The story was originally published in Spanish in Borges' 1941 collection of stories El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths). That entire book was, in turn, included within his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944). Two English-languagetranslations appeared approximately simultaneously in 1962, one by James E. Irby in a diverse collection of Borges's works titled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the entirety of Ficciones.
Plot
Borges' narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of adjacent hexagonal
rooms. In each room, there is an entrance on one wall, the bare
necessities for human survival on another wall, and four walls of
bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books are random and
apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the
books contain every possible ordering of just 25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma, and space). Though the vast majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation
or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator
notes that the library must contain all useful information, including
predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations
of every book in all languages.
Conversely, for many of the texts, some language could be devised that
would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.
Despite—indeed, because of—this glut of information, all books
are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of
suicidal despair. This leads some librarians to superstitious and cult-like
behaviors, such as the "Purifiers", who arbitrarily destroy books they
deem nonsense as they scour through the library seeking the "Crimson
Hexagon" and its illustrated, magical books. Others believe that since
all books exist in the library, somewhere one of the books must be a
perfect index of the library's contents; some even believe that a
messianic figure known as the "Man of the Book" has read it, and they
travel through the library seeking him.
Themes
Borges in 1976
The story repeats the theme of Borges' 1939 essay "The Total Library" ("La Biblioteca Total"), which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story "The Universal Library" ("Die Universalbibliothek"):
Certain examples that Aristotle attributes to Democritus and Leucippus clearly prefigure it, but its belated inventor is Gustav Theodor Fechner, and its first exponent, Kurd Lasswitz. [...] In his book The Race with the Tortoise (Berlin, 1919), Dr Theodor Wolff suggests that it is a derivation from, or a parody of, Ramón Llull's
thinking machine [...T]he elements of his game are the universal
orthographic symbols, not the words of a language [...] Lasswitz arrives
at twenty-five symbols (twenty-two letters, the space, the period, the
comma), whose recombinations and repetitions encompass everything
possible to express in all languages. The totality of such variations
would form a Total Library of astronomical size. Lasswitz urges mankind
to construct that inhuman library, which chance would organize and which
would eliminate intelligence. (Wolff's The Race with the Tortoise expounds the execution and the dimensions of that impossible enterprise.)
Many of Borges' signature motifs are featured in the story, including infinity, reality, cabalistic reasoning, and labyrinths. The concept of the library is often compared to Borel's dactylographic monkey theorem.
There is no reference to monkeys or typewriters in "The Library of
Babel", although Borges had mentioned that analogy in "The Total
Library": "[A] half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a
few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum." In this
story, the closest equivalent is the line, "A blasphemous sect suggested
[...] that all men should juggle letters and symbols until they
constructed, by an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books."
Borges would examine a similar idea in his 1975 story, "The Book of Sand"
in which there is an infinite book (or book with an indefinite number
of pages) rather than an infinite library. Moreover, the story's Book of Sand
is said to be written in an unknown alphabet and its content is not
obviously random. In The Library of Babel, Borges interpolates Italian
mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri's suggestion that any solid body could be conceptualized as the superimposition of an infinite number of planes.
The concept of the library is also overtly analogous to the view of the universe as a sphere having its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. The mathematician and philosopherBlaise Pascal employed this metaphor, and in an earlier essay Borges noted that Pascal's manuscript called the sphere effroyable, or "frightful".
In any case, a library containing all possible books, arranged at random, might as well be a library containing zero
books, as any true information would be buried in, and rendered
indistinguishable from, all possible forms of false information; the
experience of opening to any page of any of the library's books has been
simulated by websites which create screenfuls of random letters.
The quote at the beginning of the story, "By this art you may contemplate the variation of the twenty-three letters," is from Robert Burton's 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Philosophical implications
This lends itself to the philosophical idea proposed by Immanuel Kant,
that our mind helps to structure our experience of reality; thus the
rules of reality (as we know it) are intrinsic to the mind. So if we
identify these rules, we can better decode 'reality'. One might
speculate that these rules are contained in the crimson hexagon room
which is the key to decoding the others. The library becomes a
temptation, even an obsession, because it contains these gems of
enlightenment while also burying them in deception. On a psychological
level, the infinite storehouse of information is a hindrance and a
distraction, because it lures one away from writing one's own book (i.e.
living one's life). Anything one might write would of course already
exist. One can see any text as being pulled from the library by the act
of the author defining the search letter by letter until they reach a
text close enough to the one they intended to write. The text already
existed theoretically, but had to be found by the act of the author's
imagination. Another implication is an argument against certain proofs of the existence of God, as it is carried out by David Hume using the thought experiment of a similar library of books generated not by human mind, but by nature.
Infinite extent
In
mainstream theories of natural language syntax, every
syntactically-valid utterance can be extended to produce a new, longer
one, because of recursion.
However, the books in the Library of Babel are of bounded length ("each
book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each
line, of some eighty letters"), so the Library can only contain a finite
number of distinct strings. Borges' narrator notes this fact, but
believes that the Library is nevertheless infinite; he speculates that
it repeats itself periodically, giving an eventual "order" to the
"disorder" of the seemingly random arrangement of books.
Quine's reduction
In a short essay, W. V. O. Quine
noted that the Library of Babel is finite, and that any text that
doesn't fit in a single book can be reconstructed by finding a second
book with the continuation. The size of the alphabet can be reduced by
using, say, Morse code, even though it makes the books more verbose; the
size of the books can also be reduced by splitting each into multiple
volumes and discarding the duplicates. Writes Quine, "The ultimate
absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two
volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent
repetition and alternation of the two are sufficient, we well know, for
spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but
universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation:
everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with
two characters."
Comparison with biology
The full possible set of protein sequences (protein sequence space) has been compared to the Library of Babel.[7][8] In the Library of Babel,
finding any book that made sense was almost impossible due to the sheer
number and lack of order. The same would be true of protein sequences
if it were not for natural selection, which has picked out only protein
sequences that make sense. Additionally, each protein sequence is
surrounded by a set of neighbors (point mutants) that are likely to have
at least some function. Daniel Dennett's 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea
includes an elaboration of the Library of Babel concept to imagine the
set of all possible genetic sequences, which he calls the Library of
Mendel, in order to illustrate the mathematics of genetic variation.
Dennett uses this concept again later in the book to imagine all
possible algorithms that can be included in his Toshiba
computer, which he calls the Library of Toshiba. He describes the
Library of Mendel and the Library of Toshiba as subsets within the
Library of Babel.
Influence on later writers
Umberto Eco's postmodern novel The Name of the Rose
(1980) features a labyrinthine library, presided over by a blind monk
named Jorge of Burgos. The aedificium is, however, octagonal in shape.
In "The Net of Babel", published in Interzone in 1995, David Langford imagines the Library becoming computerized
for easy access. This aids the librarians in searching for specific
text while also highlighting the futility of such searches as they can
find anything, but nothing of meaning as such. The sequel continues many
of Borges's themes, while also highlighting the difference between data and information, and satirizing the Internet.
Russell Standish's Theory of Nothing uses the concept of the Library of Babel to illustrate how an ultimate ensemble
containing all possible descriptions would in sum contain zero
information and would thus be the simplest possible explanation for the
existence of the universe. This theory, therefore, implies the reality
of all universes.
Michael Ende reused the idea of a universe of hexagonal rooms in the Temple of a Thousand Doors from The Neverending Story, which contained all the possible characteristics of doors in the fantastic realm. A later chapter features the infinite monkey theorem.
Terry Pratchett uses the concept of the infinite library in his Discworld novels. The knowledgeable librarian is a human wizard transformed into an orangutan.
In Greg Bear's novel City at the End of Time
(2008), the sum-runners carried by the protagonists are intended by
their creator to be combined to form a 'Babel', an infinite library
containing every possible permutation of every possible character in
every possible language. Bear has stated that this was inspired by
Borges, who is also namechecked in the novel. Borges is described as an
unknown Argentinian who commissioned an encyclopedia of impossible
things, a reference to either "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" or the Book of Imaginary Beings.
Fone, a short comic novel drawn by Milo Manara,
features a human astronaut and his alien partner stranded on a planet
named Borges Profeta. The planet is overflowed by books containing all
the possible permutations of letters.
Steven L. Peck wrote a novella entitled A Short Stay in Hell
(2012) in which the protagonist must find the book containing his life
story in an afterlife replica of Borges' Library of Babel.
The third season of Carmilla, a Canadian single-frame web series based on the novella by J. Sheridan Le Fanu,
is set in a mystical library described as "non-Euclidean" and
omnipotent. It contains a door that, depending on the knocking pattern
on its panels, can be opened into any universe. It also creates a
temporary parallel universe and is able to shift a character between the
parallel and the original. As the parallel universe collapses,
darkness falls, and a character perishes in the void after uttering the
words, "O time thy pyramids," which are contained on the second-to-last
page of a book in the Library of Babel.
In Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar, the protagonist, Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, becomes trapped in a black hole which mirrors the Library of Babel; Cooper's universe consists of an infinitely extended tesseract
consisting of the back-side of a specific bookshelf full of books in
his former family home in all directions, but at different times in the
bookshelf's history. This scene has been compared to the Library of
Babel, and Nolan cites Borges as an artistic influence.
The Library of Babel, a website created by Jonathan Basile,
emulates an English-language version of Borges' library. An algorithm
he created generates a 'book' by iterating every permutation of 29
characters: the 26 English letters, space, comma, and period. Each book
is marked by a coordinate, corresponding to its place on the hexagonal
library (hexagon name, wall number, shelf number, and book name) so that
every book can be found at the same place every time. The website is
said to contain "all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books".
The Tower of Babel (Hebrew: מִגְדַּל בָּבֶל, Migdal Bavel) narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages.
According to the story, a united human race in the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the land of Shinar (שִׁנְעָר).
There they agree to build a city and a tower tall enough to reach
heaven. God, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so
that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around
the world.
German Late Medieval (c. 1370s) depiction of the construction of the tower
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and
burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they
for morter. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower,
whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be
scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 6 And the LORD
said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and
this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them,
which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
— Genesis 11:1–9
Etymology
The phrase "Tower of Babel" does not appear in the Bible; it is always "the city and the tower" (אֶת-הָעִיר וְאֶת-הַמִּגְדָּל) or just "the city" (הָעִיר). The original derivation of the name Babel (also the Hebrew name for Babylon) is uncertain. The native, Akkadian name of the city was Bāb-ilim, meaning "gate of God". However, that form and interpretation itself are now usually thought to be the result of an Akkadian folk etymology applied to an earlier form of the name, Babilla, of unknown meaning and probably non-Semitic origin. According to the Bible, the city received the name "Babel" from the Hebrew verb בָּלַ֥ל (bālal), meaning to jumble or to confuse.
Dating the Tower of Babel
Some scholars use internal and external evidence to offer 3500-3000
BC as a likely range for the date of the tower, based on 5 details
included in the narrative: "One, the event took place in Shinar, at
Babylon in particular (vv. 2, 9). Two, the event involved the building
of a city with a tower (vv. 4, 5). Three, the tower was constructed of
baked brick (v. 3). Four, the mortar used was asphalt (v. 3). Five, the
tower was very probably a ziggurat."
Composition
Genre
The narrative of the tower of Babel Genesis 11:1–9 is an etiology
or explanation of a phenomenon. Etiologies are narratives that explain
the origin of a custom, ritual, geographical feature, name, or other
phenomenon.
The story of the Tower of Babel explains the origins of the
multiplicity of languages. God was concerned that humans had blasphemed
by building the tower to avoid a second flood so God brought into
existence multiple languages. Thus, humans were divided into linguistic groups, unable to understand one another.
Themes
The story's theme of competition between God and humans appears elsewhere in Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The 1st-century Jewish interpretation found in Flavius Josephus explains the construction of the tower as a hubristic act of defiance against God ordered by the arrogant tyrant Nimrod.
There have, however, been some contemporary challenges to this
classical interpretation, with emphasis placed on the explicit motive of
cultural and linguistic homogeneity mentioned in the narrative (v. 1,
4, 6). This reading of the text sees God's actions not as a punishment for pride, but as an etiology of cultural differences, presenting Babel as the cradle of civilization.
Authorship and source criticism
Jewish and Christian tradition attributes the composition of the whole Pentateuch, which includes the story of the Tower of Babel, to Moses. Modern Biblical scholarship rejects Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, but is divided on the question of its authorship.
Many scholars subscribe to some form of the documentary hypothesis,
which argues that the Pentateuch is composed of multiple "sources" that
were later merged. Scholars who favor this hypothesis, such as Richard Elliot Friedman, tend to see the Genesis 11:1-9 as being composed by the J or Jahwist/Yahwist source. Michael Coogan
suggests the intentional word play regarding the city of Babel, and the
noise of the people's "babbling" is found in the Hebrew words as easily
as in English, is considered typical of the Yahwist source. John Van Seters,
who has put forth substantial modifications to the hypothesis, suggests
that these verses are part of what he calls a "Pre-Yahwistic stage".
Other scholars reject the documentary hypothesis all together. The "minimalist" scholars tend to see the books of Genesis through 2 Kings as written by a single, anonymous author during the Hellenistic period.
Philippe Wajdenbaum suggests that the Tower of Babel story is evidence
that this author was familiar with the works of both Herodotus and Plato.
There is a Sumerian myth similar to that of the Tower of Babel, called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, where
Enmerkar of Uruk is building a massive ziggurat in Eridu and demands a tribute of precious materials from Aratta for its construction, at one point reciting an incantation imploring the god Enki to restore (or in Kramer's translation, to disrupt) the linguistic unity of the inhabited regions—named as Shubur, Hamazi, Sumer, Uri-ki (Akkad), and the Martu land, "the whole universe, the well-guarded people—may they all address Enlil together in a single language."
In addition, a further Assyrian myth, dating from the 8th century BC during the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–605 BC) bears a number of similarities to the later written Biblical story.
Greco-Roman parallel
In Greek mythology, much of which was adopted by the Romans, there is a myth referred to as the Gigantomachy, the battle fought between the Giants and the Olympian gods for supremacy of the cosmos. In Ovid's telling of the myth, the Giants attempt to reach the gods in heaven by stacking mountains, but are repelled by Jupiter's thunderbolts. A.S. Kline translates Metamorphoses 1.151-155 as:
"Rendering the heights of heaven no safer than the earth, they
say the giants attempted to take the Celestial kingdom, piling mountains
up to the distant stars. Then the all-powerful father of the gods
hurled his bolt of lightning, fractured Olympus and threw Mount Pelion
down from Ossa below."
Biblical scholar Philippe Wajdenbaum suggests that the author of
Genesis was familiar with the Gigantomachy myth and used it to compose
the Tower of Babel story.
Mexico
Various traditions similar to that of the tower of Babel are found in Central America. Some writers connected the Great Pyramid of Cholula to the Tower of Babel. The Dominican friarDiego Durán
(1537–1588) reported hearing an account about the pyramid from a
hundred-year-old priest at Cholula, shortly after the conquest of
Mexico. He wrote that he was told when the light of the sun first
appeared upon the land, giants appeared and set off in search of the
sun. Not finding it, they built a tower to reach the sky. An angered God
of the Heavens called upon the inhabitants of the sky, who destroyed
the tower and scattered its inhabitants. The story was not related to
either a flood or the confusion of languages, although Frazer connects
its construction and the scattering of the giants with the Tower of
Babel.
Another story, attributed by the native historian Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl (c. 1565–1648) to the ancient Toltecs, states that after men had multiplied following a great deluge, they erected a tall zacuali
or tower, to preserve themselves in the event of a second deluge.
However, their languages were confounded and they went to separate parts
of the earth.
Arizona
Still another story, attributed to the Tohono O'odham people, holds that Montezuma
escaped a great flood, then became wicked and attempted to build a
house reaching to heaven, but the Great Spirit destroyed it with
thunderbolts.
Cherokee
One version of the Cherokee
origin story recounted in 1896 has both a tower narrative and a flood
narrative: "When we lived beyond the great waters there were twelve
clans belonging to the Cherokee tribe. And back in the old country in
which we lived the country was subject to great floods. So in the course
of time we held a council and decided to build a storehouse reaching to
heaven. The Cherokees said that when the house was built and the floods
came the tribe would just leave the earth and go to heaven. And we
commenced to build a great structure, and when it was towering into one
of the highest heavens the great powers destroyed the apex, cutting it
down to about half of its height. But as the tribe was fully determined
to build to heaven for safety they were not discouraged but commenced to
repair the damage done by the gods. Finally they completed the lofty
structure and considered themselves safe from the floods. But after it
was completed the gods destroyed the high part, again, and when they
determined to repair the damage they found that the language of the
tribe was confused or destroyed."
Nepal
Traces of a somewhat similar story have also been reported among the Tharu of Nepal and northern India.
Botswana
According to David Livingstone, the people he met living near Lake Ngami in 1849 had such a tradition, but with the builders' heads getting "cracked by the fall of the scaffolding".
Other traditions
In his 1918 book, Folklore in the Old Testament, Scottish social anthropologist Sir James George Frazer
documented similarities between Old Testament stories, such as the
Flood, and indigenous legends around the world. He identified
Livingston's account with a tale found in Lozi mythology,
wherein the wicked men build a tower of masts to pursue the
Creator-God, Nyambe, who has fled to Heaven on a spider-web, but the men
perish when the masts collapse. He further relates similar tales of the
Ashanti that substitute a pile of porridge pestles for the masts. Frazer moreover cites such legends found among the Kongo people, as well as in Tanzania, where the men stack poles or trees in a failed attempt to reach the moon. He further cited the Karbi and Kuki people of Assam as having a similar story. The traditions of the Karen people of Myanmar,
which Frazer considered to show clear 'Abrahamic' influence, also
relate that their ancestors migrated there following the abandonment of a
great pagoda in the land of the Karenni
30 generations from Adam, when the languages were confused and the
Karen separated from the Karenni. He notes yet another version current
in the Admiralty Islands, where mankind's languages are confused following a failed attempt to build houses reaching to heaven.
Biblical scholars see the Book of Genesis as mythological and not as a historical account of events. Genesis is described as beginning with historicized myth and ending with mythicized history. Nevertheless, the story of Babel can be interpreted in terms of its context.
Genesis 10:10 states that Babel (LXX: Βαβυλών) formed part of Nimrod's
kingdom. The Bible does not specifically mention that Nimrod ordered
the building of the tower, but many other sources have associated its
construction with Nimrod.
Genesis 11:9 attributes the Hebrew version of the name, Babel, to the verb balal, which means to confuse or confound
in Hebrew. The first century Roman-Jewish author Flavius Josephus
similarly explained that the name was derived from the Hebrew word Babel (בבל), meaning "confusion".
Destruction
Genesis makes no mention of any destruction of the tower. The people
whose languages are confounded were simply scattered from there over the
face of the Earth and stopped building their city. However, in other
sources, such as the Book of Jubilees (chapter 10 v.18–27), Cornelius Alexander (frag. 10), Abydenus (frags. 5 and 6), Josephus (Antiquities 1.4.3), and the Sibylline Oracles (iii. 117–129), God overturns the tower with a great wind. In the Talmud,
it said that the top of the tower was burnt, the bottom was swallowed,
and the middle was left standing to erode over time (Sanhedrin 109a).
Etemenanki (Sumerian:
"temple of the foundation of heaven and earth") was the name of a
ziggurat dedicated to Marduk in the city of Babylon. It was famously
rebuilt by the 6th-century BCE Neo-Babylonian dynasty rulers Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II, but had fallen into disrepair by the time of Alexander's
conquests. He managed to move the tiles of the tower to another
location, but his death stopped the reconstruction, and it was
demolished during the reign of his successor Antiochus Soter. The Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) wrote an account of the ziggurat in his Histories, which he called the "Temple of Zeus Belus".
According to modern scholars, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel was likely influenced by Etemenanki.
Stephen L. Harris proposed this occurred during the Babylonian captivity. Isaac Asimov speculated that the authors of Genesis 11:1–9
were inspired by the existence of an apparently incomplete ziggurat at
Babylon, and by the phonological similarity between Babylonian Bab-ilu, meaning "gate of God", and the Hebrew word balal, meaning "mixed", "confused", or "confounded".
Philippe Wajdenbaum suggests Genesis 11:3 was directly referencing
Herodotus' description of the construction processes used in Babylon and
Etemenanki in Histories book I 179 & 181, and was therefore written
in the Hellenistic period.
Later literature
Book of Jubilees
The Book of Jubilees contains one of the most detailed accounts found anywhere of the Tower.
And they began to build, and in the fourth week they made
brick with fire, and the bricks served them for stone, and the clay
with which they cemented them together was asphalt which comes out of
the sea, and out of the fountains of water in the land of Shinar. And
they built it: forty and three years were they building it; its breadth
was 203 bricks, and the height [of a brick] was the third of one; its
height amounted to 5433 cubits and 2 palms, and [the extent of one wall was] thirteen stades [and of the other thirty stades]. (Jubilees 10:20–21, Charles' 1913 translation)
Pseudo-Philo
In Pseudo-Philo, the direction for the building is ascribed not only to Nimrod, who is made prince of the Hamites, but also to Joktan, as prince of the Semites, and to Phenech son of Dodanim, as prince of the Japhetites. Twelve men are arrested for refusing to bring bricks, including Abraham, Lot, Nahor, and several sons of Joktan. However, Joktan finally saves the twelve from the wrath of the other two princes.
The Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews (c. 94 CE), recounted history as found in the Hebrew Bible
and mentioned the Tower of Babel. He wrote that it was Nimrod who had
the tower built and that Nimrod was a tyrant who tried to turn the
people away from God. In this account, God confused the people rather
than destroying them because annihilation with a Flood had not taught
them to be godly.
Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of
God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of
great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God as if
it were through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was
their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually
changed the government into tyranny,
seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring
them into a constant dependence on his power... Now the multitude were
very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod and to esteem it a
piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither
sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work:
and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very
high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so
great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height
seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of
burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen,
that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they
acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they
were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners [in the
Flood]; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse
languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages,
they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein
they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of
that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean
by the word Babel, confusion. The Sibyl also makes mention of this
tower, and of the confusion of the language, when she says thus:—"When
all men were of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if
they would thereby ascend up to heaven; but the gods sent storms of wind
and overthrew the tower, and gave everyone a peculiar language; and for
this reason it was that the city was called Babylon."
Greek Apocalypse of Baruch
Third Apocalypse of Baruch (or 3 Baruch, c. 2nd century), one of the pseudepigrapha, describes the just rewards of sinners and the righteous in the afterlife.
Among the sinners are those who instigated the Tower of Babel. In the
account, Baruch is first taken (in a vision) to see the resting place of
the souls of "those who built the tower of strife against God, and the
Lord banished them." Next he is shown another place, and there,
occupying the form of dogs,
Those who gave counsel to build the tower, for they whom thou seest
drove forth multitudes of both men and women, to make bricks; among
whom, a woman making bricks was not allowed to be released in the hour
of child-birth, but brought forth while she was making bricks, and
carried her child in her apron, and continued to make bricks. And the
Lord appeared to them and confused their speech, when they had built the
tower to the height of four hundred and sixty-three cubits. And they
took a gimlet,
and sought to pierce the heavens, saying, Let us see (whether) the
heaven is made of clay, or of brass, or of iron. When God saw this He
did not permit them, but smote them with blindness and confusion of
speech, and rendered them as thou seest. (Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, 3:5–8)
Midrash
Rabbinic literature
offers many different accounts of other causes for building the Tower
of Babel, and of the intentions of its builders. According to one
midrash the builders of the Tower, called "the generation of secession"
in the Jewish sources, said: "God has no right to choose the upper world
for Himself, and to leave the lower world to us; therefore we will
build us a tower, with an idol on the top holding a sword, so that it
may appear as if it intended to war with God" (Gen. R.xxxviii. 7; Tan., ed. Buber, Noah, xxvii. et seq.).
The building of the Tower was meant to bid defiance not only to
God, but also to Abraham, who exhorted the builders to reverence. The
passage mentions that the builders spoke sharp words against God, saying
that once every 1,656 years, heaven tottered so that the water poured
down upon the earth, therefore they would support it by columns that
there might not be another deluge (Gen. R. l.c.; Tan. l.c.; similarly
Josephus, "Ant." i. 4, § 2).
Some among that generation even wanted to war against God in
heaven (Talmud Sanhedrin 109a). They were encouraged in this undertaking
by the notion that arrows that they shot into the sky fell back
dripping with blood, so that the people really believed that they could
wage war against the inhabitants of the heavens (Sefer ha-Yashar,
Chapter 9:12–36). According to Josephus and Midrash Pirke R. El. xxiv.,
it was mainly Nimrod who persuaded his contemporaries to build the
Tower, while other rabbinical sources assert, on the contrary, that
Nimrod separated from the builders.
According to another midrashic account, one third of the Tower
builders were punished by being transformed into semi-demonic creatures
and banished into three parallel dimensions, inhabited now by their
descendants.
Although not mentioned by name, the Quran has a story with similarities to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, although set in the Egypt of Moses: Pharaoh asks Haman to build him a stone (or clay) tower so that he can mount up to heaven and confront the God of Moses.
Another story in Sura 2:102 mentions the name of Babil, but tells of when the two angels Harut and Marut
taught magic to some people in Babylon and warned them that magic is a
sin and that their teaching them magic is a test of faith.
A tale about Babil appears more fully in the writings of Yaqut (i, 448 f.) and the Lisān al-ʿArab [ar]
(xiii. 72), but without the tower: mankind were swept together by winds
into the plain that was afterward called "Babil", where they were
assigned their separate languages by God, and were then scattered again
in the same way. In the History of the Prophets and Kings by the 9th-century Muslim theologian al-Tabari, a fuller version is given: Nimrod has the tower built in Babil, God destroys it, and the language of mankind, formerly Syriac, is then confused into 72 languages. Another Muslim historian of the 13th century, Abu al-Fida relates the same story, adding that the patriarch Eber (an ancestor of Abraham) was allowed to keep the original tongue, Hebrew in this case, because he would not partake in the building.
Although variations similar to the biblical narrative of the
Tower of Babel exist within Islamic tradition, the central theme of God
separating humankind on the basis of language is alien to Islam
according to the author Yahiya Emerick. In Islamic belief, he argues, God created nations to know each other and not to be separated.
Book of Mormon
In the Book of Mormon, a man named Jared
and his family ask God that their language not be confounded at the
time of the "great tower". Because of their prayers, God preserves their
language and leads them to the Valley of Nimrod. From there, they travel across the sea to the Americas.
Despite no mention of the Tower of Babel in the original text of the Book of Mormon, some leaders in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints assert that the "great tower" was indeed the Tower of Babel - as in the 1981 introduction to the Book of Mormon - despite the chronology of the Book of Ether aligning more closely with the 21st century BC Sumerian tower temple myth of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta to the goddess Innana.
Church apologists have also supported this connection and argue the
reality of the Tower of Babel: "Although there are many in our day who
consider the accounts of the Flood and tower of Babel to be fiction,
Latter-day Saints affirm their reality."
In either case, the church firmly believes in the factual nature of at
least one "great tower" built in the region of ancient
Sumeria/Assyria/Babylonia.
The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré, a woodcut depicting the Tower of Babel
The confusion of tongues (confusio linguarum) is the origin myth for the fragmentation of human languages described in Genesis 11:1–9,
as a result of the construction of the Tower of Babel. Prior to this
event, humanity was stated to speak a single language. The preceding Genesis 10:5 states that the descendants of Japheth, Gomer, and Javan
dispersed "with their own tongues," creating an apparent contradiction.
Scholars have been debating or explaining this apparent contradiction
for centuries.
During the Middle Ages, the Hebrew language was widely considered the language used by God to address Adam in Paradise, and by Adam as lawgiver (the Adamic language) by various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholastics.
Dante Alighieri addresses the topic in his De vulgari eloquentia (1302-1305). He argues that the Adamic language is of divine origin and therefore unchangeable. He also notes that according to Genesis, the first speech act is due to Eve, addressing the serpent, and not to Adam.
In his Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1320), however, Dante changes his view to another that treats the Adamic language as the product of Adam.
This had the consequence that it could no longer be regarded as
immutable, and hence Hebrew could not be regarded as identical with the
language of Paradise. Dante concludes (Paradiso XXVI) that Hebrew
is a derivative of the language of Adam. In particular, the chief
Hebrew name for God in scholastic tradition, El, must be derived of a different Adamic name for God, which Dante gives as I.
Before the acceptance of the Indo-Europeanlanguage family, these languages were considered to be "Japhetite" by some authors (e.g., Rasmus Rask in 1815; see Indo-European studies).
Beginning in Renaissance Europe, priority over Hebrew was claimed for
the alleged Japhetic languages, which were supposedly never corrupted
because their speakers had not participated in the construction of the
Tower of Babel. Among the candidates for a living descendant of the
Adamic language were: Gaelic (see Auraicept na n-Éces); Tuscan (Giovanni Battista Gelli, 1542, Piero Francesco Giambullari, 1564); Dutch (Goropius Becanus, 1569, Abraham Mylius, 1612); Swedish (Olaus Rudbeck, 1675); German (Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, 1641, Schottel, 1641). The Swedish physician Andreas Kempe
wrote a satirical tract in 1688, where he made fun of the contest
between the European nationalists to claim their native tongue as the
Adamic language. Caricaturing the attempts by the Swede Olaus Rudbeck to
pronounce Swedish the original language of mankind, Kempe wrote a
scathing parody where Adam spoke Danish, God spoke Swedish, and the serpent French.
The primacy of Hebrew was still defended by some authors until
the emergence of modern linguistics in the second half of the 18th
century, e.g. by Pierre Besnier [fr] (1648–1705) in A philosophicall essay for the reunion of the languages, or, the art of knowing all by the mastery of one (1675) and by Gottfried Hensel (1687–1767) in his Synopsis Universae Philologiae (1741).
For a long time, historical linguistics wrestled with the idea of a single original language. In the Middle Ages, and down to the 17th century, attempts were made to identify a living descendant of the Adamic language.
The literal belief that the world's linguistic variety originated with the tower of Babel is pseudolinguistics, and is contrary to the known facts about the origin and history of languages.
In the Biblical introduction of the Tower of Babel account, in Genesis 11:1,
it is said that everyone on Earth spoke the same language, but this is
inconsistent with the Biblical description of the post-Noahic world
described in Genesis 10:5, where it is said that the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth gave rise to different nations, each with their own language.
There have also been a number of traditions around the world that
describe a divine confusion of the one original language into several,
albeit without any tower. Aside from the Ancient Greek myth that Hermes confused the languages, causing Zeus to give his throne to Phoroneus, Frazer specifically mentions such accounts among the Wasania of Kenya, the Kacha Naga people of Assam, the inhabitants of Encounter Bay in Australia, the Maidu of California, the Tlingit of Alaska, and the K'iche' Maya of Guatemala.
The Estonian myth of "the Cooking of Languages" has also been compared.
Enumeration of scattered languages
There are several mediaeval historiographic accounts that attempt to
make an enumeration of the languages scattered at the Tower of Babel.
Because a count of all the descendants of Noah listed by name in chapter 10 of Genesis (LXX)
provides 15 names for Japheth's descendants, 30 for Ham's, and 27 for
Shem's, these figures became established as the 72 languages resulting
from the confusion at Babel—although the exact listing of these
languages changed over time. (The LXX Bible has two additional names,
Elisa and Cainan, not found in the Masoretic text of this chapter, so
early rabbinic traditions, such as the Mishna, speak instead of
"70 languages".) Some of the earliest sources for 72 (sometimes 73)
languages are the 2nd-century Christian writers Clement of Alexandria (Stromata I, 21) and Hippolytus of Rome (On the Psalms 9); it is repeated in the Syriac book Cave of Treasures (c. 350 CE), Epiphanius of Salamis' Panarion (c. 375) and St. Augustine's The City of God
16.6 (c. 410). The chronicles attributed to Hippolytus (c. 234) contain
one of the first attempts to list each of the 72 peoples who were
believed to have spoken these languages.
Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae
(c. 600) mentions the number of 72; however, his list of names from the
Bible drops the sons of Joktan and substitutes the sons of Abraham and
Lot, resulting in only about 56 names total; he then appends a list of
some of the nations known in his own day, such as the Longobards and the Franks.
This listing was to prove quite influential on later accounts that made
the Lombards and Franks themselves into descendants of eponymous
grandsons of Japheth, e.g. the Historia Brittonum (c. 833), The Meadows of Gold by al Masudi (c. 947) and Book of Roads and Kingdoms by al-Bakri (1068), the 11th-century Lebor Gabála Érenn, and the midrashic compilations Yosippon (c. 950), Chronicles of Jerahmeel, and Sefer haYashar.
Other sources that mention 72 (or 70) languages scattered from Babel are the Old Irish poem Cu cen mathair by Luccreth moccu Chiara (c. 600); the Irish monastic work Auraicept na n-Éces; History of the Prophets and Kings by the Persian historian Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (c. 915); the Anglo-Saxon dialogue Solomon and Saturn; the Russian Primary Chronicle (c. 1113); the Jewish Kabbalistic work Bahir (1174); the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (c. 1200); the SyriacBook of the Bee (c. 1221); the Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum (c. 1284; mentions 22 for Shem, 31 for Ham and 17 for Japheth for a total of 70); Villani's 1300 account; and the rabbinic Midrash ha-Gadol
(14th century). Villani adds that it "was begun 700 years after the
Flood, and there were 2,354 years from the beginning of the world to the
confusion of the Tower of Babel. And we find that they were 107 years
working at it; and men lived long in those times". According to the Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum, however, the project was begun only 200 years following the Deluge.
The tradition of 72 languages persisted into later times. Both José de Acosta in his 1576 treatise De procuranda indorum salute, and António Vieira a century later in his Sermão da Epifania,
expressed amazement at how much this 'number of tongues' could be
surpassed, there being hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages
indigenous only to Peru and Brazil.
Height
The Book of Genesis does not mention how tall the tower was. The
phrase used to describe the tower, "its top in the sky" (v.4), was an
idiom for impressive height; rather than implying arrogance, this was
simply a cliché for height.
The Book of Jubilees mentions the tower's height as being 5,433
cubits and 2 palms, or 2,484 m (8,150 ft), about three times the height
of Burj Khalifa,
or roughly 1.6 miles high. The Third Apocalypse of Baruch mentions that
the 'tower of strife' reached a height of 463 cubits, or 211.8 m
(695 ft), taller than any structure built in human history until the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, which is 324 m (1,063 ft) in height.
Gregory of Tours writing c. 594, quotes the earlier historian Orosius
(c. 417) as saying the tower was "laid out foursquare on a very level
plain. Its wall, made of baked brick cemented with pitch, is fifty cubits (23 m or 75 ft) wide, two hundred (91.5 m or 300 ft) high, and four hundred and seventy stades (82.72 km or 51.4 miles) in circumference.
A stade was an ancient Greek unit of length, based on the circumference
of a typical sports stadium of the time which was about 176 metres
(577 ft). Twenty-five gates
are situated on each side, which make in all one hundred. The doors of
these gates, which are of wonderful size, are cast in bronze. The same
historian tells many other tales of this city, and says: 'Although such
was the glory of its building still it was conquered and destroyed.'"
A typical medieval account is given by Giovanni Villani (1300): He relates that "it measured eighty miles [130 km] round, and it was already 4,000 paces high, or 5.92 km (3.68 mi) and 1,000 paces thick, and each pace is three of our feet." The 14th-century traveler John Mandeville also included an account of the tower and reported that its height had been 64 furlongs, or 13 km (8 mi), according to the local inhabitants.
The 17th-century historian Verstegan
provides yet another figure – quoting Isidore, he says that the tower
was 5,164 paces high, or 7.6 km (4.7 mi), and quoting Josephus that the
tower was wider than it was high, more like a mountain than a tower. He
also quotes unnamed authors who say that the spiral path was so wide
that it contained lodgings for workers and animals, and other authors
who claim that the path was wide enough to have fields for growing grain for the animals used in the construction.
In his book, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down (Pelican 1978–1984), Professor J.E. Gordon considers the height of the Tower of Babel. He wrote, "brick and stone weigh about 120 lb per cubic foot
(2,000 kg per cubic metre) and the crushing strength of these materials
is generally rather better than 6,000 lbs per square inch or 40
mega-pascals. Elementary arithmetic shows that a tower with parallel
walls could have been built to a height of 2.1 km (1.3 mi) before the
bricks at the bottom were crushed. However, by making the walls taper
towards the top they ... could well have been built to a height where
the men of Shinnar would run short of oxygen and had difficulty in
breathing before the brick walls crushed beneath their own dead weight."
In popular culture
Pieter Brueghel's influential portrayal is based on the Colosseum
in Rome, while later conical depictions of the tower (as depicted in
Doré's illustration) resemble much later Muslim towers observed by
19th-century explorers in the area, notably the Minaret of Samarra. M.C. Escher depicts a more stylized geometrical structure in his woodcut representing the story.
American choreographer Adam Darius staged a multilingual theatrical interpretation of The Tower of Babel in 1993 at the ICA in London.
Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis,
in a flashback, plays upon themes of lack of communication between the
designers of the tower and the workers who are constructing it. The
short scene states how the words used to glorify the tower's
construction by its designers took on totally different, oppressive
meanings to the workers. This led to its destruction as they rose up
against the designers because of the insufferable working conditions.
The appearance of the tower was modeled after Brueghel's 1563 painting.
The political philosopher Michael Oakeshott surveyed historic variations of the Tower of Babel in different cultures and produced a modern retelling of his own in his 1983 book, On History.
In his retelling, Oakeshott expresses disdain for human willingness to
sacrifice individuality, culture, and quality of life for grand
collective projects. He attributes this behavior to fascination with
novelty, persistent dissatisfaction, greed, and lack of self-reflection.
A.S. Byatt's novel Babel Tower
(1996) is about the question "whether language can be shared, or, if
that turns out to be illusory, how individuals, in talking to each
other, fail to understand each other".
The progressive band Soul Secret wrote a concept album called BABEL, based on a modernized version of the myth.
Science fiction writer Ted Chiang wrote a story called "Tower of Babylon" that imagined a miner's climbing the tower all the way to the top where he meets the vault of heaven.
Fantasy novelist Josiah Bancroft has a series The Books of Babel, which is to conclude with book IV in 2021.
This biblical episode is dramatized in the Indian television series Bible Ki Kahaniyan, which aired on DD National from 1992.
In the 1990 Japanese television anime Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, the Tower of Babel is used by the Atlanteans as an interstellar communication device.
Later in the series, the Neo Atlanteans rebuild the Tower of Babel and
use its communication beam as a weapon of mass destruction. Both the
original and the rebuilt tower resembles the painting Tower of Babel by artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
In the video game series Doom, the Tower of Babel appears multiple times. In Doom (1993), the level "E2M8" is named and takes place at the "Tower of Babel". In Doom Eternal
the campaign level "Nekravol" contains the Tower of Babel, but instead
of its biblical purpose, it functions as a processing line for the
suffering of human souls. In-game it is referred to as "The Citadel",
but the concept art for Doom Eternal (The Art of Doom Eternal artbook, and the Steam Trading Card) refers to it as the "Tower Babel".
2017 comic book La tour de Bab-El-Oued (The tower of Bab-El-Oued) from Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat
series refers to the Tower of Babel in a context of intercultural
conflict and cooperation (Jews and Muslims during the French
colonization in Algeria).
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