The Tower of Babel

THE very name of Babylon conjures up countless images from the past, a very distant, past. Founded in ca. 2300 BCE, it was once the largest urban settlement in the world, cultural capital of the ancient near east, centre of a great and flourishing civilisation. But each time, the name is mentioned, controversies also come into the mind, for historians, archaeologists and theologians keep turning towards it too, and seldom agree among themselves. About two things, however, there is no disagreement: that it was the capital of Babylonia, the alluvial plain between the two rivers that ran through ancient Mesopotamia, the Euphrates and the Tigris; and that it remained a splendid city till, at least, the times of Alexander, the Great. It is also generally agreed that it was king Nebuchadnezzar, who adorned the city with great buildings, raising some soaring structures that proclaimed his fame and his vision. But that brings with it the story of the enigmatic Tower of Babel, which is told in such graphic detail in the Old Testament.

"Now the whole earth had one language and few words" it is written in Genesis 11: 1-9. "And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."

Advertisement The Tower of Babel. Painting by Lucas van Valkenburgh. 1594. Alte Pinakothek, Munich

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech."

So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the earth."

One often uses the term ‘Tower of Babel’ loosely now, especially when too many people are speaking at the same time and confusion results. But here, in the story in the Old Testament, there are themes that have been debated for generations now: the limits of human endeavour; the pride of man and God’s unwillingness to countenance either that pride or the thought of all of them being of one mind and one language; the punishment He meted out to men — for harbouring the ambition to equal him — by creating a ‘confusion of tongues’ among them, and so on. This at a theological level. The story is seen by others in a different light. Some students of linguistics, for instance, tend to see in the Biblical story a metaphor for the diversity of languages that exists. And so on.

But it is easy to see how a story like this, especially one which had the sanction of the Holy Book itself, would challenge the imagination of painters of long ago: a tower reaching up to the heavens! There is evidence that artist after artist tried to visualise the tower and bring into being an image of one of the most ambitious undertakings of man. And tried to weave into his image different themes: lofty thought, ambition, anger, justice, and injustice.

Countless paintings appear to have been made especially from the 15th century onwards, one of the most famous being by Pieter Breughel, the great Flemish artist (c. 1525-1569). Breughel made, in fact, three versions of the Tower, one of which has now been lost, and the other two made possibly in the same year, 1563. In the larger of his surviving works, the massive Babylonian Tower stands, storey upon spiralling storey, but essentially incomplete, ‘without its top in the heavens’.

And in the foreground, he introduces a figure of authority — some sources suggest that this is Nimrod, Noah’s grandson who was overseeing the Tower’s construction — while the countless tiny figures toiling away at the structure emphasise the tower’s gigantic proportions and the ultimate insignificance of mankind.

But one detail escapes if one is looking at this great painting casually: at first sight Breughel’s tower looks sturdy and well-constructed, but on closer inspection, one notices that the design contains flaws, probably inserted to indicate how bold and presumptuous — and thus doomed to failure — the whole project was.

Breughel’s painting of the Tower was the source of inspiration for many, including Lucas van Valkenburgh, the Belgian, who painted in 1594 a fine version very close to that of the older master. Valkenburgh’s splendid Tower, also without ‘its top in the heavens’, stands, like Breughel’s, at the edge of a river alive with bustling boats, and in the background one sees a sprawling city, stretching out in all directions. Other painters explored their own minds, however, and produced remarkably different ‘versions’. This went on for centuries. An inventory of images of the Tower could run into several pages, one suspects.

There are archaeologists, who have been trying to find traces of the Tower. Debates continue to rage among scholars about the location of the Tower, if one indeed of those proportions was ever built. The connection of ziggurats the remains of many of which still exist — temple towers in the form of a terraced pyramid of successively receding stories — with the ancient Tower is the subject of many peoples’ inquiries. But, to come back to our own times, there are those who believe that the building of the European Parliament at Strasbourg was inspired by images of the Tower of Babel, and others who see in the pyramidal structure featured on the American one-dollar bill a concealed reference to the ancient Tower. Clearly, the fascination is not over yet.

(This article was published on 01 January 2012)