by Randall S. Frederick

In scripture, the Bible records Babylon as the source of confusion. In the Book of Genesis, the Mesopotamian city of Babel, later called Babylon, was the location of a large ancient structure called a ziggurat, a pyramid-like square that ascends upwards in successively receding levels. Large populations have often congregated around ziggurats like Mesoamerican pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacán in central Mexico, the Castillo at Chichén Itzá in the Yucatan, the Great Pyramid in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the Pyramid at Cholula or the Inca’s great temple at Cuzco in Peru. Like these, the people of Mesopotamia congregated at Babel/Babylon and built a tower-like structure in an attempt to ascend to Heaven. There are several ways to interpret this. Were humans trying to get to heaven through hard work? Was it a religious effort to build a “stairway” to the sky and, once humans got there, did they want to make war with the gods and claim their throne?

In one of my most popular papers tucked away on a website for biblical scholars, I propose the “tower of Babel” was an effort to climb upwards and begin transmitting messages through the sky. Instead of replacing the gods, the people would become gods through an ancient form of radio evangelism. This idea is, according to the viewed stats of the paper, quite popular in the Asiatic Rim.

Whatever the initial reason for the construction, it is amusing to me that the diversity of opinion on what the “tower of Babel” was, why it was built, and what happened after construction had begun continues to elude scholars. No one knows what actually happened there. Babylon is historically important. Babel is not. Except to Evangelicals, who use the story of the Tower of Babel to explain the ways in which humans are evil before asking you, without irony, to donate to their building project.

In the biblical account in Genesis, we only know what happened after construction stopped: the people of Mesopotamia stopped their work because they didn’t understand one another. There’s something very human about this. What began as a project to unite the people instead became the most well-known example of human misunderstanding. People leave Babel speaking different languages, and experiencing the world in remarkably different ways. Even trained in critical theory and hermeneutics to search for secondary and third layers of meaning, “that math ain’t mathing.” The stories of Babel/Babylon, tongues and towers, do not match the way Evangelicals discuss the location as a center of learning, of evil, of abominations. Quite the opposite.

Later, Babylon takes on different qualities. Apparently, some people remain in Babel and develop the city into a nation while most leave to create and conjoin with different cultures and ways of life. These people go on to build their own city-states and nations, dispersing across the known world. The Israelite people are sold into slavery by one of their own and then, miraculously, find a new way of life. They develop their own schools, although this seems a marginal note in the development of their new nation. Instead, emphasis is placed on the development of a kingdom aspiring to become an empire. Emphasis is placed on their royal treasury, on the way they are able to secure good prices for lumber in the construction of a religious center. Still, tucked away at the start of the historical books of the Jewish TNKH is mention of a “school of the prophets”, a group of people antagonistic to the Israelite aspirations to, for, and of empire. This disposition toward power and dominance politically, financially, and culturally, will remain entirely apart from the “school of the prophets” and the educational apparatus within Israel. What follows is the collapse of the Israelite kingdom, over and over again. Exile and encroachment and enslavement, the only difference being the names of the conquerors who take control of the small nation.

One of these nations, Babylonia, thrives on the adoption of smaller nations. It subsumes cultures and practices, enacting an ancient form of social Darwinism. Cultures naturally survive if they are adopted by the existing culture of the conquering nation, centered in the capital of Babylon. The record of these cultures is housed in the libraries and schools, in educational institutions and marketplaces. Astrology is one such practice, literacy and ironworks other examples. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Babylonia was the Code of (King) Hammurabi, considered one of the most important surviving legal texts from the Ancient Near East. Surviving on clay tablets and large stone stelae, Hammurabi’s code was the first written collection of Mesopotamian laws to be discovered by archaeologists. The sixth and best-known of the Amorite dynasts, Hammurabi ruled from 1792 to 1750 BCE, conquered the surrounding city-states, and raised Babylon to the capital of a kingdom comprising all of southern Mesopotamia and part of Assyria. Today, this region is northern Iraq. At the time of Hammurabi, Babylon’s political importance, together with its favorable location, made it henceforth the main commercial and administrative center of Babylonia while its wealth and prestige made it a target for foreign conquerors.

This too is not the “modern Babylon” denounced by Evangelicals, though the details of why get too factual and historically profound for them. It requires patience and understanding that they do not embody and perhaps never have. Evangelicals have instead cornered the market on denouncing what they do not understand, whether that is law, education, science, or the ability to think critically as a result of literacy. Anti-science, anti-education, anti-literacy, with total unquestioned loyalty to their leaders. These are qualities of cult systems, cult members, and cultic thinking. Evangelicals do not like facts because facts complicate their emphasis on feeling and personal experience. Though Evangelicals would deny this, the emphasis on personal experience is a result of the Enlightenment. Their pseudo-scholars and pseudo-historians all claim that the Enlightenment was a dark time; the claims of the Church regarding miracles and absolute authority were questioned and ultimately lost. As a product of the Enlightenment, this emphasis on the subjective, personal experience of “inner truth” makes sense. It is a testament to all that they lost. Yet, by emphasizing emotions and the subjective, their messaging is defined by negative emotions like anger and fear these days, anticipating further erosion of the facile power they have managed to accumulate and the cultic empire of their leaders. Facts and objectivity challenge Evangelical acceptance of all things Bible, placing demands upon them to read their own sacred texts and confront what is actually in the Bible rather than what they feel to be true. The two, it seems, are often incompatible. After all, while fear and anger and violence now define Evangelicalism, the prophets insist that the people of God “fear not”. The apostles, like Paul, remind believers that “God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power, love, and a sound mind.” Even superficially, this is not what Evangelicalism presents with constant fear-mongering, loud clamoring, and violence.

You see, ancient Babylon is not problematic. A millennium later, King Nebuchadnezzar II or “Nebuchadnezzar the Great” will take over the nation of Israel. In a short military campaign, he takes the people captive and leads them into slavery as part of his second Babylonian Empire. His military campaigns were massive and he often oversaw them himself to ensure success. He also oversaw construction in Babylon, the capital city, rebuilding it according to his vision throughout his reign from 605 to 562 BCE. Ruling for 43 years, Nebuchadnezzar was the longest-reigning king of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty. By the time of his death on 562, he was the most powerful ruler in the world. Tellingly, his name gives insight into the political climate at the time of his ascendancy and the intentions he brought to his reign. His name, Nebuchadnezzar, means “Nabu, watch over my heir.” Nabu was the ancient Mesopotamian god of literacy, arts and sciences, writing, and wisdom. Nabu, in ancient religion, is often compared and paralleled with Mercury or Athena.

Despite his successful military career during his father Nabopolassar’s reign, the first third or so of Nebuchadnezzar’s rule saw little to no major military achievements, and notably a disastrous failure in an attempted invasion of Egypt. These years of lackluster military performance saw some of Babylon’s vassals, particularly in the Levant, beginning to doubt Babylon’s power, viewing the Neo-Babylonian Empire as a “paper tiger” rather than a power truly on the level of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The situation grew so severe that people in Babylonia itself began disobeying the king, some going as far as to revolt against Nebuchadnezzar’s rule. After this disappointing early period as king, Nebuchadnezzar’s luck turned. In the 580s BC, he engaged in a successful string of military actions in the Levant against the vassal states in rebellion there, likely with the ultimate intent of curbing Egyptian influence in the region.

For the Israelite people, this should have been a political victory. Nebuchadnezzar wanted to prevent the expanse of Israel’s historical enemy and oppressor, Egypt. But in 587 BC, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Kingdom of Judah and its capital, Jerusalem. He was no friend to the Israelite people, but another conqueror and oppressor accumulating the small nation and its peoples. The destruction of Jerusalem was a pivotal event immediately followed by Babylonian captivity as the city’s population and people from the surrounding lands were deported to Babylonia. The prophets in the Bible, together with modern rabbinical and historical scholars all agree that this was a decisive point in Jewish history. Under his rule, Jewish life was forever changed. The practice of sacrifice came to an end and would much later be replaced by Rabbinic Judaism with houses of learning, in the image of Nebuchadnezzar’s schools.

The Jews thereafter referred to Nebuchadnezzar as the greatest enemy they had faced until that point, as a “destroyer of nations” (משחית גוים, Jer. 4:7). In II Kings 24, the Bible recalls that “the Lord declared” that Babylonia strip the Israelite Temple, to profane it and carry anything of value away. “Nebuchadnezzar removed all the treasures from the temple of the Lord and from the royal palace, and took away all the gold articles that Solomon kind of Israel had made from the temple of the LORD. He carried into exile all Jerusalem: all the officers and fighting meant, and all the craftsmen and artisan – a total of ten thousand. Only the poorest people of the land were left.”

Curiously, while the historical (re: political/ not prophetic) books of the Jewish people depict Nebuchadnezzar as a tool for greater purposes, namely God’s will, the Book of Jeremiah paints a different picture. Remember, the political leaders and the prophets do not take the same view of things. They are often contrary to one another. In Jeremiah the prophet’s account for example, Nebuchadnezzar is a cruel enemy. Even though the conquering king is God’s appointed ruler of the world, he is also a divine instrument to punish the disobedience of Israel. To use Evangelical language, these two depictions “feel” incompatible. It does not help that Daniel, whose visions have immense relevance to geopolitics and are the most far-reaching, is minimized as a “lesser” prophet in the Hebrew canon. Had Evangelicals been the ones writing the historical books and assembling the “greater” prophecies, Daniel may have been dismissed entirely. Facts, for the Evangelical, are irrelevant. Geopolitics are only important so far as they empower Evangelicals. Externally, Evangelicals dismiss facts when they are inconvenient. They denounce Babylon’s headlines as “fake news” then offer “alternative facts” of their own in its place. Internally, Evangelicals cannibalize their own. Inconvenient readings of scripture, of history, of current events, are “heresy” propagated “fake Christians” or heretics whenever such readings do not fit the narrative of power that they have carefully curated. They reject, then correct the longstanding record of history with a new one that, while not factual, better fits a new narrative and, as _ writes in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, “if the American religious landscape has long resembled the world of early Christianity, then twenty-first century America looks increasingly as if it’s replaying that story with a different ending – one in which orthodoxy slowly withers and only heresies endure.” If need be, Evangelicals actively erase history and encourage forgetting. After all, the historians of the Bible did it first.

Outside of scripture, the destruction of Jerusalem, the capture of the rebellious Phoenician city of Tyre, and other campaigns in the Levant, Nebuchadnezzar is seen as a hero. He completed the Neo-Babylonian Empire’s transformation into the new great power of the ancient Near East. He was not a mad king bent on destruction. In addition to his military campaigns, he is remembered as a great builder-king. The prosperity ensured by his wars allowed Nebuchadnezzar to conduct great building projects in Babylon and elsewhere in Mesopotamia. Nebuchadnezzar’s military might looms large in the biblical text, but evidence from Neo-Babylonian sources from around the time of his reign offers a different emphasis. Non-biblical accounts of his reign focus on the Nebuchadnezzar’s outstanding record in construction, in unifying cultures, even his religious piety. Nebuchadnezzar was committed to rebuilding Babylon (in modern-day Iraq) after it had been freed from Assyrian rule. He turned the city into one that was famed for its opulence and majesty throughout the ancient world. The modern image of Babylon is largely of the city as it was after Nebuchadnezzar’s projects, during which he, among other work, rebuilt many of the city’s religious buildings, including the Esagila and Etemenanki, renovated its existing palace and constructed a brand new palace, beautified its ceremonial centre through renovations to the city’s Processional Street and the famous Ishtar Gate. The Ishtar Gate, it was discovered by archeoogists, was part of the processional way leading into the heart of the city, was constructed under Nebuchadnezzar’s rule, and carries his dedication. The walls of the processional way were decorated with images of lions, the sacred animal of Ishtar, goddess of love. Bricks from the blue-glazed wall bearing Nebuchadnezzar’s inscription have been discovered in their thousands, a recurring testament to his projects.

Another source of information about the ruler is found in the biblical account of the prophet Daniel. As a boy, Daniel was part of the captured people taken to Babylon. He distinguished himself and was assigned to study at the royal palace. He is not a prophet in Judaism, the faith he would have grown up with and seemingly held to throughout his life, if the biblical account is to be believed. The rabbis reckoned him to be the most distinguished member of the Babylonian diaspora, unsurpassed in piety and good deeds, firm in his adherence to the Law despite being surrounded by enemies who sought his ruin, and in the first few centuries CE they wrote down the many legends that had grown up around his name. He is considered a prophet in Christianity, and although he is not mentioned in the Quran, Muslim sources afford him the same revered title, that of a prophet. While some conservative scholars hold that Daniel existed and his book was written in the 6th century BCE, most scholars – religious and otherwise – agree that Daniel is not a historical figure. “His” work was written after his lifetime. If he truly existed at all. Much of the book, instead of a biographical account or description of his prophecies, is a cryptic, jumbled allusion to the reign of the 2nd century BCE Hellenistic king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, not the named king of the text, Nebuchadnezzar.

Nevertheless, the biblical account gives insight into the culture of Mesopotamia and in Daniel’s account of captivity, he and three of his friends are chosen for their intellect and beauty to be trained in the Babylonian court. There, they are given new names; Daniel (Hebrew, “El/God is my judge”) is given the Babylonian name Belteshazzar, meaning “Baal protect the king”, although it should be noted that Nebuchadnezzar’s son is a close derivative, Belshazzar, meaning “king of Babylon” or, according to some scholars, a contracted form of “son of Nebuchadnezzar.”

The interplay of Baal in both names, Daniel/Belteshazzar and Belshazzar is notable. In the Bible, Baal is the name given to several different deities who are designated as false gods or idols. It is most often used to describe the specific Canaanite-Phoenician god of fertility and rain. Additionally, Baal is associated with Beezlebub, demons, and the devil. Early audiences to the text would have immediately picked up on this and, hearing Daniel as a son of evil, would have easily discredited both him and the legitimacy of his visions.

Baal, in modern scholarship, is not one god bearing this name but instead a category, a title for many gods, even the Hebrew God of the Torah. The Book of Joshua recalls that even the patriarch Abraham once worshipped “Baals” or false gods along with his father Terah. In Jewish lore, Abraham’s father was an idol maker until Abraham became frustrated with the noncommitted plurality of worshipping so many gods. Surely, they could not all be true. Not all gods claiming to be Baal could be the true and living Eternal One.

There are several inscriptions to Baal across hundreds of archeological discoveries, making reconstruction of original intent a bit difficult. Baal is a generic name used by various cultures in Canaan for their deities, and given the wide interpretation, it has come to mean “lord” or “master”. More liberal biblical scholars even note that it is possible to see a dual face of the Israelite God “El” as “Baal” while moderate scholars are willing to concede that Baal may be the Israelite name for a harsh and violent form of the Israelite God depicted throughout Hebrew scriptures. Baal is first mentioned in the Bible in the Book of Numbers. The name appears in several places in the plural “Baalim”, including Judges 2:11, 10:10, 1 Kings 18:18, Jeremiah 2:23, and Hosea 2:17. Baal is also identified with Molech (Jeremiah 19:5).

Which is to say that while Daniel’s “true” account is debated, there is material substance in the work – whoever the actual author – that indicates a great deal about the cultures of the Levant as they circulate around Babylon. Though he is the “son” of Baal, there remains considerable debate over what this means. Daniel, for his great piety and loyalty to the God of Abraham, does not express shame or hesitation in calling himself by this name. Though his early life is defined by rejection of the culture of Babylon, even to the point of restricting his diet, what emerges is an individual who does not take offense at Babylon in the way that his contemporary prophets do. Nebuchadnezzar, in Daniel’s telling, is neither a man of construction or a warrior. Instead, King Nebuchadnezzar is a thoughtful and learned man who encourages even the enslaved peoples, the Israelites, to prosper through commerce, extensive building projects, farming, culture, the arts, and education. If the king is a visionary, then the book of Daniel reinterprets what “visionary” means. He approaches Daniel, seeking an interpretation of a dream where giant statue made of four metals with feet of mingled iron and clay is smashed by a stone from heaven. Only Daniel, whose wisdom and ability to interpret dreams and signs in the skies surpasses “all the magicians and enchanters of the kingdom” iis able to interpret it: the dream signifies four kingdoms, of which Babylon is the first, that God will destroy and replace with his own kingdom.

Daniel had already distinguished himself as something of an oracle. What follows in the book named after him are a series of similar dreams and signs that only Daniel understands. Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a great tree that shelters all the world and of a heavenly figure who decrees that the tree will be destroyed; again, only Daniel can interpret the dream, which concerns the sovereignty of God over the kings of the earth. When Nebuchadnezzar’s son Belshazzar uses consecrated vessels from the Jewish temple as serving vessels for his extravagant feast, a hand appears and writes a mysterious message on a wall. Once again, only Daniel can interpret. The hand writing on the wall – witnessed by all, understood by one – explicitly tells the king that his kingdom will be given to the Medes and Persians. Belshazzar, unlike his father Nebuchadnezzar, has not acknowledged the sovereignty of the God of Daniel.

The Medes and Persians overthrow Nebuchadnezzar and the new king, Darius the Mede, appoints Daniel to high authority. Jealous rivals, enraged that this foreign slave has ascended to power and continues to tell the third king in a row what will happen, attempt to destroy Daniel with an accusation that he worships God instead of the king. Daniel, unashamed, admits the accusation is true. He is thrown into a den of lions, but an angel saves him, his accusers are destroyed, and Daniel is restored to his position of power. This silences the critics, for after all who can deny the veracity of his claims and his ability to survive the halls of political intrique?

In the third year of Darius’ rule, Daniel has a series of visions. Instead of interpreting the dreams, visions, and circumstances of others, these visions are original to his own experience. In the first vision, four beasts come out of the sea, the last with ten horns, and an eleventh horn grows and achieves dominion over the Earth. The “Ancient of Days” (God) gives dominion to “one like a son of man”. Reversing the trend, an angel interprets the vision for Daniel instead of him interpreting for another. In the second vision, a ram with two horns is attacked by a goat with one horn; the one horn breaks and is replaced by four. A little horn arises and attacks the people of God and the temple, and Daniel is again given an explanation. He is informed how long the little horn’s dominion will endure. In the third vision, Daniel is troubled to read in holy scripture (the book is not named but appears to be his contemporary, Jeremiah) that Jerusalem would be desolate for 70 years. Daniel repents on behalf of the Jews and requests that Jerusalem and its people be restored. An angel refers to a period of 70 sevens (or weeks) of years.

In the final vision, Daniel sees a period of history culminating in a struggle between the “king of the north” and the “king of the south” in which God’s people suffer terribly; an angel explains that in the end the righteous will be vindicated and God’s kingdom will be established on Earth. Such a vision would be especially meaningful to the Israelites whose national, cultural, and spiritual claims are built upon the division of the Northern and Southern kingdoms of Israel.

Following Solomon’s death in c. 926 BCE, tensions between the northern part of Israel, containing the ten northern tribes, and the southern section, dominated by Jerusalem and the southern tribes, reach a boiling point. When Solomon’s son and successor Rehoboam deals tactlessly with economic complaints of the northern tribes, in about 930 BCE. There are differences of opinion as to the actual year, but not about the division itself. The Kingdom of Israel and Judah splits into two kingdoms: the northern Kingdom of Israel, which included the cities of Shechem and Samaria, and the southern Kingdom of Judah, which contained Jerusalem. This split was what brought about their present dispossession of the nation, weakening and dividing them against one another when they should have remained united.

This is an important turn. The Jewish community understands Daniel’s final vision as descriptive (i.e. a lesson to be learned from), whether it is “prophetic” in revealing the importance of unity among the Diaspora or, generally, as looking forward to the eventual collapse of the nations. For Jewish mystics, who will later congregate around the Christian community, Daniel’s vision is prescriptive, an event yet to occur detailed for those who have “ears to hear and eyes to see”, to understand when the collapse of the nations begins to take place. Both views allow those who accept the texts (and their authorship) to have a degree of distance from the vision. It is either long ago, or not yet; either way, it has no bearing on the present experience. There is a decisive split, one that will come to cleave the Christian community from their spiritual, cultural, and racial ancestry of the Jewish people. It will give language to the mysticism Christianity will adopt from Judaism, its predecessor. Like Daniel, John will have a vision of the end of the world that culminates in the collapse of nations and a divide of kingdoms, one the kingdom of God and the other the kingdom of Satan, the evil one. Remarkably, the vision is never interpreted by the Diaspora or Christians as having relevance to themselves, upon whom this vision would have relevance, importance, and precedence. In the mystic interpretation, the events of Daniel occur elsewhere and impact unnamed foreign nations. Placing importance on Daniel’s refusal of Babylon and the explicit rejection of Babylon offered by the Major Prophets, Babylon is mythologized to such an extreme that any nation against the political interests of Israel becomes “Babylon.” Babylon is a place of hardship, loss, and upheaval. In an exaggerated form, the Christian community depicts Babylon as a multi-faceted evil, one that can even make education into something evil.

Babylon, through Daniel’s account, is a collection of strange episodes. While the book itself is collected with other prophetic writings in the Hebrew/Jewish canon, Daniel himself is not afforded the role of “prophet.” Why might this be? Because Daniel is aligned with the empire. He, unlike the other prophets in the history of Israel and the sacred writings of the Jewish people, is aligned with the enemy. The events described make Daniel special, certainly. His wisdom excels that of the magicians, astrologers, and political advisors in Israel and Babylon throughout the changes in leadership at a time of personal, spiritual, cultural, and political upheaval.

Continued in pt. 3