Not enough evidence for Tower of Babel... yet

I like David Rohl. His research challenges traditional timelines for current Egyptian chronology. He makes me think. His books and research were heavily resourced in the documentary Patterns of Evidence, which I thought was well done.

I’m going through this UKTV series Secrets of the Bible and I just finished the episode on the Tower of Babel and remain unconvinced that we’ve found the Tower of Babel.

The essence of the film is this:

• We don’t have much information in the Bible about the Tower of Babel but it was likely built by Nimrod.
• Josephus, in his Antiquities, says that Nimrod built the Tower as a safehaven in case God decided to flood the world again.
• Rohl looked in the Sumerian King’s List and found a king by the name of Enmerkar who fit the time and place of Nimrod. The name was different and that was a problem. First, Nimrod is described as a hunter in the Bible. Kar is the Sumerian word for hunter. In the written Hebrew language only consonants are used. If you take away the vowels in Enmer and in Nimrod you are left with NMR in both. In Nimrod though there is the consonant “D” which is left. In Hebrew this consonant add the meaning of rebelling against God. Rohl thinks these two characters are the same person.
• When looking for the Tower of Babel, we can’t look at the historical city of Babylon because it is too late for when the Tower of Babel should have been built. In Sumerian, the name for Babylon is Nunki. In studying Sumerian scripts, Rohl found that there was another large city named Nunki that was much older than Babylon. This city is known as Eridu. In Eridu, they have found a ziggurat structure that appears to have been abandoned before it was complete- which is what we would expect fro the Biblical story.
• What about the multiplication of languages and the great migration of people? Rohl thinks there is strong evidence that people from Sumeria migrated to Egypt. We find Lapiz Lazuli from Afghanistan in Ancient Egypt. He makes the case that Egyptians could be descendants of the blending of African people with Sumerian people.

It’s an interesting theory but the documentary didn’t show any excavations from the city of Eridu, which I would have liked to see.

Another recent claim about the Tower of Babel has come from Dr. Andrew George, a professor of Babylonian at the University of London who recently deciphered a stone tablet with a drawing of a tower and the image of Nebuchadnezzar II, who he thinks built the Tower. I agree with most Biblical scholars that while interesting, Babylon was too late in history for where the Bible puts this story.