Transcription
[Music] it's taken quite a bit to get out here to eridoo. Scholars say that the Tower of Babel was here. We have here a great example of a ziggurat in Mesopotamia. So behind me here in Babylon is the place where the ziggurat of Babylon stood. Oh, [Music] Omar, I found the Tower of Babel. [Music] I mean, one thing that just is always impressive to me is just look at how flat the area is out in this huge valley, river valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates. One of the problems in this area is that what do you build with? You have all this alluvial soil, meaning soil that's been washed down from these rivers, which means there's really not stone in it. We're also too low. It's too hot here for forests. They figured out how to make clay bricks and then to fire them in a kiln to make them hard like stone, and then this is what they used to do their building. Actually, it works very nicely because they can make everything uniform and then harden it like rock, and then they can build these amazing tower temples in their cities.
In Genesis chapter 11, the people say, "Let us build ourselves a city with a tower." The name of the city was called Babel. The note for Babel at the bottom of the page says that is Babylon. This is because Babylon is the later Greek form of the older name Babel. Uh, the city of Babylon is the city of Babel in the Bible. This is why the Jewish historian Josephus wrote, "The place wherein they built the Tower is now called Babylon." We know that the Tower of Babel was built here in this city because this is Babel, this is Babylon, and so the Tower of Babel is synonymous with the Tower of Babylon. You can call it either one. Behind me is the site where the ziggurat, that is the Tower Temple of Babylon, stood. You can hardly see anything here today. So, in order to better understand what a ziggurat looks like, we're going to go to Ur. This is the best preserved ziggurat in Mesopotamia. So, not only because it was found the best preserved, but also because a lot of restoration work has been done here. So here I can show you what a ziggurat looks like. It's very obvious since the most famous architecture from Mesopotamia are these ziggurats, these tower temples, that when we're reading in Genesis chapter 11 about the Tower of Babel, that it's talking about one of these tower temples.
So there are three main parts to a ziggurat. There is the house on the top, there is the tower itself, and then there's the stairway that attaches the ground to the house on top. And so the house on top is the temple building itself. The people believed that the god lived in the house on top of the ziggurat. The tower is the foundation for that house, and so that's why a ziggurat is a tower temple. The third part of a ziggurat is the stairway that was the link between man and God. The tower itself is made up of these different steps. So each step is a platform that's made of mud brick, and then each successive platform gets smaller and smaller as you go up. So I'm up at the upper step here on the ziggurat of Ur. There's three different steps, three of these platforms built on top of each other, and then the house, the temple building itself on top. I'm up on the crown of the ziggurat, and this is where the house would have been.
One of the main archaeologists that excavated the Ur ziggurat was Leonard Wooley. In his book, *Ur of the Chaldees*, he wrote, "In every important city there was at least one such tower crowned by a sanctuary. Of them all, the biggest and most famous was the ziggurat of Babylon, now entirely destroyed, but its ground plan shows that it was on a larger scale of the ziggurat at Ur." The excavator and discoverer of the ground plan of the ziggurat of Babylon was the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey. So behind me here is the place where the ziggurat of Babylon stood. This ziggurat was called Etemenanki, which means "the house of the foundation of heaven and earth." Beginning in 1908, Koldewey unearthed the foundation of the Tower of Babylon. From what once was a towering ziggurat, only the lowliest portions of the base remained after its destruction by the Persian army, and where afterwards for thousands of years, the local people took the valuable fired bricks for their own building projects. All we have really from the ziggurat that stood here is the footprint of where it was.
The dimensions of the Babylon ziggurat had been written and preserved on an ancient tablet, with each side of the base of the foundation being 90 meters long. In his excavation report, Koldewey wrote that from the ruins themselves, "the side length of the ziggurat show 90 meters." When Koldewey came here and excavated here in the early 1900s, he confirmed those measurements as accurate. The same tablet says the height of the tower was 90 meters, nearly 3,300 feet. That was confirmed, and there's no reason then to think that the records aren't also accurate on how tall it was. This ziggurat was measured by Wooley at 70 feet high. In comparison, the ziggurat in Babylon was 300 feet high. And so the staircase that you see going up here would have been over four times higher in Babylon than it is here at the ziggurat at Ur. This means that the priests at Babylon had to be in four times better shape than the priests here at Ur. And this trench next to me, Koldewey excavated the staircase that came off of the front of the ziggurat. Anywhere that you would have been here in the city of Babylon, you would have seen the ziggurat, and you would have seen this staircase that was going 300 feet up into the sky. And so this was not just the ziggurat of a city, this was the ziggurat of an empire. And so now it's ironic that this, uh, most famous, this biggest ziggurat from Mesopotamia in ancient times, now has been reduced to a pile of mud. To get onto the mound of the ziggurat ruins, I had to first get through this jungle of brush.
[Music]
This is the logical place where the Tower of Babel once stood. Koldewey wrote in his report that the tower he had excavated was the one the Jews of the Old Testament regarded as the essence of human presumption. And why? In his book, Wooley wrote that in Hebrew tradition, the ziggurat of Babylon is the Tower of Babel. The Wycliffe Bible Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology puts it this way: "The Tower of Babel, Genesis 11, is surely to be associated with the ziggurat of Babylon." There is no question that this is where the ziggurat of Babylon stood, the Tower of Babylon. And so it was destroyed and rebuilt many times. We have in the ancient Babylonian records, we have Hammurabi, uh, who ruled this city back in the, uh, 18th century BC. He rebuilt the ziggurat. Then it was destroyed by Sennacherib. It was rebuilt by Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar. Then it was destroyed again by the King of Persia, Xerxes. And so we have this common phenomenon here in archaeology where the sacred place, the sacred ground, remains the same, and the temples that were destroyed and then rebuilt were rebuilt one on top of another over time, over thousands of years. This is the common phenomenon that we have in all these archaeological sites where the temple stays the same, it stays in the same place, and if it's destroyed, it's rebuilt in the same spot. So that is why this is the logical place for the original building that was built here, the Tower of Babel, where God came down because of the rebellion of the people and scattered the people and gave them different languages and confusion. To learn more about evidence supporting the Bible, you can order a copy of my book, *Where God Came Down: The Archaeological Evidence*. Just click the link in the description below this video.
It's taken quite a bit to get out here to Eridu. My goodness, it's, it's out in the middle of nowhere. It's been one of the candidates. A few scholars say that the Tower of Babel was here. Raining a lot here in Iraq, and so we had to walk a long ways through the mud to get here. And so this has been, this has been excavated in the past. The earliest levels here are very old. They, they've been dated by the archaeologists to 4,500 BC. And so what we're looking at here is on the mound itself, and this is where the ziggurat of Eridu stood. Now, some, a few scholars have said that this is where we should look for the Tower of Babel. That's one of the reasons I wanted to come out here was because of those claims. However, uh, in the Bible, it doesn't say that the Tower of Babel is the Tower of Eridu. It says that it's the Tower of Babel, and Babel is the city of Babylon. Even if this city had a different name in ancient times, even if that name was, uh, Babel, meaning the Gate of God, the city that the Bible is talking about in Genesis 11 is definitely the city that becomes known later as Babylon. And so that's where we should look for the Tower of Babel. But this is very interesting. This is a very old ziggurat and a very, very old city.
So another thing that people get confused about with the city of Babylon is how old it is. And the reason is that they have not been able to excavate as deeply in this site as they have in other sites. So, for example, at the city of Ur, the river has moved far away from the site, from Ur. It's 10 miles to the west from the site, and so this allowed, uh, excavations to go very deep. The Euphrates River still passes right by this site, and over the years, dams have been put into the river to raise, on purpose, the water table for agricultural reasons. In fact, we can see that right here because this mound is surrounded by water. Anytime in a site, you have admixture of material, you have some material from those earlier levels represented in the upper levels, and you have that here. So you have material coming from the site that shows its great antiquity. In his excavation report, Koldewey wrote, "The existence of Babylon in prehistoric times before the fifth millennium is proved by flint and other stone implements. It is impossible to carry excavations down to that depth owing to the rise in water level." Those earlier layers of the city are down there, it's just that they're underwater, they can't be dug. And so this is a city of great antiquity. The material culture here goes back to that time period.
We should also keep in mind that Genesis 11 says that after he confused their language, the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city called Babel. How long the city was abandoned for is not known. So the city of Babylon is spoken of throughout scripture, from the Book of Genesis, the first book, to the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible. And so the history of Babylon is connected all the way through scripture. In Genesis 11:4, the people said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves." Later in history, Daniel chapter 4 says King Nebuchadnezzar was walking on the roof of the Royal Palace of Babylon. He said, "Is not this the great Babylon I have built by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?" Of his view of the city, what would have stood out the most would have been the tower he had built with a temple on top of it. In the last book in the Bible, the Book of Revelation, the city of Babylon the Great is used symbolically of the abominations of the earth, where like a tower, her sins are piled up to heaven. God's judgment is then declared: "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great." In Revelation, Babylon is the city that is used symbolically for wickedness and rebellion against God, and that is connected all the way back through its history, all the way back to the Tower of Babel.
The famous 300-foot ziggurat of Babylon is reduced to this. Even though it, it's not much to look at as far as looking having magnificent ruins or something like that, it is quite staggering to look at to understand the judgment of God. This is the magnificent ziggurat of, of history and antiquity. This is the one that was so impressive, and isn't it ironic that through God's judgment, it has literally been brought down to nothing? And so this is what a ziggurat is. Of course, this is, it's a symbol of man thinking that he can work himself into favor and relationship with God. A ziggurat gets three things wrong. It gets wrong who God is, who man is, and the link between the two, how the two can be connected. And so in this concept of things, um, there's not very much separation between the god that's being worshiped and the people themselves. It brings God down and it elevates man up. And so in this concept, you can actually make a stairway to heaven. You can actually make a stairway that leads up to the place where the god that's being worshiped dwells. Anybody that comes from a biblical worldview looks at this and it's absurd. The biblical account teaches us that God is, uh, holy, that God is righteous, that man is fallen and sinful, and so the separation between man and God is, is this huge void that can't be crossed. There's nothing that man can do to cross that void of separation between man and God. If it's going to be crossed, then it's going to be the work of God that accomplishes that. In order to be with God, God has to come down and do the work. And so the stairs, the, the way that we can be in relationship with God is Christ himself. And Christ came down, he did the work on the cross that is for the forgiveness of sin, which separates man from God, so that we can approach God and be in relationship with him. And so the staircase in the gospel, in the Bible, is Jesus.
Robert Koldewey died in 1925. Fittingly, his friends and colleagues marked his grave by erecting a stone model representing his discovery of the Tower of Babel. My book can be ordered through the link in the description. Please consider subscribing. And to learn more about the archaeology of Babylon, watch this video.