Hebrew Myths (19 page)

5
. Although eunuchs were forbidden membership in God’s congregation (
Deuteronomy
XXIII. 1), it was an early Israelite battle custom to castrate uncircumcised enemies, as it was in the Egyptian wars of the fourteenth to the thirteenth centuries
B.C.
against the Sea Peoples. According to 1
Samuel
XVIII. 25–27, David pays King Saul two hundred Philistine foreskins as a bride-price for the Princess Michal. The same custom, originally perhaps a magical means of warding off a dead man’s ghostly vengeance, survives today among the Arabs.

6
. Japheth’s sons are listed in
Genesis
X. 2 as Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Meshech and Tiras. Gomer is now generally identified with the Cimmerians of Anatolia; Magog, with the Armenian kingdom of Gog (
Ezekiel
XXXVIII. 1 ff) mentioned in the fourteenth-century
B.C.
Tell Amarna letters; Madai, with Media; Javan, with Ionia—his sons, recorded in
Genesis
X. 5, are Elisha, the Alashya of Cyprus; Kittim, another Cypriot people; Tarshish, the Tartessians of Southern Spain; and Dodanim, an error for Rodanim, the Rhodians. Tubal represents the Tibareni of Anatolia (see 19.
2
); Meshech, their neighbours, the Moschians; Tiras, a people mentioned in an Egyptian document of the thirteenth century
B.C.
, as Tursha, members of a sea-confederacy—perhaps the piratical Tyrsenians, some of whom held the Aegean islands Lemnos and Imbros as late as the sixth century
B.C.
, while others emigrated to Italy and became the Etruscans.

(
a
) Noah’s descendants journeyed together from country to country, slowly moving eastward. They came upon a plain in Shinear, and said: ‘Come, let us bake bricks; we will build ourselves a city, and a tower reaching to Heaven, and become one nation, lest we be scattered over the earth.’ At once they began work, using bitumen for mortar to seal the courses of brick. God watched them, and thought: ‘While they continue as one people, speaking one tongue, whatever they have in mind will be accomplished… Let us now confuse their language, and provoke misunderstandings between them.’ This He did, and presently work on the tower ceased, and the builders dispersed in all directions. Its ruins were called Babel, because God
confused
the tongues of mankind, and divided a single nation into seventy.
²²⁴

(
b
) Others say that Nimrod, a famous hunter in God’s service, raised the Tower of Babel; but that it was not his first foundation. Having won dominion over all Noah’s descendants, he had already built a fortress upon a round rock, setting a great throne of cedar-wood upon it to support a second great throne, made of iron; this, in turn, supported a great copper throne, with a silver throne above the copper, and a golden throne above the silver. At the summit of this pyramid, Nimrod placed a gigantic gem from which, sitting in divine state, he exacted universal homage.
²²⁵

(
c
) Nimrod’s father was Cush, Ham’s son by the wife of his old age. Ham doted on Cush, and secretly gave him the garments of skin which God had made for Adam and Eve, and which Shem should have inherited from Noah, but that Ham stole them. Cush kept the garments well hidden, and bequeathed them to Nimrod. When, at the age of twenty, Nimrod first wore these holy relics, he became exceedingly strong; and God granted him courage and skill in the chase. After killing his quarry, he never failed to raise an altar and offer God sacrifices.

(
d
) Twenty years passed, and a war broke out between the Sons of Ham and the Sons of Japheth, their chief enemies. Despite an
early defeat, Nimrod gathered together four hundred and sixty Sons of Ham and eighty chosen mercenaries from the Sons of Shem. With this army he routed the Sons of Japheth, and returned victorious. The Sons of Ham thereupon crowned him King, and he appointed governors and judges over his entire kingdom, choosing Terah the son of Nahor to command the army. Nimrod’s Councillors advised him to build a capital in the Eastern plain. He did so, calling the city Shinear because, he said, ‘God has
shattered
my enemies.’ Presently he also overcame the Sons of Shem. They brought him tribute, paid homage, and came to live at Shinear, side by side with the Sons of Ham and Japheth, all continuing to speak the Hebrew tongue.

(
e
) In his pride, Nimrod did more evil than any man since the Deluge, raising idols of stone and wood, which the whole world must worship; his son Mardon proved to be yet worse—hence the proverb ‘Evil parents, evil child.’ Nimrod and his people raised the Tower of Babel in rebellion against God; for he said: ‘I will be revenged on Him for the drowning of my ancestors. Should He send another flood, my tower will rise even above Ararat, and keep me safe.’ They planned to assault Heaven by means of the Tower, destroy God, and set up idols in His stead.
²²⁶

(
f
) Soon the Tower had risen seventy miles high, with seven stairways on its eastern side, by which hod-carriers climbed to the summit; and seven on the western, by which they descended. Abram, Terah’s son, viewed this work and cursed the builders in God’s name: for should a brick drop from a man’s hand and break, all bewailed its loss; but should a man himself fall and die, his neighbours never so much as turned their heads. When Nimrod’s men shot arrows into Heaven, God’s angels caught every one and, to deceive them, threw it back dripping blood. The archers cried: ‘Now we have killed all Heaven’s inhabitants!’
²²⁷

(
g
) God then spoke to the seventy angels nearest His throne, saying: ‘Let us go down again and confuse their language, making seventy tongues of one!’ And so He did, for immediately the builders became embroiled in misunderstandings. If a mason told a hod-carrier ‘Give me mortar!’, the carrier would hand him a brick instead, with which the mason would angrily kill the hod-carrier. Many were the murders done in the Tower; and on the ground also, because of this confusion; until at last work slowed to a standstill.

As for the Tower: Earth swallowed a third part; fire from Heaven destroyed another third; the remainder stands to this very day—still so tall that from its summit the distant groves of Jericho appear
like a swarm of locusts; and the thin air robs men of their wits. Yet the Tower seems less tall than it is, because of an exceedingly wide base.
²²⁸

(
h
) Every family now spoke its own language, chose its own country, founded its own cities, became a nation, and acknowledged no universal ruler. God appointed seventy angels to guard these separate nations; but He said also: ‘Over Abram’s Children I will Myself watch, and they shall stay true to the Hebrew tongue.’
²²⁹

(
i
) Nevertheless, Nimrod continued to rule from Shinear, and built more cities; namely Erech, Akkad and Calne, which he filled with inhabitants, reigning over them in majesty, and taking the title of ‘Amraphel’.
²³⁰

(
j
) At last Jacob’s son Esau met Nimrod by chance while both were out hunting, killed him, and despoiled him of the holy garments. Esau was then likewise greatly strengthened, until Jacob stole them from his tent; saying: ‘My brother does not deserve such a blessing!’, he dug a hole and buried them.
²³¹

***

1
. This twelfth-century Jewish version of the ancient Tower of Babel myth closely resembles that given by the fifth-century Christian writer Orosius of Tarragona in his
Seven Books Against the Pagans
. Orosius, who seems to have drawn—though at second or third hand—from Jewish Tannaitic sources, describes the Tower as five and a half miles high, ten miles in circumference, with a hundred brazen gates and four hundred and eighty storeys. He reports that Nimrod’s grandson Ninus built the city of Nineveh—an honour which
Genesis
X. 11 gives to Asshur.

2
. Haupt identifies Nimrod son of Cush, also called Nebrod, or Nebron, with Nazimarattas, one of the non-Semitic (but also non-Indo-European) Cassite Kings of Babylon. Coming down from Cush (Kashshu) now Kurdistan, the mountainous region which separated Assyria from Media, they had overwhelmed the Amorite dynasty of Babylon, and ruled from the sixteenth century
B.C.
to the twelfth. Their national god was called Kashshu, and their kings could therefore be described as ‘Sons of Cush’. Another Cassite god was Murudash, identified with Ninurta, a name from which
Nimrod may have been evolved. Like all his predecessors and successors, Nimrod will have been ‘a mighty hunter’ in so far as he was depicted on monuments killing lions, bulls and serpents—a symbolic act suggesting a coronation ritual. This myth may preserve the tradition of Nazimarattas’s early glory—before he was humbled by Adadnirari I, a fourteenth-century king of Assyria. It is, however, confused by the existence of a second Cush—namely the Ethiopian kingdom centred on Meroe, and referred to in
Isaiah
XVIII. 1, which had ethnic connexions with Southern Arabia. The Cush mentioned in
Genesis
X. 8, which makes Nimrod a ‘son of Cush’, is Cassite; the one mentioned in the preceding verse fathered several South Arabian peoples and must therefore be the second Cush.

3
. Nimrod’s Hebraicized name (from the verb
marod
, ‘to rebel’) confirms his evil reputation. According to the seventh-century
A.D.
Chronicon Paschale
, Persians called the constellation Orion ‘Nimrod’; thus linking him with the rebel angel Shemhazai (see 18.
f
), and with the Greek hero Orion, also ‘a mighty hunter’ who offended his god.

4
. The Nimrod tradition has, however, become attached to the myth of Samael’s rebellion against El (see 13.
b. c.
), and the Hittite myth of Kumarbi’s towering stone giant Ullikummi from whose head he intended to launch an attack on the seventy gods of Heaven (see 8.
3
). A Greek myth, evidently drawn from the same source, tells how the gigantic Aloeids piled Mount Pelion upon Mount Ossa as a means of attacking Zeus’s Olympian Heaven.

5
. In
Genesis
XIV. 19 Amraphel is called the King of Shinear; in the Targum, King of Babylon; and in Josephus’s
Antiquities
, ‘Amara Psides, King of Shinar’. He has been confidently identified with Hammurabi, King of Babylon (1728–1686
B.C.
), the code-maker and city-builder, though Shinar is now thought to be the Akkadian Shankhar, a country lying to the north-west of Babylon.

6
. These early Hebrew traditions were reinforced and enlarged when King Nebuchadrezzar II (604–562
B.C.
), another great administrator who forcibly populated the cities he built, carried off large numbers of Judaeans to exile in Babylon. King Sargon II of Assyria (721–705
B.C.
) had already deported all but a few of the Northern Israelites; and Nebuchadrezzar needed the Judaeans to help him repair the shameful damage done at Babylon by Sennacherib in 689
B.C.
, when he plundered and burned the enormous terrace-temples known as
ziggurats
.

7
. For a long time the lofty tower of
Birs Nimrud
was believed to be the Tower of Babel. With the decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions, it has, however, been established that
Birs Nimrud
was the tower of the city of Borsippa; and agreed that the Tower of Babel must have been located within the city of Babel (or Babylon) herself. This huge tower, called in Sumerian
Etemenenanki
(‘House of the Foundation of Heaven and
Earth’) stood in the central temple-complex called
Esagila
or ‘House that Lifts Up the Head’.

The location of Babylon had been known before the German Oriental Society excavated it in 1899–1918, because the mound which marked its site near modern Hillah was called
Bābil
by the Arabs. This name preserved the old Akkadian form of the city’s name,
Bab-Ili
or ‘Gate of God’. The Biblical interpretation of Babel, as deriving from the Hebrew
balal
, ‘to confuse’, is an early and classic example of popular etymology.

8
. Literal belief in the ‘confusion of tongues’ myth has been encouraged by the discovery at Borsippa of another Nebuchadrezzar II inscription. It records that the local ziggurat, long fallen into disrepair, had never been completed by its original architect; the God Marduk, therefore, persuaded his servant the King to perfect it. ‘Mardon’, the name of Nimrod’s son, also means ‘rebel’, but may well be a cacophemism for ‘Marduk’.

Though the Judaeans transported to Babylon by Nebuchadrezzar will have been astonished at the number of different dialects spoken by their fellow-deportees, God’s confusion of tongues seems to be a far more ancient tradition—Moses of Chorene records it in his
Armenian History
, when discussing Xisuthros and the ark (see 20.
5
).

9
. St Jerome, like Orosius, identifies the Tower of Babel with Babylon itself—the outer walls of which, according to Herodotus, measured over fifty-five miles. The circumference of the Royal City enclosed by it was, however, about seven miles (not much less than the Tower’s), and its inner walls stood over a hundred yards high.

10. Nebuchadrezzar’s corvées, cruelly enforced, may account for the graphic description of how workmen went up and down the Tower stairs, and of what happened when a brick was dropped. His royal palaces, also, were ‘adorned with gold, silver and precious stones, after being reared as high as the hills’—which may explain Nimrod’s extravagant throne-pyramid. Forty years later, King Darius the Persian (522–485
B.C.
) began the work of destruction so often prophesied by Isaiah and Jeremiah; his son Xerxes continued it. According to Arrian, Alexander the Great (366–323
B.C.
) thought seriously of restoring Babylon’s glory, but reckoned that it would take ten thousand men more than two months even to cart away the rubble. Meanwhile, the population had emigrated to Seleucia on the Tigris and, by Josephus’s time (end of first century
A.D.
), all the ziggurats had fallen into complete neglect.