Yeah, I know - contrary to what I said earlier, three out of the four of these appear to be round, and none are pyramidal, but bear in mind, these were not painted in the third millennium, BCE, but most during the European Renaissance. And as anyone who is familiar with M. C. Escher knows, his works (bottom right) can always be expected to exceed the ordinary.
    In a moment, we will examine the actual tower, but first, let’s finish the story - I can’t wait to see how it ends!

    Gen 11:5 “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
    11:6  “And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language, and this they begin to do: now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.
    11:7  “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
    11:8  “So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build that city.”

    Be that as it may, SOMEone built it, as Babylon was a major influence in Mesopotamia for thousands of more years.
    Why do you imagine this god was so concerned that these boys decided to play with their Bronze Age erector set? What possible harm could these kids, playing in the dirt, possibly do to this omnipotent god? And why did he have to “come down to see the city and the tower?” It’s beginning to look more and more like omniscience is not his strong suit.
    And then there’s, “now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.” So what? If my little boy had ever come down the sidewalk pulling His little red wagon filled with someone's discarded scrap auto parts, and headed for the back yard after informing me He was going to build a car, I would have smiled wistfully, knowing He was headed for disillusionment, but at the same time, I'd have been bursting with pride that despite the odds, He was willing to TRY such a project, that He was able to exercise His imagination to dream an impossible dream. Browning once wrote, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for?" I think Browning's referring to the proverbial carrot and stick.
    Regrettably, the god of the Bible doesn’t seem to care as much about his children as I do mine.
    Or could it be that a Man, or a group of Men, sitting around a campfire at night, musing over the fact that there seemed to be so many varieties of Humans and languages in their known world and speculating as to just how that might have come to be, reached the above conclusion and decided that their speculations must be fact.
    Pyramidal or round, one thing these towers have in common is that they are tiered - they begin large at the bottom and get progressively narrower as they rise. That’s a good thing, as it maintains the principle I mentioned earlier, of spreading the weight over the largest possible area (though a pyramid of the same height would have an even greater surface-to-ground ratio, and would spread the weight over an even larger area).
    So let’s imagine you’re an ancient Babylonian engineer - as I often do - and you want to build a tower to heaven that has a base much larger than the top layer of the tower. First, you would need to establish a ratio between the bottom layer and the top layer. Then, since it must be assumed you’ve never been there, you’ll just have to guesstimate how far heaven is from earth. Once you decide on an arbitrary height, you can use that figure, plus the ratio of top-to-base you earlier determined, and from that, you'll know exactly how large your base layer must be.
    So you break ground, and ten or fifteen years later, paying thousands of workmen to build bricks, dry them, bake them, carry them up the tower and lay them, you’re finally finished - the last brick is in place - and you’re all set to break out the champagne, except for one minor detail - you haven’t reached heaven!
    From this, it’s obvious that you must build a higher tower. The good news is that you can build onto the existing tower, but you have to build a new base, a much larger base, if you’re going to maintain the same top-to-base ratio as before. So you begin again, ultimately finishing with exactly the same results - no heaven. Does it take a god to make you quit? Really?
    I’d never make it as a god, I’m far too laid back. But building on that singular talent, I can lie on my back in the grass on a warm summer’s day and imagine what a god might be like. First of all - given the circumstances above - a real god would be totally confident in his omnipotence, and would feel no threat from the building of any such tower to heaven. “Boys will be boys,” he would chuckle. He’d sit there with his Lazy-boy cocked back and a steaming plate of nachos in his lap (with maybe a bit of cheese sauce dripping onto his white robe), in front of his big-screen - and I mean Biiig-screen! We’re talking CineMax on steroids! - he’d reach for the little cloud where he’d parked his icy can of Bud, and cackle his holy head off as he watched the idiots below trying to build the tower and passing out from oxygen deprivation as the tower rose ever higher, until they finally came to the realization that you simply can’t get there from here.
    Of course, Earth-bound Men wouldn't necessarily know that oxygen thinned the higher one goes, but an omniscient god would certainly be expected to possess such information.
    Returning to reality, as sadly we must from time to time, The New American Bible, in its footnotes to this chapter, confides:

    “This story, based on traditions about the temple towers or ziggurats of Babylonia, is used by the sacred writer primarily to illustrate man’s increasing wickedness, shown here in the presumptuous effort to create an urban culture apart from God. The secondary motive in this story is to present an imaginative origin of the diversity of languages among the various peoples inhabiting the earth, as well as an artificial explanation of the name, ‘Babylon.’” (emphasis, mine)

    “‘Babel’,” it continues, “is the Hebrew form of the name, ‘Babylon.’ The native name, Bab-i-li, means ‘Gate of the Gods;’ The Hebrew word, balil, ‘he confused,’ has a similar sound.” (Note in particular, for future reference, that the name of the tower is "Bab-el," as this suffix will increase in significance as we proceed.)

    Whoever the “J” Source was, He/They had been known throughout J’s contributions to the Old Testament, to seem to enjoy a good play on words, much as did Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. Of course Shakespeare never pretended He was telling you a true story.
    Of 11:4, New American explains the phrase, “tower with its top in the sky” as a “direct reference to the chief ziggurat of Babylon, the E-sag-ila, signifying ‘the house that raises high it’s head’”. And further informs us that, “Babylonian ziggurats were the earliest skyscrapers.”
    Far be it from me to disagree with the New American, or any other Bible, but the ziggurat at Babylon, E-sag-ila, dedicated to the god, Marduk, though started centuries earlier, saw the majority of the work done on the temple during the 6th century, BCE, far closer to the Hebrew “Babylonian Captivity,” (during which, most of the Penteteuch was written) than to Abram/Abraham’s era of sixteen or seventeen centuries earlier, if He ever existed at all.
    Far more likely, the ziggurat in question would have been the great ziggurat at Ur, dedicated to Nanna, the Moon diety of Sumerian mythology theology, from which city we will see, at the end of this chapter, Abram/Abraham allegedly migrated.
    The Great Ziggurat of Ur was built in 2100 BCE, reached a height of 70 feet and was three stories high - around 600 BCE (again, during the "Babylonian Captivity"), the temple was rebuilt and increased to a height of possibly seven stories. I say possibly, because much of the monument was later destroyed (see below) and only recently, partially restored and returned to the custody of the Iraqi government by the occupying United States military forces.