When the site of the ancient city-state of Ur, in modern-day Iraq, was excavated in the 1920s and 1930s, it exposed a massive ziggurat, believed to have been built by King Ur-Nammu around 2000 BC. Ziggurats, pyramid-like temples made of mud bricks, were thought to connect heaven with earth. Perhaps it was what the tower of Babel, as described in Genesis 11:1–9, looked like. In fact, the “city . . . with a tower that reaches to the heavens” (v. 4)—which was located on a plain in Shinar (v. 2), a region in Babylonia—may have been very similar to the city of Ur and its ziggurat.

The story of this tower is the last “fall” story in Genesis 1–11, and may represent the most full-blown form of arrogance and rebellion in a series of already monumental examples of human failure (3:1–19; 4:1–12; 6:1–7).

We can detect arrogance and rebellion in the motives of the people as they embark on their ambitious project: “so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (11:4). Their desire to make a name for themselves reflects their arrogance. Their resistance to being “scattered over the face of the whole earth” reflects their rebellion against God’s command to “be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth” (9:1).

We also detect arrogance and rebellion in the methods they use to achieve their objectives. “They used brick . . . and bitumen” (11:3), the cutting edge of building technology in those days, and evidently, these advances were making humanity feel godlike. They would go on to say: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens” (v. 4). Ziggurats were designed to provide a bridge for the gods to come down to interact with their devotees. The top of a ziggurat was believed to be the first step of a deity on his journey from the heavens to the earth.¹ As biblical scholar John H. Walton observes: “Man was no longer attempting to be like God, but more insidiously, was trying to bring deity down to the level of man.”²

The punchline of the story comes in Genesis 11:5: “But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building” (italics added). God had to descend from where He was in order to look at the tower that the builders were boasting would reach heaven!

The construction of the tower and their unity in language had made the people in Shinar think that they could achieve anything on their own—without God. Thus they had to be confounded, to prevent them from going any further on the path of rebellion and sin (vv. 6–7). They had resisted God’s command, but He sovereignly achieved the repopulation of the whole earth as He had planned, scattering the people over all the earth as He confused their language (vv. 8–9). “Babel” means “gateway of God” in Hebrew, but it sounds like another Hebrew word, balal, which is also used in verse 9 and verse 7 and means “to confuse or mix”. And in English, the word “babble” indicates utter confusion!

¹ John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2006), 119–123.

² John H. Walton, “The Mesopotamian Background of the Tower of Babel Account and Its Implications,” Bulletin of Biblical Research 5, no. 1 (1995): 169, https://doi.org/10.2307/26422132.