BABEL was the native name of the city called Babylon by the Greeks. It means “gate of god,” or “gate of the gods,” and was the Semitic translation of the original Accadian designation Ca-dimirra. According to Gen. xi. 1-9, mankind, after the deluge, travelled from the mountain of the East (or Elwand), where the ark had rested, and settled in Shinar (Sumir, or the north-west of Chaldea). Here they attempted to build â city and a tower whose top might reach unto heaven, but were miraculously prevented by their language being confounded. In this way the diversity of human speech was accounted for; and an etymology was found for the name of Babylon in the Hebrew verb balbel, “ to confound.” According to Alexander Polyhistor (frg. 10) and Abydenus (frgs. 5 and 6), the tower was overthrown by the winds. The native version of the story has recently been discovered among the cuneiform tablets in the British Museum. It is fuller and more complete than the account in Genesis, and formed part of a collection of Babylonian legends older, probably, than 2000 b.c. We learn from it that the tower was erected under the supervision of a semi-divine being called Etanna. The tower has been identified with the temple or tomb of Belus, which Strabo stated with some exaggeration to have been a stade (606 feet) high, but without sufficient reason. It is most probably represented by the modern Sirs Nimrud, the ruined remains of the a Temple of the Seven Lights of the Earth,” at Borsippa, a suburb of Babylon, which was dedicated to Nebo. The temple had been begun by “a former king,” and built to the height of 42 cubits, but it lay an uncompleted ruin for many centuries, and was not finished till the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. Dr Schrader believes that the state of wreck in ...

the tower and city founded by the descendants of Noah in the plain of Shinar. The different tribes descended from Noah were here collected, and from this point were dispersed, through the confusion of their language. The time when this tower was built is differently stated in the Hebrew and Samaritan chronologies. The former fixes it in the year 101 after the flood, which Mr. Faber thinks encumbered with insuperable difficulties. This writer then goes on to show, that the chronology of the Samaritan Pentateuch reconciles every date, and surmounts every difficulty. It represents Shem as dying nearly a century and a half before the death of Peleg, instead of more than that number of years afterward, and almost four centuries and a half before the death of Abraham; whom, in accordance with the history, it makes to survive his father Terah precisely a hundred years. It removes the difficulties with which the Hebrew chronology invests the whole history, by giving time, while it allows the dispersion to have taken place in the latter part of Peleg’s life, for the thirteen sons of his younger brother Joktan to have become heads of families; for Noah and his sons to have died, as it is proved they must have done, prior to the emigration from Armenia; for Nimrod, instead of being a boy, to have been of an age suitable to his exploits, and to have acquired the sovereign command, not, in the face of all probability, while the four great patriarchs were living, but after their decease; and for the families of mankind to have multiplied sufficiently to undertake the stupendous work of the tower. It explains also the silence respecting Shem in the history of Abraham, by making the former die in Armenia four hundred and forty years before the latter was born, instead of surviving ...