Did Nimrod build the Tower of Babel?

Who Genesis says built it

The Babel story in Genesis 11 has no hero and no villain with a name. The builders are a crowd, “the whole earth,” speaking one language and moving east to the plain of Shinar. They speak only in the plural: let’s make bricks, let’s build a city, let’s make a name for ourselves (11:3–4). When God comes down to look, the narrator names them once more.

Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built.

Bene ha-adam, the children of men: humanity as a whole. God scatters them, the building stops, and the city is named Babel, a pun on balal, to confuse (11:9). Why God confused the languages is a question of its own. Who led the work is not a question the text asks.

What Genesis says about Nimrod

Nimrod belongs to the chapter before, the Table of Nations, which lists Noah’s descendants people by people. In the middle of the list it pauses for a short portrait.

Cush became the father of Nimrod. He began to be a mighty one on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before Yahweh. Therefore it is said, “like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before Yahweh”. The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.

So Nimrod is a son of Cush and a grandson of Ham, the first “mighty one” after the flood, a hunter famous enough to become a proverb. His kingdom starts with real Mesopotamian cities: Babel is Babylon, Erech is Uruk, Accad is Akkad. Then he goes into Assyria and builds Nineveh and Calah (10:11). He is a founder of cities, and Babel heads his list. That is the only thread tying him to the tower. Genesis never puts him on the building site.

How Nimrod got the blame

Later readers pulled on that thread. A king of Babel in one chapter and a tower of Babel in the next seemed made for each other.

• Josephus. The Jewish historian, writing in Rome around AD 93, makes Nimrod the instigator. His Nimrod, grandson of Ham, turns people from God to tyranny and promises a tower too high for any new flood to reach, as revenge on God (Antiquities of the Jews 1.113–114).
• The rabbis. The Talmud hears a verb in his name: he was called Nimrod because he made the whole world rebel, himrid, against God (Eruvin 53a). A midrash makes him the king who throws young Abraham into a furnace for smashing idols (Genesis Rabbah 38:13).
• Augustine. His old Latin Bible called Nimrod a giant hunter against the Lord, and he made him the founder of Babylon and its tower (City of God 16.4).
• Dante. In the Inferno, Nimrod stands among the giants ringing the pit of hell, shouting a line of gibberish nobody can understand (Canto 31).
• Islam. The Quran tells of an unnamed king who argued with Abraham about God (2:258), and many commentators call him Namrud.

Who was Nimrod?

No inscription names a King Nimrod, and historians have long looked for the man behind the name. Candidates include Sargon of Akkad, who built the first great Mesopotamian empire around 2300 BC; Tukulti-Ninurta I, an Assyrian king of the 1200s BC who conquered Babylon; and Ninurta, the Mesopotamian god of war and the hunt. None fits perfectly. The Bible itself turns him into a place name: the prophet Micah calls Assyria “the land of Nimrod” (Micah 5:6).

The name stuck to the land. Local people called the ruins of Calah, the Assyrian capital Kalhu, Nimrud, and the site still bears the name; the Islamic State bulldozed and blew up much of it in 2015. In English, a nimrod was long a great hunter, as in Genesis. In American slang the word later drifted to mean a dimwit, a fate the mighty hunter did not see coming.