Where was the Tower of Babel?

What Genesis says about the place

The story of Babel in Genesis 11 is only nine verses long, but it leaves three clues about where it happened. The builders travel east. They settle on a plain. And they build with what a plain offers.

They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar.

That is a portrait of Mesopotamia. The land between the Tigris and the Euphrates has almost no building stone, so its cities rose in clay brick, dried in the sun or fired in kilns, and set in bitumen that seeps out of the ground there. To an Israelite in the hill country of Canaan, where houses were built of stone, brick and tar sounded foreign.

Shinar is Babylonia

Genesis puts the plain “in the land of Shinar” (11:2), and the name always points to the same region. Nimrod’s kingdom begins with “Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar” (10:10): Erech is Uruk and Accad is Akkad, real Mesopotamian cities. When Nebuchadnezzar carries off the Temple vessels, he takes them “into the land of Shinar to the house of his god” (Daniel 1:2). Even the robe Achan steals at Jericho, “a beautiful Babylonian robe” in the World English Bible, is in Hebrew a robe of Shinar (Joshua 7:21).

Babel is simply the Hebrew name of Babylon. Genesis hears in it the verb balal, to confuse: the city is named “because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth” (11:9).

Etemenanki, the tower that stood there

Babylon really had a great tower. Its Sumerian name, Etemenanki, means “house of the foundation of heaven and earth.” It was a ziggurat, a stepped mountain of mud brick cased in fired brick, beside Esagila, the temple of the god Marduk. After Sennacherib of Assyria wrecked Babylon in 689 BC, the tower was rebuilt by Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar II. Nabopolassar’s foundation cylinder says he made its top rival the heavens. The builders of Genesis wanted “a tower whose top reaches to the sky” (11:4).

A clay tablet copied at Uruk in 229 BC, the Esagila tablet, now in the Louvre, gives its plan: a square base about 91 meters (300 feet) on a side, and seven stages rising to about the same height. Some modern scholars think the real tower was lower, nearer 66 meters. Herodotus, in the 400s BC, describes eight towers stacked one on another, with a path winding up the outside (Histories 1.181). A black stone stele in the Schøyen Collection shows Nebuchadnezzar beside the stepped tower, labeled with its name, and has him boast of building with bitumen and baked brick, the very materials of Genesis 11:3.

Other candidates

Not everyone looked to Babylon itself. Medieval Jewish and Arab tradition pointed to Birs Nimrud, the ruined ziggurat of Borsippa, south-west of Babylon, whose name recalls Nimrod. Its broken summit still holds masses of brick melted into glassy slag. The Talmud keeps a saying that a third of the tower burned, a third sank into the earth and a third still stands (Sanhedrin 109a). Most historians see Borsippa’s ziggurat as a neighbor of the tower, not the tower itself.

The tower most people picture comes from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of 1563, now in Vienna: a round spiral of arches modeled on Rome’s Colosseum. The real towers of Shinar were square and stepped.

What is there today

Robert Koldewey’s German expedition, which dug at Babylon from 1899 to 1917, traced the tower’s foundations. What a visitor sees now, near Hillah, about 90 kilometers south of Baghdad, is its footprint: the square outline of the base, the fired bricks long since carried off for other buildings. For the rest of the city, see where Babylon is today.