One of the most puzzling stories from the Book of Genesis involves the Tower of Babel. Surely a structure of such impressive dimensions should have been identified by archaeologists after two hundred years of excavations in Mesopotamia, Sadly, this "awe-inspiring monument to Man's self-aggrandizement" has never been unearthed and, as a result, the Tower itself makes us wonder what the significance of the story of the Tower of Babel is. .
Genesis 11: 1-9, short paragraph with only nine verses is the only source of the Bible story. "There was a time when all the world spoke a single language and used the same worlds", "Let us build our selves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and make a name for ourselves, or we shall be dispersed over the face of the earth", and "The LORD came down to see the city and tower which they had build, and he said "Here they are, one people with a single language, and now they have started to do this; from now on nothing they have a mind to do will be beyond their reach. Come, let us go down there and confuse their language, so that they will not understand what they say to one another." So the LORD dispersed them from where all over the earth, and they left off building the city." These verses raise questions of why this is story in the book Genesis, and what it is really about.
Of course, we all want to know why and how we all came to be speaking different languages. If Noah and his sons repopulated the world, shouldn't we all speak their language? The story of Babel is there to explain to a primitive society how so many different languages .
developed in so short a time. What could be the cause of one united group of people been divided to several?.
Let us look some of the historical background of the story. The choice of the name "Babel" is not an accident. It refers to the Old Babylon which "represented everything that was wrong with humanity" .
