Before we get into Chapter 11, the Tower of Babel and the journey of Abraham, we need to talk about ancient Mesopotamia—what it was like, what people’s lives were like, and the things that Abraham would have grown up with. A lot of people think of that area of the world and assume it is all desert, but it was more like a garden paradise! How were their lives the same as ours? How were they different? What did they look like and how did they dress? What did they eat and how did they live? Knowing this is important to understanding the stories of Abraham, Sarah, and Lot.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. (Parents, today we are going to talk about Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent so that you kids understand where the Tower of Babel was and where Abram came from and traveled and so I am going to jabber on a bit to give you parents some time to pull up a map on the internet or a globe or in a book if you are listening to this on the radio. Okay kids, now that the grownups are gone, let’s talk about my plans to conquer the whole world using a pair of chopsticks, a roll of duct tape, and a small transistor radio…)
The Bible is a book about God. And the main people talked about are the Children of Israel and later, the Jewish people in the time of Jesus. And most of the Bible stories take place in the Land of Israel. But so far, we haven’t seen hide nor hair of the Land of Israel or the Jewish people. Not even a little bit. Not even a tiny hint. I mean, we’re about to start chapter 11, right? What gives? A long time ago I read a book by James Michener called Centennial and it was about the State of Colorado and all these people who had lived there from the original Native Americans up to modern times. But there was a problem because I hated the first chapter—the first chapter was about the dinosaurs who lived there. For me, that was super boring. I wanted to get to the good stuff and the author wanted me to know about how the rivers were formed and the plains and all that. And yeah, it was important to the story but I was way more interested in hearing about Lame Beaver, the brave Arapaho warrior and leader, and Pasquinel the French Trapper and his partner Alexander McKeag, the young Scottsman whose life he saved. That’s what I wanted. I like the action. I want to get to the main characters. But no, the dinosaurs.
In the same way, God wanted to tell a story that starts with the first eleven chapters of Genesis—where we see characters who seem very important—like Adam and Eve and Noah and Nimrod and a flood and a tower—but who aren’t really mentioned or treated as though they are important in the rest of the Bible because the story isn’t about them. They are part of God’s story but not so much a part of ours. Sure, because Adam and Eve blew it, we now have sin and death to deal with but God promised no more floods and although the Tower of Babel will be very important in the chapter we are about to read, it never gets mentioned ever again in the Bible. We are dazzled by these dramatic stories because they are very entertaining and are great material for games of “what if” however, the Bible is much more concerned with God’s plan to rescue all the world and that plan will begin at the end of chapter 11 with the unexpected choice of the son of an idol worshiper living in a place called Ur of the Chaldeans. And we won’t really know much of anything about his early life before his father decided to move to the land of Canaan. But God is like that, right? God gives us a future and not a past. When God calls us and we answer Him and we go with Him, it doesn’t matter what or who we were before—which is why Abraham’s life before God spoke to Him isn’t really important. You know, in a lot of ways, our lives don’t really become real until we begin to know God.
But we do know something important about Abraham—he came from a place called Mesopotamia, and that’s where all the action has taken place so far. Because Mesopotamia is very important to the Bible and to the story of the Tower of Babel, we are going to take a week off and talk about it. It’s okay if you are not a huge geography fan but geography is very important to Bible study. Without it, it’s hard to picture what is happening and when and why. And there are a lot of what’s, when’s and why’s about the Bible that we will understand a lot better when we know about places like Mesopotamia, Egypt and Israel. And if you have a globe or if you have the internet up, you can look up this area of the world and when I post the transcript I will have a map for you to look at.
If you know where Israel is, and that will become very important once we get introduced to Abraham and the Canaanites, and you head east, you will probably die from heat and thirst in the desert. So, let’s not do that. But if you head north, and follow the green stuff and stay out of the desert, as you go north and east you would travel through ancient Lebanon and Syria until you came to the mighty Euphrates river, and then you would follow that river south and east until you traveled all the way to what we now call the Persian Gulf. And from above, that would look like a big green boomerang surrounded by deserts and mountains. But it was a wonderful place to live in the ancient world because there was lots of water, and the soil was great and so there were important cities all along that river and also along the Tigris River. Together, those two rivers made the entire land almost a paradise and when the Bible talks about the Garden in Eden, it says that two of the rivers that flowed out of the Garden were the Tigris and Euphrates (Gen 2:14)!
So when Moses was telling the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, he was telling them that God’s Garden was like the greenest place on earth they could imagine, with a ton of food and water. They had food and water in Egypt, of course, at the other end of the Fertile Crescent, but they were also slaves. The riverbanks of the Tigris and Euphrates would have been lined with date palm groves and canals would have brought water inland to water other crops. No wonder archaeologists agree with the Bible that Mesopotamia was the “cradle” of civilization. That means that it was a good place for people to gather to live and work together as a society and not just every person for themself! This was probably where Cain built his first city and where Noah and his family headed when they got out of the ark and where Noah planted his vineyard because that takes a lot of water. This is also where Nimrod built his kingdom and the cities mentioned in Genesis 10, as they are all near those two rivers. It would have been a very good place to live.
Now, today that land is divided up and called Iraq and Syria but in those days it was divided into three areas named Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria. Sumer is also called Shinar in the Bible. Shinar is where we will find the city of Babylon later in the Bible, and Babylon was the great capital city of the Babylonian Empire. They were the ones who destroyed the walls, city, and Temple of Jerusalem in 586 BC. They carted away all the silver and gold and bronze and just everything. But where we are now in our Bible studies, that’s two thousand years away! Long after Abraham, Moses, and David. To the north of Sumer was Akkad and Akkad was very important in ancient times because it was the center of the very first empire in the world, the Akkadian Empire. The Sumerians to the south and the Akkadians had a common language that we call Akkadian. Archaeologists have found many tablets and seals written in Akkadian. They had amazing art and stories and technology like the canals that brought the water from the Tigris and Euphrates to farms that weren’t right on the rivers. North of that was Assyria. The Assyrians were some really scary dudes. If they came and took over your country, they wouldn’t let you stay there—they would take you away to the other countries they had taken over and they would put other people on your land. They didn’t want you feeling like you could fight them and get your land back because first, you would have to fight them wherever they put you, and then you would have to go back home—if you even knew how to get there—and fight the people who were living in your house and growing food in your fields! The Babylonians did that later as well, but the Assyrians did it first. It was actually a better idea than just killing everyone because it made your empire bigger and stronger. When they took over Northern Israel, they took folks away to the east and they just never came back! The people who remained and were brought there became the Samaritans.
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We know a lot about their empires and cultures, the Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians, because of archaeology. They built beautiful palaces with carved walls with scenes of kings killing lions and destroying their enemies, and tombs for their dead kings, and temples and ziggurats. We talked about ziggurats way back in Genesis 1, and they are going to be very important when we talk about the Tower of Babel and Jacob’s Ladder. We know the names of their kings, and we have the cuneiform tablets they wrote about their gods and goddess and myths, and their business contracts, and the letters that kings sent to one another. We know what they looked like because they made carvings of themselves. And some of their art even talks about people mentioned in the Bible, like King Jehu! Can you even imagine how excited archaeologists were when they found someone from the Bible in the writings of another civilization? I think my head would have probably exploded.
But if someone wanted to travel from Ur in Sumer (where Abraham came from) to Egypt, from one end of the fertile crescent to the other (and Abraham actually did this), they would start in Ur, and travel along the Euphrates river as it flowed north and west, through Uruk and Babylon—but they would avoid Ninevah, which was a dangerous place because that was on the Tigris to the north. They would stop for supplies in Mari, where archaeologists found 15,000 cuneiform tablets carved with their language! Mari was an amazing city with two sets of huge walls that were designed to keep out the floodwaters. It was destroyed by the Babylonians after Abraham died but it must have been beautiful. And they would keep going until the river went straight north, but they would go west to Aleppo, one of the oldest cities on earth! Did you know that people have lived there for thousands and thousands of years now? It was probably founded by the Amorites–one of the Canaanite tribes that descended from Ham’s grandson Canaan. And we will see a lot of those guys because they were a very powerful kingdom during the time of Abraham. Some of the ancient buildings that Abraham might have passed have been uncovered, including the Temple of Ba’al Hadad, the storm god of the Amorites. He shows up in the Bible too!
Did you think that Abraham just walked through the desert from Babylon to Israel? Nope! There were trees and farms and big cities! He had to look out for bandits and lions on the roads. Aleppo was a huge trade center between the lands of the Assyrians, the Hittites, the Canaanites, and the Egyptians. It would have been big and loud and you could probably find merchants selling just about anything you would need. Silk and spices and all sorts of wonderful, amazing things. Leaving there, you would travel south to Damascus, another one of the oldest cities on earth and mentioned quite a bit in the Bible. That’s where Saul was heading to arrest the early Christians when Jesus appeared to him on the road and spoke to him and blinded him for three whole days. Now, unfortunately, because of wars and the fact that they just kept building and building, archaeologists haven’t been able to really uncover anything from the time of Abraham but we do know it was there, not only from the Bible but also from the Egyptian records.
From Damascus, a traveler might go south through Shechem or Hazor, and travel through the land of the Canaanites and their cities to Beersheba and then down to Egypt and of course, Egypt was very powerful with magnificent cities and Pyramids and the Sphinx and temples and the Nile River. It would have been an amazing trip full of beautiful sites past the wonders of the ancient world. But they would have never really been alone because many travelers were on the roads with them. And you might ask—how long would the trip from one end to the other be? From Ur all the way to Egypt? It’s over a thousand miles! Fortunately, when Abraham did it, he didn’t do it all at once—he’d stay places, sometimes for years. But that’s like walking from San Francisco to Denver! Or from Phoenix to Houston! Maybe a good project for you would be to figure out what is a thousand miles from your house—and then think about traveling on foot and on camels and on donkeys with all your stuff and critters. The critters would really slow you down a lot! And especially if there were baby animals.
What would the people have looked like? Well, like Abraham, they would have brown or very tan-colored skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. We have a lot of examples of what they looked like around the time of Abraham. Men and women wore robes, although they were different lengths at different times, some were knee-length and others went down to the floor. Of course, fabric was expensive because it was handmade and so it is a common thing all through world history for rich and powerful people to have a lot more fabric on their bodies than the poor. Longer robes and longer sleeves usually meant more money. Fancier, dyed fabric definitely meant more money! They would have looked very different from one another based on age, gender, and status. In many cultures, slaves had to dress differently so that you knew they weren’t free people because everyone had the same color skin and you couldn’t tell them apart by that. They were people who were from the countries and communities that were very close by and so they looked the same. Some of them were sold by their own families to pay bills and others were captured in war. Men usually wore beards and long hair, although certain classes had shaved heads and no beards! How you looked told people who you were and what your job was but we can’t tell any of that just by looking at people walking down the street today. You could tell if a woman was married or single by how she dressed and sometimes by what she did with her hair or by covering her hair. Sometimes there were strict laws telling everyone what they were allowed to wear and what they weren’t allowed to wear.
Abraham would have seen the huge ziggurats that were taller than any other buildings in the cities, they would have looked like man-made mountains because that is exactly what they were—with a room on top for the god of the city and stairs leading down to a temple at the bottom. All the buildings would have been made from clay bricks because, unlike in Israel, they didn’t have stone to work with. But just like Israel and Egypt, there would have been many fields full of barley, wheat, einkorn, lentils, chickpeas, garlic, onions, eggplants, cucumbers, lettuce, beans, melons, and turnips being farmed by slaves and small landowners, as well as orchards of date palms, figs, apples, pears, plums, pomegranates, pistachio nuts, apricots, and grapes. YUM! And they also hard herds of cattle, sheep, and goats—only they didn’t eat them very often because they were way too valuable. They were all good for milk (the girl animals anyway), which gave them curds and cheese and butter, and for their wool. Cattle were an important source of leather once they were slaughtered. And they drank a lot of beer and wine made from the barley and grapes, especially in places where the water wasn’t good for drinking, and ate a lot of bread.
Did you know that a rich man in the ancient world didn’t really have money? Nope, he had land and critters instead and when he got more money he would buy more land and critters. Those were the most important. In fact, it was way more respectable to own land and critters than to be a merchant travelling around selling stuff. As Abraham passed by or through the gates of the cities, he would have seen older wealthy men sitting there talking and waiting for people to bring their arguments to be settled. The women were home, often working very hard, while the men were sitting in the shade—if they had money. We actually see that in Proverbs 31 and in Bedouin tribes today, the men sitting around not doing much of anything while the women do the bulk of the work. It’s weird but that’s how it used to work in most places. I think I would get bored just talking to the same people at the city gate all day but that was how they got the respect of the community.
Kids didn’t see their fathers much until the boys came to the age where they could join their fathers out in the world, and so if the father was a blacksmith, the sons would join him working hard in the workshop. Men were generally at home to eat and to sleep, otherwise, they were out with other men either working or talking. Until the children were a certain age, they really were only familiar with their mothers and one another. Girls rarely knew their fathers very well. When they got married, they didn’t usually get to choose their own husband or wife. The fathers would get together and they would make a decision that their kids should get married and that was that. The son would take his wife and live in the same place as his parents and the daughter would go to live with her husband’s family. That was a very hard thing for a young woman because sometimes she was a complete stranger to everyone in the house and even to her husband. And she would have to do everything that her husband’s mother told her to and until she had a baby boy, she could be very easily divorced and thrown back to her father’s house. So, Miss Tyler would be in HUGE trouble because I never ended up being able to have a baby at all. And this is going to be very important as we study the story of Abraham and Sarah.
What about their houses? In the city, they were at least two stories high but had no basements. On the first story, there would be a courtyard out front and sometimes multiple families would share that open area, but inside the house on the first floor were the small animals like chickens and the homeowners would just throw their trash down for the chickens to eat it! What? Yep—the first story of the house was pretty much a stinky barn with small animals. The second and third floors were where the family slept and lived. Cooking could be done outside in the courtyard when it was hot or on the roof of the house where it was cooler. Their houses were made with baked clay bricks held together with gooey asphalt, or with sandstone blocks if they could get them. But there weren’t any toilets or faucets or refrigerators, so they had to be very creative and they had to walk quite a ways to get what they needed.
In the countryside, they would build beehive houses, but there were no bees in them. They were just shaped like old-fashioned beehives. They were made of reeds tied together and covered with mud and some people there still live in them to this day! And think of the music Abraham would have heard as he traveled! People would sing, of course, but they would also play drums, lutes, harps, pipes, lyres, and horns. Ancient Mesopotamia had good food, beautiful scenery, gorgeous buildings that reached to the sky, music, and art. And it was busy! Men working hard to make a living as farmers, potters, builders and many other things; women at home grinding their own flour and making everything from scratch in clay ovens that were sometimes shared with other families, making their own fibers from wool and flax and making all the clothing for their families. Teenage sons learning how to work with their fathers and finding that the world of men was very different than life at home with their mom and brothers and sisters. Girls learning from a very early age to do everything their mothers can do and caring for younger brothers and sisters so that when they got married and left home forever, they would be prepared.
No way was Abraham’s journey through a barren desert with nothing interesting to look at, he was traveling through the heart of civilization. And the people he saw and met were in some ways a lot like us—in that they looked like us because we are all humans from the same family in the beginning, but the way they lived and the music they enjoyed and how they thought about things were all very different from us today. They believed in many gods and goddesses, even Abraham’s family did, and they didn’t think of their lives in terms of science because they thought everything could be explained by the activities of all those gods. And they weren’t very interested in doing things in new ways because they believed that keeping to the old ways would keep them alive. And they loved traditions. We will be learning a lot more about all this as we study Abraham, Sarah, and Lot because this was where they came from and the only life they ever knew before God told Abraham to go to the Land of Canaan.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.
https://artincontext.org/mesopotamian-art/
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/trdm/hd_trdm.htm
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/keywords/mesopotamian-art/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_Asmar_Hoard