What was the Tower of Babel and why was it built? Although everyone thinks that they know, we aren’t entirely sure because it doesn’t tell us—and you know when that happens we get a lot of “what if” stories and if you listened to the teaching on all the Nimrod myths, you know quite a few of them. This week we aren’t talking about legends but instead about archaeology—and the very cool thing about how the Bible says the Tower was built!
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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, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will mostly be in Genesis 11)
The whole earth had the same language and vocabulary. As people migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make oven-fired bricks.” (They used brick for stone and asphalt for mortar.) And they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Let’s make a name for ourselves; otherwise, we will be scattered throughout the earth.”
We’ve already talked about the first two verses—we did that last week. Now we’re going to get down to the nitty gritty and talk about the Tower of Babel that all these nameless people who wanted to make a name for themselves but ended up being totally unknown wanted to build so that it would have it’s top in the heavens. But we can’t just talk about the “tower” because they also wanted to build a city and the Bible even talks about how they were going to build it. And lemme tell you, this description of how they would build was amazingly accurate—very different from how they built things in the Land of Israel, where they had more rocks than you could throw a stone at…hey wait a minute…never mind…or in Egypt, where they used mud, baked bricks, and stone. But in Shinar? No rocks! If they wanted something to last, then they had to use their noggins.
So, what was an ancient city in Shinar like? Well, first of all, people didn’t really live there. Back during those times, the cities were where you would find the public buildings and spaces like marketplaces and temples, and if you wanted someone to decide who was right and who was wrong, you would take your problems or your court cases to the judges and elders who sat at the gates of the city. And when I say gates, I don’t want you to think of the movies with the portcullis (the metal grate that can go up and down) or big doors. It wasn’t a gate like you would have in a fence. A gate was actually a building in the wall of a city that opened inside and outside of the city. You would find people like tax collectors, judges, and scribes, educated people who could read and write and they made up contracts for people, like for when they sold something or got married. If you want to see something totally cool, when I post the transcript on Monday, I will put up a link so that you can see what the Ishtar Gate in Babylon looked like. It was very beautiful. Of course, it wasn’t built until thousands of years after the Tower of Babel was built—in fact, Nebuchadnezzar built it about six hundred years before Jesus. It was one of the wonders of the ancient world along with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which he also built, and his ziggurat.
So, cities weren’t places people lived originally, they were places that people went to do business and serve the gods at their temples. People were almost entirely farmers or shepherds and artisans. Artisans are people who make things like baskets and clay pots or who do metalwork like a blacksmith. Cities were also places where people hid when enemy raiders came to steal their food and animals and take over their land. If a city had walls, it was hard to get in and hurt the people. There are stories in the ancient world of enemy armies being stuck outside of a city, unable to get in, for over a year! If there was enough food inside a city, the people could survive until the raiders ran out of patience and left, but they could also starve to death. It’s great to have your enemies locked out but it isn’t good to be locked in! And so, all these people who came and settled in the land of Shinar (which I told you last week was in what we now call Sumer or in the south of the modern country of Iraq) decided that there were enough of them that they should build a city where they could do business and settle arguments and even be safe from enemies.
Now, some people think that cities are all terrible places because Cain built a city and Sodom and Gomorrah were cities, and Babylon, Susa, and Nineveh too! But, Jerusalem was also a city, the place God chose to place His Name. And at the end of Revelation, we will be in the New Jerusalem which will be so much bigger than any city we have right now. It will be hundreds of miles in every direction. Even from a plane you couldn’t see it all. You’d have to be in space. Cities are good when they are places where all kinds of people can come together and worship God, and get what they need from one another, and help one another. That’s God’s kind of city—clean, beautiful, and safe. Imagine being able to leave your house for five days and your mom not worrying where you are? Definitely don’t try that now in any city or any town either. Just don’t do it at all, okay? So, cities aren’t good or bad, it’s what happens inside them that is good or bad. And people out in the country can be just as awful or wonderful as the people in the cities, I know that personally. Little dudes, we all need Jesus.
So, we don’t really have many questions about what it meant to build cities because we can look at archaeological digs and find out all about that because they have uncovered a lot of ancient cities and sometimes, we can even know what the different buildings were used for. What we have a lot of questions about is that Tower and what it looked like and what it was for. And people who study the Bible and the ancient world have a couple of different ideas. One idea is that it was a watchtower, which would have been for military use. A watchtower was attached to a wall, or another building, and guards could stand watch at the top and alert the people if it looked like a group of people was going to attack. But the watchmen at the top of the tower had to be very careful because if they saw a tumbleweed coming and woke everyone up then they would lose their job pretty quick or maybe even their life. People who believe it was a watchtower often think that Nimrod was there when it was all built and this was part of the defenses for his first city. And that is a very interesting “what if” that a lot of smart people agree with.
Another idea, which is much more popular with Bible scholars, is that the Tower of Babel was a ziggurat. We’ve talked about ziggurats before, and they are found all over the world because it is just one type of pyramid. If you have seen the Egyptian pyramids, you know that they figured out how to make the sides flat but most everywhere else and especially in Babylon, they have different levels and steps up the side. We find them in Iraq, Iran, China, Cambodia, Mexico, and Indonesia and who knows—maybe some of your ancestors built one! That would be pretty cool. Now, the pyramids in Egypt were tombs for their Pharaohs, their kings, because they thought their kings were actually gods and so these tombs were monuments where they would place their bodies after they died. But the pyramids in Mesopotamia, where Babylon was, were different. Ziggurat is a word that means “raised platform” which is exactly what it was. Think of a stack of boxes where the one on the bottom was really big and the next one was smaller and the next one even smaller, all the way to the top. Some Ziggurats had two levels and some actually had seven. There were stairs from the bottom to the top and you might think those stairs were for people but they weren’t. Although priests and kings would use the stairs, they were built so that the city God could come down to the city to bless everyone! Yes, their gods had to use the stairs to come down from wherever it was that they spent their time. Remember, I have told you that these guys weren’t like our God, they were more like humans with powers and really important jobs like making it rain or making sure that the sun comes up every morning.
Now along with every ziggurat was a temple or a shrine to the city god but no one is entirely sure if it was at the top or at the bottom because the ones that have been found are mostly in pretty bad condition so we can’t know for sure. Maybe sometimes they were at the top and at other times they were at the bottom. But the purpose of the ziggurat was to make a place where heaven and earth overlap. Where the world of the gods and the world of humans would meet and the gods could come down and bless the humans. And the humans could feed and care for the gods, because humans were their slaves. Now, when you look at all the artwork from a long time ago about what they thought the Tower of Babel looked like, you can see that they didn’t know anything about archaeology or the ancient world. They made their towers quite modern looking, with rounded sides and spiral staircases but they didn’t have that kind of technology and besides that, a tower like that wouldn’t be very sturdy, it would break down very easily. Ziggurats were built so tough that some of them are still around today.
They weren’t built of stone, of course, because they didn’t have any, but like the Bible says, the people made baked mud bricks and mud was something they had a lot of! But you might look at a picture of a ziggurat and think that it was hollow inside, like a house, with rooms but that isn’t the case. If it was hollow inside, then it would collapse. There were small rooms, very small rooms, inside for the priests to work in but the ziggurats were built with bricks on the outside and around the rooms and between the brick walls was a whole lot of dirt which made the whole thing very strong. Now, some people think they built the Tower of Babel so that they could worship a false god but we don’t see anyone doing that yet in the Bible. I don’t think that happened until they had different languages and different nations and forgot God. I think they were trying to get God to come back to them, since their ancestors had been thrown out of the Garden. Remember, the Bible doesn’t tell us for sure and it is okay to have different ideas. A few weeks ago, we talked about the Nimrod legends and how some people thought that they were building the Tower of Babel so that if God flooded the earth again that they could run up to the top of the tower and be okay. Others believed that they wanted to use the tower so they could attack heaven, which would have definitely ended up with them getting their puny human butts kicked. And then even later on, some people decided that the Tower was built for idol worship and that Nimrod wanted to burn Abraham to a crisp for not worshipping there (but it was almost impossible for them to have lived at the same time).
But after the flood, no one would know where the entrance was to the Garden in Eden, where they knew the presence of God was. And remember that in Ezekiel 28:13-14, we find out that the Garden was on a mountain. (graphic) So the people in Shinar, I think they believed from Noah’s stories that if they could just get high enough, that they could find God again and get Him to come down and bless them. A ziggurat was a man-made mountain, they even looked like mountains. And we see that they wanted to build a “tower” with its top in the sky, which brings me to something super cool. There was this ginormous ziggurat named Entemenanki, and it means “temple of the foundation of heaven and earth.” Guess who built it? That’s right, Nebuchanezzar—and it was also considered a wonder of the world until Alexander the Great trashed it. So, this was waaay after the Tower of Babel but what they called it and what they said about it at the time has taught us a lot about why they built them and how they felt about them and what they believed about how building one would bring the blessing of the god or goddess it was dedicated to. Nebuchadnezzar called his ziggurat the temple of the foundation of heaven and earth because he believed that at the top of the ziggurat was where the god Marduk could pass from the heavens down onto the ziggurat and could then walk down the stairs to bless the king and the city. And guess what he made it with? Baked bricks and asphalt—or tar, you know the stuff they make our roads with? Exactly like the Bible tells us about the Tower of Babel. Baked bricks with asphalt in between them would make the building waterproof, which was very important.
So, I think that’s what the people at Shinar were doing too—I think they wanted God back. I think they wanted to make another mountain of God where they could be with Him. I think they wanted to gather as one people and build a mountain so tall that God could come down to be with them again. I don’t think they felt very blessed anymore. People want to be protected, and blessed, and they want to know that their god hears them and is paying attention to them. It’s a lonely life without a connection to God. It can be scary too, especially back then. Was it wrong for them to want this? It is certainly not wrong to want to be near to God, right? But…that’s not exactly what they were trying to do because a ziggurat was built in order to get a god to show up in a certain place so that they could be taken care of—fed, bathed, dressed, anointed with oil, and put to bed at night. Well, that’s what their idol was for anyway, they took care of their god by taking care of the idol that represented the god. Not sure exactly why they thought that would work but they sure did. But God had sent humans away from the Garden, and He could have called them back if He wanted them to come. But He didn’t. They were trying to take for themselves what God had taken away. And that never works. They didn’t ask God what He wanted from them, or what they could do to bring Him closer, they just decided to take matters into their own hands and build that mountain and that city around it and while they were at it, people from all over would be amazed and would come to their city so that they could be near God too, and spend money there and the builders would all be rich and famous. And that is exactly what happened when cities built ziggurats and temples.
Later, when Israel came to the holy Land, God did have the people build Him a Temple on top of a mountain, Mount Zion which was also called Mount Moriah. God gave David the plans to build the Temple, in writing, from the Holy Spirit I Chron 28:11 “Then David gave his son Solomon the plans for the portico of the temple and its buildings, treasuries, upstairs rooms, inner rooms, and a room for the mercy seat. The plans contained everything he had in mind for the courts of the Lord’s house, all the surrounding chambers, the treasuries of God’s house, and the treasuries for what is dedicated…David concluded, “By the Lord’s hand on me, he enabled me to understand everything in writing, all the details of the plan.” Dang guys, the Holy Spirit gave David the plans for building the Temple, in writing, and all the details. And God’s Temple on Mt Zion was made entirely of HUMONGOUS stones and cedar beams, and some of it was even covered in pure gold! And there were carvings and moldings of trees and flowers because they designed it to be like the Garden in Eden on the Mountain of God! Because that was where God said that they could meet with Him always. And people would gather everyday to make sacrifices, to celebrate a feast with Him, or to give God a whole animal. Three times a year, all the people would come to God’s Temple on Mt Zion to celebrate and two of those times were for an entire week on Passover and Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. It was the most beautiful building in the world and when they opened it up for the first time and prayed, the Presence of God came down to the Holy of Holies in the Temple (no stairs required) and all the priests had to leave the Temple because there was no way they could be in there with God’s presence being so strong.
Right before Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the city and the Temple, God left the Temple and never came back to Mount Zion. You see, the Mountain of God became a horrible place where Israelites worshiped the sun and the moon and so many false gods, and they carved pictures of creepy crawly things into the walls and the Temple became such a filthy place that God decided to leave the Temple and the City and they weren’t blessed anymore—they were just buildings and no longer protected by the Lord. They forced Him to leave even though He loved them. And they almost all had to leave the Holy Land and were moved to the Babylonian Empire, where the Tower of Babel had been built thousands of years before. It was there that they saw what a land without God was really like, where the gods were cruel and didn’t care for humans at all but only used them to get what they needed or wanted. While they were in Babylon, they learned that God had been a very great and wonderful God to them.
In Babylon, they learned to hate idol worship and false gods. It was like when the Israelites in the wilderness were complaining about the wonderful free manna that God was giving them to eat in the desert and they were wanting to head back to Egypt for the free (and it’s never free when you are enslaved, you are working for it) fish and onions and leeks and garlic, so God gave them nothing but quail until they would rather die than eat any more of it! And the quail weren’t very happy about the arrangement either! They were exiled, thrown out of, the Promised Land because they were being very cruel and sinful and worshiping other gods. Well, the Babylonians were way better at being cruel to vulnerable people than the Israelites and so when they were in Babylon, they got their fill of what life was like without God there to protect them and bless them and show them what is right and what is wrong. They never knew how good they had it before, but they sure figured it out! And so, God brought them back to Mount Zion and Jerusalem and the Promised Land but when they built the new Temple that God told them to build, He never showed up to put His Presence in it. The Spirit of God was never in that Temple as it had been in Solomon’s Temple. And that was a big problem.
When Jesus came, something amazing happened. When His mother and father went to the Temple to give an offering to God after Jesus was born, there were people who had been praying and waiting for Him for a long time, Anna and Simeon. They realized that the Presence of God was in the Temple again, in this tiny little baby boy and they were very happy. When Jesus was twelve years old and His family came for the Passover, they accidentally left him behind because the group they were in with all their relatives and their other children was so big. When they came back, they found Him in the Temple talking with the great sages who really knew the Bible, and He was shocking them with how much He knew and how clever and wise He was. They didn’t know the Presence of God was there in the Temple again, they were just amazed.
When Jesus was thirty years old, He was baptized in the wilderness by His cousin John, and when He came up out of the water, God made sure that the people there knew something amazing was happening. John was very well respected and honored by all the people of Israel and they were all going to him to be baptized because they wanted the Messiah to come and end their troubles with the cruel Romans. Things were pretty bad. But when Jesus came out of the water, John said that he saw the Spirit of God resting on Jesus like a dove, and that a voice told him that Jesus was God’s one unique beloved son. Temples were places where the spirit of a god was supposed to live inside an idol. But when they built the Tabernacle and the first Temple, God’s spirit lived inside it without any idol at all. When He told them to build another Temple after the first one was destroyed, the Spirit of God was never there at all. Until Jesus came and brought the Spirit with Him, and the Spirit was in Him in the way it used to be in the Temple of God. That made Jesus God’s new and perfect Temple, the place where God lived on earth and was worshiped perfectly. But then Jesus was crucified so that sin and death could be destroyed because it was the first time that they had ever done battle with God Himself. Because sin and death had no authority, no power, over Jesus because he had never done anything wrong and because His Father was God who had also never sinned, they lost the battle.
And so, when Jesus was raised from the dead, His Body became the new Temple and when we believe Him and call Him our King and do what He says, we become part of Him and we start becoming new and better people. We become part of God’s new Temple that’s made up of every believer in the world. That’s what the Apostle Paul told us. That’s why the new Temple that they made was destroyed forty years after Jesus died and why there has never been another one. There are things that need to happen that God hasn’t allowed to happen because Jesus is the ultimate Temple of God and there will never be one greater than He is. I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful time studying the Bible with the people who love you.