Page 288 - Foundations

Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words. Since that time
the earthquake and the thunder had dispersed the sun-dried clay. The bricks of the casing had been
split, and the earth of the interior had been scattered in heaps. Merodach, the great god, excited my
mind to repair this building. I did not change the site nor did I take away the foundation. In a
fortunate month, in an auspicious day, I undertook to build porticoes around the crude brick masses,
and the casing of burnt bricks. I adapted the circuits, I put the inscription of my name in the Kitir of
the portico. I set my hand to finish it. And to exalt its head. As it had been done in ancient days, so
I exalted its summit.
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etemenanki]

These words reveal that it was believed in Nebuchadnezzar’s day that the ruins at Birs Nimrud were
the original Tower of Babel, a tower that was left with the top incomplete due to the people having
abandoned its building when their language was confused. Nebuchadnezzar’s testimony does little
to settle the question of whether the Scriptures are communicating the people’s intent to build a tower
whose top reached into the heavens, or a tower whose top revealed the heavens. Nebuchadnezzar in
one statement declares that his reconstruction of the “tower would reach the skies,” yet he also
constructed each of the seven levels to correspond to one of “the seven spheres” of the heavens, and
Herodotus reported to have seen the tower and described it as having the constellations of the zodiac
adorning its summit.

Whatever the actual meaning that is intended in the Scriptures, there is a definite link between
Nimrod, Babel, its famed Tower, and the idolatrous worship that spread from there to all parts of the
world. We will look further at the character of this religion, and its presence in all ages and all parts
of the globe in the next chapter.