The Life of Nimrod - III

The Dispersion from Babel

In our last episode Nimrod and his father Cush had built their first kingdom. Those were the four cities, including Babel on the Upper Tigris River Valley, east of the site where the Ark had landed on Karaca Dag, and the altar where Yahweh was worshipped. The Kingdom of Babel lasted for about 43 years, from the founding of the Tower-Temple to the Dispersion. Cush reigned from 2233 to 2191 BC.

While the word Babylon means “gateway of the god,” and the Hebrew word “babel” means confusion, there is some evidence that the city originally had a different name. It was named “Kish” or Cush after its founder. Thus, Cush himself began a tradition of men who built doomed cities named after themselves. (In another post, I will detail several examples of the curse of naming a city after oneself, as evidence of the deadly sin of hubris.)

The name Kish was repeated by later cultures in lower Mesopotamia as well as the Hittites and Tabalians in Cilicia. The Sumerian word for king is also found in several languages as the word Sar. One of the later kings of Akkad was named Shar-Kali-Sharri, which means “King of All Kings.”

However, the Sumerian “sar” is not the root of the later Russian word, Tsar, which is believed to be a contraction of the name Caesar, as is the German Kaiser.

The people of the Ancient Near East used the title Kish-shara, or Shari-Kush, to mean “King of the Universe.” 1,500 years after Babel was founded, the Assyrian Emperor, Ashurbanipal, was very offended when a Cimmerian king presumed to use the title Shar-Kussara.

According to an Inca record called The Quito Manuscript by Montesinos, Noah came down to Babel and preached to the people to disperse to their inherited allotments of territory 150 years after the Flood, which was 2197 BC. The Hindus and the Chinese also counted their nations from the year 2197 BC, which was 150 years after the Flood ended, and five or six years before the Dispersion. If their records are accurate to the year, then it might appear that the people were commanded by Noah to leave Babel about five years before the Dispersion, but they did not go.

While Genesis relates the Babel account, it only tells of the confusion of tongues and dispersion of the people. There are five ancient extra-biblical traditions that the confusion of tongues was accompanied by earthquakes and a burning wind that forced the people to abandon the Tower of Babel.

1. Book of Jubilees (circa 160–100 BCE):

The Book of Jubilees, an ancient Jewish text, explicitly states that after God confounded the languages, he "sent a mighty wind against the tower and overthrew it upon the earth" (Jubilees 10:26). This is the earliest known written source attributing the destruction of the tower to a mighty wind.

2. Abydenus (c. 200 BCE–200 CE):

Abydenus, a Greco-Babylonian historian, preserved in fragments quoted by Eusebius, wrote that when the builders of the tower (sometimes described as giants) neared the heavens, "the winds came to the help of the gods, and overthrew their structure upon them, the ruins of which were called Babylon". This motif of the wind as a divine agent of destruction is echoed in several later sources.

3. Babylonian and Mesopotamian Inscriptions:

Nebuchadnezzar II, in inscriptions regarding the ziggurat at Borsippa (often associated with the Tower of Babel), stated: "Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words. Since that time earthquakes and lightning had dispersed its sun-dried clay; the bricks of the casing had split, and the earth of the interior had been scattered in heaps". This links the ruin of the ancient tower to both earthquakes and lightning, though it is presented as a historical observation rather than a direct divine intervention.

4. Pompeius Trogus

While not mentioning the Tower of Babel, Pomeius Trogus relates the history of the Canaanite founders of Carthage. He said that their original homeland suffered an earthquake, after which they left and came to the Syrian lake, where they settled. They then moved to the Sea and built the city of Sidon. Centuries late,r after Sidon was defeated in battle, the refugees founded the city of Tyre on an island off the coast in order to avoid being conquered from the land a second time.

5. Islamic and Other Traditions:

Islamic tradition also sometimes references a mighty wind associated with the confusion of tongues at the site of Babylon, though these accounts are generally later and draw from Jewish apocryphal sources.

The Karaca Dag Eruption

While it is impossible at this time to be absolutely certain of the location of Babel, the site that the author has identified suffered a near miss from a volcanic eruption shortly after the Flood.

On the eastern flank of the shield volcano, Karaca Dag, is a recent volcanic vent with a cone and a lava field downstream. The shape of the cone indicates that this volcano erupted explosively, and then a large lava field flowed toward the site we have tentatively identified as Babel, about five miles north of the modern village of Cinar (Shinar).

If God wished to motivate the people to leave Babel, it seems that an explosive volcanic eruption, nearby but not close enough to kill everyone, did the trick. Thus the Dispersion from Babel was remembered as the confusion of tongues, as well as an earthquake and a burning wind that forced them to stop building the city and tower of Babel.

Nimrod’s Kingdom in Purple, Lava Flow in Red