The Bible (LXX) dates the Babel event to the mid-third millennium BC, somewhere around 2500 BC
That was the heyday of pyramid building in Egypt (“Great Pyramid of Giza”), and ziggurat building in Iraq (“Tower of Babel”)
These massive building projects, especially in Iraq, contributed to the collapse of Sumerian society at the end of the 3rd millennium BC
Much as the Mayans deforested their lands to build fires to create plaster, the Sumerians plausibly deforested their lands to fire all the mudbricks for their ziggurats…
devastating their environment and pulling the rug out from under their own feet
Sumerian society collapsed, and was invaded by migrants from other areas (plausibly environmental refugees, from some sort of climate shock about 2200-2000 BC)
the unified Sumerian culture collapsed, and was replaced by a multi-ethnic & multi-lingual society
the Biblical memory of the event is accurate & informative, using one specific incident to (efficiently) recall the entire regional era
That’s an interesting way to look at it – I hadn’t thought of it that way before. So you basically see the Babel event not as one specific event but as a composite or representative of many things going on in the world during that time (and hence other possible cases of language confusion/mixing)?
Of course approached from a scientific perspective (archeology & Occam’s razor) and abandoning the premise that humankind were created denovo and spoke one language, one could reasonably conclude that Homo sapiens reached “full consciousness” and language capability at different times and at different places on the globe. When two tribes met, they had to decipher each other’s language in order to trade goods or wives, or else treat each other as enemies. The Tower of Babel story may just be an accumulation of hundreds of such encounters stored in tribal memory. With the invention of writing, these could be preserved as a single story.
best wishes,
Al Leo
Exactly where does the Septuagint provide a date for the “Babel event”?
I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but this is off. Shulgi of Ur completed the Great Ziggurat of Ur around 2000 B.C. Interestingly, it had fallen into ruin by the 6th century BC, when it was restored and rebuilt by Nabonidus. He was the last king of Neo-Babylon, defeated by Cyrus.
In short, widespread and severe drought events at 6200 B.C., 3200 B.C. and 2200 B.C. were accompanied by political and social upheaval. This had nothing to do with the building of ziggurats, and the collapse of a political dynasty does not mean that the population of Sumeria suddenly was replaced by a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual population.
as for forests, there are still scattered forests throughout the region, and there were surely more such regions in the distant past – you think Sumeria imported 100% of its timber? There were trees around?
Yes, the Flood story remembers the major climatic shock around 3200 BC, and the Babel one remembers the climate shock of 2200 BC – to which both Egypt & (especially) Mesopotamia were plausibly made more vulnerable by their own monumental building projects (plural) throughout the 3rd millennium BC…
which may have been “compressed” into the singular account of the most famous monument of them all, that of Babylon (?)
The lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates are alluvial plains. There are stands of poplar and willow along the riverbanks, but calling it a forest would be a stretch. The people built homes from mud bricks instead of timber because that’s what was available. You see the same in the desert Southwest of the U.S. We call it adobe, and it’s sun-dried instead of baked.
So, do you subscribe to that chronology you posted of a creation around 5554 B.C.?
Maybe eventually, but the “Piora Oscillation” was an extremely wet period – the Dead Sea level rose 100m and Alpine glaciers descended 100m
Doesn’t it say somewhere (Josephus?) that Nimrod and the Tower of Babel builders demanded the use of baked mudbrick? And that it required the use of enormous quantities of wood?
The LXX, supported by the DSS and Samaritan Pentateuch (to my knowledge), all concur on a ~5500 BC date of Eden
Check your dates. The droughts at 3200 BC were followed by the wet period 2900-3200 BC.
I’d have to look it up, but the large ziggurats of Mesopotamia would require baked bricks. Sun-dried bricks would collapse from the weight. Here’s an example of how large adobe structures must be built (thanks for the excuse to post a pic of one of my favorite places!)
As far as how much wood and where it came from, I don’t know on the first, and the mountains where the rivers start are the likely source of timber. Chop down the trees and float them down the river to where they’re needed.
So you’re a young-earther with an even earlier timeline? Fascinating, but it’s a no-go for me.
But accepting your statement, yes a period of drought followed by a “whiplash of wetness” would have surprised the Sumerians so much more, and made Noah’s building of a boat (barge) far inland that much more remarkable, and its ensuing utility in the Flood that much more miraculous
thought so, massive building projects in Sumeria would have deforested somewhere, even as similar scale building projects of the Maya in the Yucatan also led to environmental degradation, and made them much more vulnerable to climate shocks
think there is solid science underlying the Flood & Babel memories
Dear Erik,
I was just reading Bill Nye’s Undeniable, but I will not list all of his arguments against your timeline in this post. I will ask the same question that he does though: How can you use scientific and historical fact to support your timeline and disregard all the other science that disproves a young earth?
There is another thread here on the Babel event that you may want to look at.
Actually, I was reading a bit more about the construction/re-construction of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, and it seems the core was sun-dried bricks with a facade of baked bricks and bitumen for cement. I’m not an engineer, but I suppose the difference is due to the fact that the structure was solid, so there were no walls that required support.
There is zero evidence of deforestation. At least, none that I could find. I wouldn’t call that “solid science.” Harvesting trees in Turkey or the Zagros Mountains of Iran for use in Sumerian building projects would not destroy the environment of southern Iraq.
I don’t really have time to revisit that earlier thread, but everything that you quoted from it here is factually incorrect.
Cities grew for several hundred years, then dwindled as populations dispersed into the countryside—and later grew again.
Dispersal into the surrounding countryside implies environment degradation in the “core” urban areas?
Wattenmaker’s research at the site of Kazane, in Turkey, suggests that societies set themselves up for environmental disasters
Trella’s studies in Upper Mesopotamia indicate that farming was intensified to provide more food to support growing populations. With limited transportation, cities depended on the fertility of nearby land. When populations were small, fields were left fallow biannually and used as grazing land for animals that fertilized the soil with their dung. Population growth changed this practice and potentially motivated the use of city wastes to fertilize fields. Analysis conducted on animal bones indicates that after several centuries of habitation, city dwellers no longer pastured their livestock in fallow fields, but instead moved them farther into the countryside, where their dung no longer benefited crops. All of these factors likely decreased agricultural sustainability.
Two thousand years ago, as the Roman Empire expanded across Europe, some people became rich and powerful while others were subjected and exploited. “In some areas, the environment was devastated, as deforestation and the depletion of mineral resources became major problems,” says Trella. “Urbanism led to the increased spread of disease and declining health for many.”
in southern Mesopotamia, deforestation, soil erosion, and salinization of the soil weakened Sumerian city-states, leading to foreign conquest and the northward shift of Mesopotamia’s cultural centers…environmental devastation and endemic warfare ultimately led to conquest by outside forces after about 2350 B.C.E.
Oh wow. You mean that all this hype about humans killing the world started over 4 million years ago? Seems amazing that the world has not melted or imploded or something by now… or maybe it is better made and self healing than scientists accredit it. Which would be quite fantastic if it was not specifically designed and created. And, just maybe, we haven’t got the foggiest idea what actually happened in prehistory, just a lot of folk tales and conjecture.
Single language? Single parents? Single race? Single religion? Yeah!
Keep going though, this is quite compelling in a surreal way.
Not sure humans have ever been consciously “environmentally minded”
In the archaic past, our collective “footprint” was too small to “trample all the plants along our way” but I’m not sure hunter-gatherers “watched their steps” all that carefully
to become true stewards of our biosphere would probably be to develop a whole brand new skill & ability
claiming that we can find the true way back in the stone age may be deeply misleading
rather, humans have never ever been (or had to be) truly environmentally conscious… we have to now because only now are we capable of collectively affecting our environment so thoroughly
Isn’t it? One of the wonders of the internet age …
So an article in UVA Magazine and a link to an outline of a chapter in an AP World History textbook are more scholarly than original research papers in academic journals?
Again, the deforestation that you cited was in Upper Mesopotamia, and a severe drought like the ones that occurred at 2200 and 3200 BC is equally likely to result in the death of trees. The bottom line is that you’re ignoring what’s right in front of your eyes …
Genesis 1-11 was not the first thing written in the Bible, despite the fact that it comes first. Biblical scholars have long hypothesized that it was composed during the Babylonian Exile. The myth of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta is the closest ANE parallel to the story of Babel. The myth was composed during the time of Shulgi of Ur, who completed the Great Ziggurat of Ur begun by his father. Nabonidus was busy restoring the same ziggurat while the remnant of Israel was in Babylon. To me, this seems like more circumstantial evidence that the story of the Tower of Babel was composed during the exile as a polemic against Neo-Babylonian culture and royal ideology. Your mileage may vary.
Few things i consider when thinking about this prehistory storytelling. It’s believed that Moses wrote these through divine inspiration and from the stories orally handed down until they begin to be wrote down. The story in question is genesis 11:1-9.
It mentions that all the people of the world spoke one language. Their understanding of the world was not like ours. When we think of the whole world we see this image from space of earth that is very recent. They did not have that image or understanding of the world. Even in the first century that is not the understanding Paul had of the whole world. Paul believed that the apostles succeeded in preaching the gospel to the whole world. The Torah in general, even when referring to the whole world, and humanity as a whole, has consistently held its magnifying glass over a small amount of people. So I believe that this whole world was primarily from the perspective of the Semitic tribes point it view in a specific region.
It states that they settled in a land and that they made bricks and mortar. Early people used all kinds of things for fire from mushrooms to plants. The size is not literal. For one God does not live in space. He’s not actually living on top of clouds or on top of a dome. This was the analogy they understood. So the issue was not that humanity was actually going to build something so large it reached the heavens and allowed us to possibly overthrow God and his kingdom. We fly spaceships after all and we have not hit some flying kingdom or slipped through a worm hole into a another dimension. So just like eating from the tree, it’s not the action itself that’s necessarily evil but the heart intention. The story points towards a concept that the people was doing the opposite of what god earlier.
Genesis 1:28 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky.”
Instead they turned their focus towards the notion that they should not subdue the earth and multiply but focus on subduing the heavens. Which they never could.
It never says what size they got to. Even the largest buildings we have now starts off at a much smaller foundation. They could not have been to deep into it. There is no reason to believe that the place was at its peak reaching hundreds of feet. Whatever they were doing could just as well been in its earliest stages.
So with all of that said what makes the most sense to me is to realize this is not a story about the entire globes human species all congregating into one large city and nearly completed with building a several mile high and wide tower that wood result in humanity spilling out into a floating kingdom and overthrowing God. It’s a ahistorical tale ( fiction and truth) is lots of ancient Semitic people deciding in their heart that they could subdue the heavens and so God somehow caused them to break up and head to other parts of the region and go back to focused on the earth and probably never made it very far into their plans.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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