Building The Tower of Babel

[Ms Tercy Lonan]

BUILDING THE TOWER OF BABEL
“And they said, ‘Come, let us build us a city, and a tower,
with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be
scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’”


And there it is—the first and incredibly significant event
that turned the whole world upside down—the beginning of
the construction of the Tower of Babel. It is a story that took
place some 4,000 years ago, yet remains startlingly topical to
this day. So, let us analyze it from all angles.
Even though this event was mentioned at the very
beginning of our narrative, let’s step back and set the
historical backdrop, which proves one thing conclusively:
everything that transpires in the material world takes its
root from the spiritual one. Any historic event you can think
of is a consequence of what has already transpired in the
spiritual realm.
There is a saying in Kabbalah that “there is not a blade of
grass below that does not have an angel above that strikes it
and tells it, ‘Grow!’” So is the case with the Tower of Babel.
It actually existed, as the annals of history confirm.
At the turn of the 20th century, German archeologist
Robert Koldewey discovered the ancient city of Babylon
in today’s Iraq. It contained the ruins of a tower whose
dimensions measured (in meters) 90x90x90. Herodotus,
the ancient Greek historian who lived in the 5th century
BC, described the tower as a seven-tier pyramid of
analogous dimensions. Historical sources speak of the
temple complex Esagila, at the heart of which stood the
Tower of Babel, dedicated to the god Marduk. It was
called Etemenaki, which is Sumerian for “Temple of the
Foundation of Heaven and Earth.”
Esagila was the religious center of that world, in which
paganism reigned. Astrology, zodiac signs and horoscopes,
fortune-telling, numerology, spiritism, magic, sorcery,
charms, hexes, invocations, exorcism of evil spirits—were all
born in Esagila and survive through the modern age. Today,
we see a resurgence of these beliefs.