Man's Feat at the Tower of Babel

Written by John Abram

“You said in your heart,

I will ascend to heaven;

I will raise my throne

above the stars of God;

I will sit on the mount of assembly

on the heights of Zaphon; 

I will ascend to the tops of the clouds,

I will make myself like the Most High.’ 

But you are brought down to Sheol,

to the depths of the Pit.”

(Isaiah, 14:12).

I set about to study the Tower of Babel as a believer, curious to discover the truth, wanting to understand what had happened. What I found, however, about what man had accomplished, from the accounts that I´ve read in the ancient texts, while it amazes me, has only served to perplex me deeply. And I realize now, I´ll probably spend a lifetime pondering on a scientific explanation for the way we did what we did in Babylon, but my thirst for that particular piece of knowledge will probably never be quenched. And I´m willing to bet that God wouldn´t have it any other way.

The conclusion that I´m prepared to share with you, in fact, will only lead us to the front door of the truth, no further. That door is locked, reader. It is barred shut. We will never be able to enter again, as we did with the tower.

Dear reader: As a fellow man, I can only report my findings to you from the rational and scientific workings of my human mind; I have not been privy to any spiritual insight or divine knowledge in this matter at all. Nor will I let my belief in God influence the essence of this paper and thus turn you away from it. While I am a believer, I’m also, and first and foremost, a scientist at heart. And all I ask of you is to digest this writing with reason and logic. If you’re a believer as well, then with your faith, consider what the excerpts I’ll present to you mean.

I will draw my conclusions from the sacred texts themselves, that both foreshadow and describe our feat in Babylon, taking them at face value and not overinterpreting them metaphorically. I ask that you view the texts in their historical light as well, if you are so willing to take them as records of man’s early history, your belief in God or lack thereof aside.

Before Babylon

When God created the heavens and the Earth, He quickly banished Satan to the latter. Only later would He create Adam and Eve, of His own likeness, to whom He looked on very kindly, giving them a home in the Garden of Eden. But then, from the depths of the abyss to which he had been banished, the fallen Angel of Light sprang forth upon them, persuading them to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And mankind had lost its innocence, was consequently put out of the Garden, and was made to live out in the rocky unknown terrain, in the darkness and dreariness, forever. And the children they would have, and the generations to come, were no longer of God´s direct creation, as were Adam and Eve. They were sons of man, and therefore prone to an unclean nature.

And as such, and from living on Earth with other corrupt fallen angels aligned with Satan who taught us their ways and reproduced with the daughters of men, most humans were sinners. Thus God created the Flood, the rain said to have fallen from Heaven. God had wiped the slate clean; the Flood was a Judgement. The wicked were drowned. Only Noah, who was righteous enough in the eyes of the Father to carry on the race of man, and his sons (and their wives) were spared.

Man Demands More 

But after the Flood, transgression was still part of our nature, as it forever will be. And soon a descendant of Noah would rally the people to rebel. His name was Nimrod, son of Cush, and he was known as the first “mighty” man on Earth, a hunter of such great skill that it was even acknowledged by God.

The people on Earth had been traveling from the East as a single group when they decided to create their own destiny. They “spoke the same language and were of the same speech.” In Genesis 11 we read what they said:

“Come, let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves. Otherwise, we shall be scattered abroad over the face of the whole Earth.” 

Thus they settled in the plain of Shinar, in modern day Iraq, where they commenced to build their city and tower. This was, of course, against God´s direct orders, which were to “multiply and fill the Earth,” given to Adam and Eve and repeated to the survivors of the Flood. This is what unnerved God, most ministers preach: man´s direct disobedience.

A Foreshadowing of the Feat 

Before the Great Flood, God’s word was given to the father of the Ark builder Noah; Enoch, who was a very righteous man, and is very respected in the contemporary Christian community, was said to have walked with God. In the Book of Enoch, God’s angels tell him of the Flood to come and the decimation of the wicked, but promise him that a select few will be spared through his kin. But then, after the Judgement, the angel Uriel says in chapter 79, we will return to our wicked ways, and that while we will do something that has never been done before, it will stem from sin:

“But in those days [of sin] shall Heaven be seen; and barrenness shall take place in the borders of the great chariots in the West. Heaven shall shine more than when illuminated by the orders of light; while many chiefs among the stars of authority shall err, perverting their ways and works.”

God Reacts

As you can imagine, man’s selfish actions got the full and undivided attention of God. Genesis says “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built,” and was truly unpleased, if not alarmed:

“And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the Earth, and they left off building the city.”

Our storyteller Moses goes on to say that in confounding our tongue and dispersing us, God created 70 languages and the races (and nations) of men across the various continents. He had put an end to our advanced, anthropocentric society, had even turned some of us into apes.

In my research, I have found that most ministers and pastors say that the moral of this story is that man had built Babylon and its tower for his own advancement, without the blessing of God, and in neglecting Him, were judged. But is an advanced society that offensive to God? Is a universal language a threat to Him? And just how far did man get before he was cut down to size by his creator?

I believe we had breached the walls of the kingdom of Heaven. We had somehow accomplished what we had set out to do. We had pounded on the walls and broken our way into the holy place. We had caused such a ruckus that God stepped in.

But how could man have done this with just a tower made of brick and a common language? Is not Heaven in another realm—one we don’t know of? Is not the atmosphere just air at its various layers, pressures and compositions? 

As we know from modern day science, there are no doors to Heaven in the atmosphere. There is an ozone layer, there are jet streams, there is noctilucence, water vapor and condensates in the form of precipitation, winds and clouds. The mesosphere, stratosphere, and troposphere have all been well studied and documented. Modern man could build a tower literally hundreds of thousands of miles high and still not reach Heaven, nor a portal to it. 

Playing the Devil’s Advocate

The tower may have been tall, but it could never have been tall enough. Or could it have been?

The Book of Enoch divulges information about certain “gates of Heaven” that previously existed above the Earth, from which the winds came, wherein “the treasures of thunder” and “the splendor of the lightning” were contained, as with “the treasures of hail and of frost, the treasures of snow, the treasures of rain and dew.” Of some of God’s angels, who the angel Uriel refers to as “luminaries,” he explains the cosmic mechanism to Noah: 

“This is the first law of the luminaries. The sun and the light arrive at the gates of Heaven, which are on the East, and on the West of it at the western gates of Heaven. The sun sets in Heaven, and, returning by the North, to proceed towards the East, is conducted so as to enter by that gate, and illuminate the face of Heaven.”

All of this had been, “until a new work [was to] be effected, which will be eternal,” which I infer to be the very Judgement of the (first) Babylonians, whereby said “gates” were probably retracted, and the workings of the universe in collaboration with the ethers were probably cloaked even deeper in secrecy, this time way out of our reach.

Not only do we have to consider these passages, we have to take into account that the holy books in which they are contained share a statement in common, which is that the human beings of that era were instructed in the ways of sorcery and black magic, alchemy, and were given secret knowledge by the exiled angels confined to the Earth among them.

The Tower as a Structure

Given that the Bible hardly describes any physical attributes of the tower, we can look to the Book of Jasher for more detail. Six-hundred thousand people, it says, were involved in its construction. It says that the tower was so tall that it took a whole year for a brick at the bottom to reach its way to the top. It was so big around that it took two days to walk completely around its base. 

Looking for a Location

As I grew more and more curious, I just couldn’t help myself but to think about the dimensions described of the tower and imagine it spatially on the Earth. I looked up the average walking speed of a human being (1.2 mph), and multiplied that number by 20 hours, which is what I considered to equal about two full days walked (a person would obviously rest to eat and sleep, etc.). That gave me the circumference of the tower, which I then extracted the radius from by using the well-known formula from high school Geometry, C=2(π)r. I concluded that the tower could have had a radius of approximately 4-6 miles, which would have given it a diameter of 8-12 miles. I then looked on Google Maps, at the surface of Iraq. I looked for an 8- to 12-mile round imprint on the ground, and found one on the map.

If the Tower of Babel did exist and if it was so huge, there certainly had to be a footprint of it on the Earth´s surface. This one was in the right place and of the right size. While looking at the scale on the map and finding this place, I wondered why nobody had ever done this before.

As you may note, the location curiously includes a greater-in-size silhouette of a dinosaur-like animal. 

Here is a screenshot of this place in terms of where it lays in Iraq:

When you zoom down to the circle, you can actually see decent curvature on the earth, which may have been the tower’s foundation or perimeter, if you will.

Now reader, I´m not trying to suggest that this is the site where the Tower of Babel once stood. I´m just sharing my best guess with you, which you may even call “a shot in the dark,” as to a possible location, from my own scientifically adventurous mind. I´m no geologist and I’m not an archaeologist, and I sure as Hell have never been to Iraq. But if I could go, I´d go to this place and take a good long look around at the ground, to see if it looked like a circular cross-section. And I’d bring a shovel. There is, unfortunately, no “Street View” for this vast desert area, and the topological and geological maps are a bit challenging to interpret. 

Babylon to Be an Issue

One of John the Baptist´s revelations about the End Days ties in to the nature of our intentions in Babylon:

“Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke with me, saying, ‘Come here, I will show you the judgment of the Great Harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the Earth committed acts of immorality, and those who dwell on the Earth were made drunk with the wine of her immorality.’ And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness; and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of blasphemous names, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a gold cup full of abominations and of the unclean things of her immorality, and on her forehead a name was written, a mystery, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the Saints, and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus. When I saw her, I wondered greatly.”

I have literally, at times, thought about the Tower of Babel to the point of suffering. We apparently were trying, with the help of the expelled ones, to escape our predestined planet that was to be our home and land on which to die and rejoin the gods in the divine place of our origin. We had gone knocking on His door, and for some reason, He didn’t like it. We had done something great, but we were probably up to no good.

Images: Supplied by the Author