Brick, bitumen, and temple-towers: background to Babel

Says In Shinar “they used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar” (Gen 11:3; וְהַחֵמָר … לַחֹמֶר, vehakhemar … lakhomer, a wordplay), and they planned “a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens” (11:4; וּמִגְדָּל וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם, umigdal verosho vashamayim, “and a tower, and its top in the heavens”).

Rogers describes Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, where “was reared an artificial platform of brick laid in bitumen”, and a cylinder of Nabonidus on rebuilding a “temple tower” “with bitumen and burned brick”. King describes Enlil’s temple at Nippur “with its temple-tower Imkharsag rising in successive stages beside it”, without linking it to Babel. Keil notes that for mortar “they used asphalt, in which the neighbourhood of Babylon abounds”, and says of the Birs Nimrud ruins that any “historical connection with the tower of the confusion of tongues, must remain, at least for the present, a matter of uncertainty”. Josephus cites the Sibyl: “When all men were of one language, some of them built an high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven”, until “the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower”. These are their statements.

Uncertain Whether the tower of 11:4 was a temple-tower of the Babylonian kind, whether “its top in the heavens” is literal aim or hyperbole, and how the Sibyl’s later story relates to Gen 11 are open. No ancient text is adopted as the background, no dependence is claimed, and this background does not fix the meaning of 11:1–9.