AN EMOTIONAL EXCAVATION
Ancient Babylon is located in the modern city of Hillah, Iraq, which is about sixty miles south of Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, on the Hillah branch of the Euphrates River. Although some of ancient Babylon’s classic features have been restored, much of it lies in ruins as a result of the shifting course of the Euphrates and its tributaries, repeated ancient conquests, subsequent neglect over the centuries, the transportation of many of the city’s treasures and architectural features to Western museums by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century explorers and archaeologists, and a couple of recent wars. Fortunately, an excellent virtual reconstruction of ancient Babylon is available to view for free at Babylon 3D,1 demonstrating the importance of digital modeling to cultural heritage preservation.
Very few people travel to Iraq, and yet somehow everyone seems to have a negative impression of Babylon. I have a theory as to why this is so. It’s not because of a bad interaction they once had with someone from Iraq or because of some bad hummus at a Baghdad restaurant, but rather because of the way the Bible portrays Babylon. Throughout its pages, the Bible presents a very negative portrayal of Babylon. Revelation 17:5 even calls the city “Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations,” and says this name was inscribed on Babylon’s forehead! And since most people around the world are more familiar with the Bible than Babylon itself, the ancient city continues to have this negative reputation.
My experience with the Babylonians took place 16½ feet underground, in a cistern at Tel ‘Azeqah in Israel, which was one of the last towns to fall before the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem itself (Jer. 34:7). As part of my research at Tel ‘Azeqah, I was tasked with excavating a Late Bronze Age cistern that was in use through the Iron Age (from approximately 1500 to 586 BCE) on the southern slope of the tell. It took me nine weeks over two seasons to excavate the plastered water-collection facility. As at many excavation projects, the first weeks were exciting and new, and the final weeks leading to the completion were full of celebration, photos, and more than one underground toast to our success. But it was during the weeks in between—the long, dark, arduous, sweaty, dusty, frustrating, claustrophobic, and questioning-my-career-choice moments of the dig—that I encountered the Babylonians face-to-face. These weeks in the cistern gave me more time than I ever wanted to reflect on the destructive things men have done to one another throughout time for God and country.
The last buckets of dirt excavated from the Area S2 water cistern 16½ feet below ground at Tel ‘Azeqah, Israel. The cistern is plastered on the bottom and all sides to prevent water loss.
About 2 feet from the bottom of the plastered cistern there is a white chalky layer of debris about 2 feet thick. The white layer was created by annual rainwater washing the surface limestone debris into the cistern. Beneath this layer, I discovered vessel after vessel of what archaeologists call Iron IIc pottery, which is pottery that was used between 700 and 586 BCE. Each of the vessels held 1 to 2 gallons of water and, curiously, each was missing one handle. This was because when the Judahites living in ‘Azeqah around 650 BCE needed water, they would tie a rope to the handle of a clay vessel and lower it into the cistern. Occasionally, the handle would break off, leaving the vessel at the bottom of the cistern and the unfortunate (and thirsty) person at the other end of the rope with nothing but a broken handle. Although this was bad for the fetcher of water (who was out a good water pitcher), it’s great for archaeologists, as we can use this twenty-six-hundred-year-old pot to tell us about the people who lived at ‘Azeqah.
We dated the pottery at the bottom of the cistern to somewhere between the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. The pottery at the bottom told us that this was the last time anyone used the cistern to draw water. This means that something happened that caused the cistern to go out of use and allowed years of limestone runoff to form the layer of white chalky debris 2 feet from the bottom of the cistern. That something may have been the Babylonians. I know this not just because of the pottery I found below the chalky layer, but also because of what I discovered above it.
During the hottest weeks of the summer, while I was digging down through the bowels of my cistern at ‘Azeqah, I began to uncover bones. This is not uncommon in archaeology as the remains of animals are ubiquitous, especially down in holes that were once cisterns. But as I continued digging, I quickly realized that these weren’t sheep, goat, or cow bones; these were human bones. I knew I wasn’t in a tomb, as we had already identified the chamber as a plastered cistern. Yet there were bones in the cistern.
I am not scared of skeletons. The living are far more dangerous than the dead. Excavating human bones is part of my science and my work as an archaeologist. There is little emotion involved. Excavate. Document. That is my job. Yet these were human bones. And in my underground isolation, hunched over and staring into the eye socket of a skull looking back up at me, I could not help but think about the life this person lived. As I brushed the dirt from this skull’s cheekbone, I wondered to myself what he did for a living. Was he happy? Was he in love? Did he ever have his heart broken? Was his father proud of him?
At that moment I felt tears welling up, which makes it difficult to work when you’re on your hands and knees looking straight down. It was especially hard when I uncovered the skeleton of a small child, probably three or four years old. My mind immediately raced back to my newborn twins, Quincy and Rory Kate, and my two-year-old son, Mac. I sat frozen as I realized how absolutely devastated I’d be if anything ever happened to them.
My thoughts turned to this child’s parents and how destroyed they must have been to have lost their child. I was overwhelmed. I turned off my headlamp and just sat there, weeping silently, alone, in the dark. What horrible series of events must have transpired in order for this precious child to wind up at the bottom of an old cistern? I knew nothing about this child other than he had died and had been discarded without a proper burial. I didn’t even know his name. So I made a decision. I didn’t leave the cistern. I stayed right there in the dark. I wanted to experience the pain, the grief, and the sorrow. I just sat, and cried, and mourned his loss. I felt I owed it to him.
And it was there, in the dark, 16½ feet below ground in a cistern at Tel ‘Azeqah, that I finally began to understand what Babylon meant to the Jews who built the Bible. As I sat on the very destruction layer created by the Babylonians and surveyed the bones of dead individuals strewn about the cistern, I came into physical contact with what Babylon brought to Judah—destruction, death, and sorrow. What had once given life to Judahites was now a Persian-period disposal site. It’s no wonder why Babylon is portrayed so negatively in the Bible.
Now, if you’ll pardon me for just a second, I need a moment to wipe the tears off my keyboard, get a drink, and hug my kids.
Okay. I’m a professional. Moving on.
BABYLON AND THE TOWER OF BABEL
The English name Babylon comes from the Greek (Βαβυλών), which was a transliteration of the Akkadian name Babili, which in turn was likely the name of a place or city. Over time, a popular folk etymology (i.e., a supposed origin of a word that sounds like it makes sense, but isn’t actually historical) interpreted the origin of the name as bab-ili, meaning “gate of God.”2 In the Hebrew Bible, Babylon is rendered as an approximate transliteration, bavel (),3 which preserves the folk etymology and, as we’ll see, offers an additional counteretymology with an entire story in the book of Genesis: the Tower of Babel.
The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1–9 is an etiological myth, or a story that explains the origin of something like a religious tradition, natural phenomenon, or proper name.4 In this case, the Tower of Babel explains how all of the world’s different languages could have come about in such a short time after the flood.
According to the biblical narrative, the great flood wiped out every land and air creature from the face of the earth with the exception of Noaḥ and his family, totaling eight persons, and the ani
mals they brought onto the ark. Genesis 11:1 says that everyone on the ark spoke the same language, and therefore every descendant of Noaḥ’s three sons, Ḥam, Shem, and Yafet (Japheth), would have spoken the language their fathers taught them. Apparently someone in ancient history asked the obvious question, “If everyone is so closely related, how did we get so many different languages, like Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Phoenician, Egyptian, Aramaic, Elamite, and Akkadian, so quickly following the flood?” Languages take centuries to develop, evolve, and differentiate from one another, and since different nations spoke different languages, an explanation was needed to show how the different languages emerged.
Enter the Tower of Babel story, which is told for the very purpose of answering this question. The key to the purpose of the story is its location in the narrative. Note how the story of the Tower of Babel is strategically wedged in between the genealogies of the sons of Noaḥ: the descendants of Shem are recounted in Genesis 10:21–32, then the story of the Tower of Babel is somewhat unexpectedly told in 11:1–9, and then 11:10 picks back up with the descendants of Shem again. The Tower of Babel story is placed where it is in the genealogies of the descendants of Noaḥ because the editor of Genesis is attempting to preemptively address the expected question of the relatively sudden appearance of so many different languages. Its answer: the world’s languages didn’t evolve gradually over time (as is demonstrated from the linguistic and archaeological record of literary remains we have today); rather, God miraculously made them all at the same time. Genesis 11:2–4 claims that Noaḥ’s descendants wanted to build a city and a high place that could reach the heavens: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens” (11:4). Modern scholars argue that the tower mentioned in Genesis 11:4 was influenced by stories of ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats, or high places of worship that were usually part of ancient temple complexes. These ziggurats would have been known to the biblical authors through direct experience with them, stories told about them, or experience with their destroyed remains. A well-known ziggurat in the center of ancient Babylon, the Etemenanki, was dedicated to the god Marduk in the sixth century BCE after being rebuilt by King Nebuchadnezzar II. We also have the story of the construction of a towering religious precinct, the Esagila, mentioned in the Akkadian creation epic the Enuma Elish.5
What is fascinating about the next verses in Genesis is that they depict God as making a rather extraordinary claim about the builders of the tower:
The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” (11:5–7)
According to the Bible, the reason given for God’s intervention in the building of the Tower of Babel was the fear that humans could actually build a tower that reached the heavens! The view that one could build a structure that could physically reach the divine realm is consistent with the worldview found, for instance, in the creation narratives in Genesis 1 and 2: the earth is a flat surface over which a domed firmament is stretched, separating the heavens from the earth (1:6–8). The builders wanted to construct a tower that reached beyond this barrier, and according to the Bible, God feared that they might do it!
In the story, God’s solution is to confuse their languages, which would apparently keep the builders from communicating with each other (11:8) and cause them to abort the construction of the tower. Then in Genesis 11:9, we find a new etymology for Babylon, which expands on the earlier Akkadian folk etymology: “Therefore it was called Babel (, bavel), because there the LORD confused (, balal) the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.”
Genesis 11:9 claims that the Hebrew word for the tower and the city of Babylon, Babel, results from a play on the Hebrew word balal, “to confuse,” offering both an endorsement of the Akkadian “gate of God” folk etymology and a pejorative counteretymology that mocks the failure of the “confused” Babylonians to complete their tower to the heavens. This story offers an explanation for the presence of so many different languages so few generations after the flood: God made them from nothing. So from the very origin of the city’s name, Babylon played an integral role in one of the Bible’s best-known stories, the Tower of Babel.
THE FIRST BABYLONIAN DYNASTY AND HAMMURABI’S CODE
Another early example of how Babylon influenced the Bible may be seen in its use of Hammurabi’s law code. Babylon experienced two periods of dominance; biblical Babylon is actually the second great period in Babylon’s history and is referred to by scholars as the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which ruled over Mesopotamia and the greater Near East for nearly a century from 626 until 539 BCE. But the earlier Babylonian period of domination also contributed significantly to the contents of the Bible.
The first Babylonian dynasty spanned a period from around 1830 to 1531 BCE and is best known for King Hammurapi (more commonly Hammurabi) and his famed law code, which is on display at the Louvre in Paris. The Code of Hammurabi is an ancient law code that set standards of conduct and justice for most areas of human interaction, including contracts, wages, property rights, criminal behavior, divorce, inheritance, and so forth. Because Hammurabi’s law code (which was created about 1750 BCE) predates the supposed historical Moses, exodus, and Mt. Sinai revelation (which cannot be dated to any earlier than 1450 BCE),6 many conclude that Hammurabi’s code influenced many of the laws in the Bible.7 For instance, lines 196–97 of Hammurabi’s code read:
The top of the Law Code of Babylonian king Hammurabi. The iconography shows Hammurabi receiving a ring and scepter (symbols of royal power) from the seated Mesopotamian sun god Shamash, whose feet rest on the mountains.
A close-up of the Akkadian cuneiform text of the Law Code of Babylonian king Hammurabi.
If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one break a man’s bone, they shall break his bone.8
This is similar to the later law found in Exodus 21:23–25:
If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
What’s more, many of the laws in Hammurabi’s law code break down very specific laws into scenarios similar to those found in the Bible’s law codes. For example, lines 250–51 of Hammurabi’s code state:
If a bull, when passing through the street, gore a man and bring about his death, this case has no penalty. If a man’s bull have been wont to gore and they have made known to him his habit of goring, and he have not protected his horns or have not tied him up, and that bull gore the son of a man and bring about his death, he shall pay one-half mana of silver.9
So if the bull is unaccustomed to goring, there is no penalty for the bull’s owner. However, if the bull is a repeat offender, there is a penalty for the owner, presumably because he knew of the risk to others. Compare that to the law given in Exodus 21:28–29:
When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall not be liable. If the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not restrained it, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.
Although the penalties are adjusted (and are much harsher) in the Bible, the idea of different penalties for different casuistic laws (i.e., civil laws with varying penalties determined on a case-by-case basis) concerning goring beasts that we find in the Bible is parallel to that of the Code of Hammurabi, including the liability of the animal’s owner for repeat offenses. If you take a moment to read the laws in Hammurabi’s code10 and then read the Covenant Code in Exodus 20:19–23:33, you’ll quickly understand why so
many scholars believe that the laws said to have been given to Moses by God on Mt. Sinai appear to have been heavily influenced by earlier Babylonian law codes, specifically the Code of Hammurabi. It is a very real case of the city of Babylon contributing to the building of the central law code of the Bible.
THE RISE OF THE NEO-BABYLONIAN EMPIRE AND THE FALL OF JERUSALEM
Over a millennium after the rise and fall of the first Babylonian dynasty, the city of Babylon once again found itself under foreign domination, this time at the hands of the Neo-Assyrian Empire beginning in 934 BCE. Following the death of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in 627 BCE, the Babylonians rebelled against Assyria (as part of a larger coalition of Medes, Persians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, Scythians, and Cimmerians) under the command of the Chaldean tribal leader Nabopolassar, who served as the first king of the newly established Neo-Babylonian Empire. But it was Nabopolassar’s son, Nebuchadnezzar II, who became the feared leader of the empire and the rebuilder of Babylon.
The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II was the Assyrianborn king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 604 to 561 BCE and is considered one of the greatest kings of ancient Babylon. (In fact, Saddam Hussein saw himself as the reembodiment of Nebuchadnezzar II and actually rebuilt, expanded, and took up residence in the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar II; he even went so far as to depict himself in the same poses used in the earlier king’s iconography in order to project his propagandist portrayal as the greatest ruler in Babylon since Nebuchadnezzar II.) Ruling from Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar II reestablished the city as a magnificent capital. He rebuilt temples and palaces, built the famed Ishtar Gate, and is said to have built one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, although the actual existence of the Hanging Gardens is still debated, as there is no archaeological evidence for the gardens.11
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