From the Holy Scriptures it appears that when Ne- buchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and levelled most ofthe city with the ground, "he brought away the treasures ofthe temple, and the treasures ofthe king's house, and put them all into the temple of Bel at Bab- ylon" (2 Chron. xxxvii, 7). The brazen and other vessels which Solomon had caused to be made for the service of Jehovah are said to have been broken up by order of the Assyrian monarch, and formed into the famous <;ates of brass which so long adorned the superb entrances into the great area ofthe temple of Belus (comp. Hecatseus ap. Joseph. Ant. i, 4, 3).
The purposes to which this splendid edifice was ap- propriated may be parti}' gathered from the preced- ing statements. These purposes varied in some de- gree with the changes in opinions and manners which successive ages brought. The signal disappointment inflicted on its original founders show that even in its origin there was connected with it something greatly
BABEL
591
BABEL
displeasing to God. It seems, indeed, always to have existed in dero- gation of the divine glo- ry. Consecrated at the first, as it probably was, to the immoderate am- bition of the monothe- istic children of the Deluge, it passed to the Sabian religion, and thus, falling one degree from purity of worship, became a temple of the sun and the rest of the host of heaven, till, in the natural progress of corruption, it sank in- to gross idolatry, and, as the passage from Herodotus shows, was polluted by the vices which generally accom- panied the observances of heathen superstition. In on3 purpose it un- doubtedly proved of service to mankind. The Babylonians were given to the study of astronomy. This en- nobling pursuit was one of the peculiar functions of the learn- ed men denominated by Herodotus Chalde- ans, the priests of Belus ; and the temple was crowned by an astronomical observatory, from the elevation of which the starry heavens could be most advantageous- ly studied over plains so open and wide, and in an at- mosphere so clear and bright as tho6e of Babylonia.
To Nimrod the first foundations of the tower are as- cribed ; Semiramis enlarged and beautified it (Ctesias ap. Diod. Sic. ii, 7) ; but it appears that the temple of Bel, in its most renowned state, was not completed till the time of Nebuchadnezzar, who, after the accomplish- ment of his many conquests, consecrated this superb edifice to the idolatrous object to whom he ascribed his victories. That the observatory on the tower was erected in remote times there is good reason to be- lieve. Prideaux mentions {Connection, i, 123) the cir- cumstance that when Alexander made himself master of Babylon, Callisthencs, the philosopher, who attended him thither, found astronomical observations ascend- ing upward 1900 years. — Kitto. See Astronomy.
6. Evidence as to its present Remains. — After the lapse of so man}' centuries, and the occurrence in "the land of Shinar" of so many revolutions, it is not to be ex- pected that the identification of the Tower of Babel with any actual ruin should be easy, or lead to any very certain result. The majority of opinions, how- ever, among the learned, make it the same as the above-described temple of Belus ; and as to its mod- ern locality, the predominant opinion has been in favor of the great temple of Nebo at Borsippa, the modern Birs Nimrttd, although the distance of that place from Babylon is a great difficulty in the way of the identifi- cation. When Christian travellers first began to visit the Mesopotamian ruins, they generally attached the name of "the Tower of Babel" to whatever mass, I among those beheld by them, was the loftiest and most imposing. Rawulf, in the lGth century, found the " Tower of Babel" at Fehigiah ; Pietro della Valle, in the 18th, identified it with the ruin Babil near Hillah ; while early in the present century Rich and Ker Porter revived the Jewish notion, and argued for its identity with the Birs. There are, in reality, no positive grounds
Ruins of Uiiri Nimrud.
either for identifying the tower with the temple of Belus, or for supposing that any remains of it long survived the check which the builders received when they were "scattered abroad upon the face of the earth," and "left off to build the city" (Gen. xi, 8); yet the striking general similarity of its form and con- struction to those structures, taken in connection with its evidently great antiquity, create a presumption in favor of the identification that it is difficult to resist. See Shinar. Nor, indeed, does the Birs Nimrud lie much, if any, farther distant from Hillah (the modern representative of Babylon) than do (in an opposite direction) some other ruins (e. g. especially the mound called BabU, the only other rival to the honor of rep- resenting the ancient Tower of Babel and temple of Belus in the vicinity), which were yet undoubtedly included within the ample circuit of the ancient walls ; in fact, the Birs itself will fall within the line of the outer walls of Babylon, if laid down of the extent de- scribed by Herodotus. Sec Babylon. Its pyramidal structure, also, with the numerous contractions of its successive stages, still traceable in the ruins, favors the identification (sec below). — Smith ; Kitto.