Search for the Tower of Babel

[Music] it's taken quite a bit to get out here to eradoo you Scholars say that the Tower of Babel was here we have here a great example of a cigarette in Mesopotamia so behind me here in Babylon is the place where the ziggurat of Babylon stood oh [Music] Omar I found the Tower of Babel [Music] I mean one thing that just is always impressive to me is just look at how flat the area is out in this huge Valley River Valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates one of the problems in this area is that what do you build with you have all this alluvial soil meaning soil that's been washed down from these Rivers which means there's really not Stone in it we're also too low it's too hot here for forests they figured out how to make clay bricks and then to fire them in a kiln to make them hard like Stone and then this is what they used to do their building actually it works very nicely because they can make everything uniform and then Harden it like rock and then they can build these amazing Tower temples in their cities in Genesis chapter 11 the people say let us build ourselves a city with a tower the name of the city was called Babel the note for Babel at the bottom of the page says that is Babylon this is because Babylon is the later Greek form of the older name Babel uh the city of Babylon is the city of Babel in the Bible this is why the Jewish historian Josephus wrote the place wherein they built the Tower is now called Babylon we know that the Tower of Babel was built here in this city because this is Babel this is Babylon and so the Tower of Babel is synonymous with the Tower of Babylon you can call it either one behind me is the site where the ziggurat that is the Tower Temple of Babylon stood you can hardly see anything here today so in order to better understand what a ziggurat looks like we're going to go to ER this is the best preserved cigarette in Mesopotamian so not only because it was found the best preserved but also because a lot of restoration work has been done here so here I can show you what a ziggurat looks like it's very obvious since the most famous architecture from Mesopotamia are these ziggurats these Tower temples that when we're reading in Genesis chapter 11 about the Tower of Babel that it's talking about one of these Tower temples so there are three main parts to a cigarette there is the house on the top there is the tower itself and then there's the stairway that attaches the ground to the house on top and so the house on top is the temple building itself the people believed that the god lived in the house on top of the ziggurat the tower is the foundation for that house and so that's why a cigarette is a tower Temple the third part of a cigarette is the stairway that was the link between man and God the tower itself is made up of these different steps so each step is a platform that's made of mud brick and then each successive platform gets smaller and smaller as you go up so I'm up at the upper step here on the ziggurat of ER there's three different steps three of these platforms built on top of each other and then the house the temple building itself on top I'm up on the crown of the ziggurat and this is where the house would have been one of the main archaeologists that excavated the ER ziggurat was Leonard Wooley in his book ER of the chaldees he wrote in every important city there was at least one such Tower crowned by a sanctuary of them all the biggest and most famous was the ziggurat of Babylon now entirely destroyed but its ground plan shows that it was on a larger scale of the ziggurat at er the excavator and discoverer of the ground plan of the ziggurat of Babylon was the German archaeologist Robert caldavey so behind me here is the place where the ziggurat of Babylon stood this ziggurat was called etaminanki which means the house of the foundation of Heaven and Earth beginning in 1908 cultivate Unearthed the foundation of the Tower of Babylon from what once was a towering ziggurat only the lowliest portions of the base remained after its destruction by the Persian army and where afterwards for thousands of years the local people took the valuable fired Brigs for their own building projects all we have really from the ziggurat that stood here is the footprint of where it was the dimensions of the Babylon ziggurat had been written and preserved on an ancient tablet with each side of the base of the foundation being 90 meters long in his excavation report cultivate wrote that from the ruins themselves the side length of the ziggurat show 90 meters when cultivate came here and excavated here in the early 1900s he confirmed those measurements as accurate the same tablet says the height of the tower was 90 meters nearly 3 300 feet that was confirmed and there's no reason then to think that the records aren't also accurate on how tall it was this ziggurat was measured by woolly at 70 feet high in comparison the ziggurat and Babylon was 300 feet high and so the staircase that you see going up here would have been over four times higher in Babylon than it is here at the ziggurat at er this means that the priests at Babylon had to be in four times better shape than the priests here at Ur and this trench next to me cultivate excavated the staircase that came off of the front of the ziggurat anywhere that you would have been here in the city of Babylon you would have seen the ziggurat and you would have seen this staircase that was going 300 feet up into the sky and so this was not just the ziggurat of a city this was the ziggurat of an Empire and so now it's ironic that this uh most famous this biggest ziggurat from Mesopotamia in ancient times now has been reduced to a pile of mud to get onto the mound of the ziggurat ruins I had to first get through this Jungle of brush [Music] foreign this is the logical place where the Tower of Babel once stood cultivate wrote in his report that the tower he had excavated was the one the Jews of the Old Testament regarded as the essence of human presumption and why in his book woolly wrote that in Hebrew tradition the ziggurat of Babylon is the Tower of Babel the Wycliffe Bible dictionary of biblical archeology puts it this way the Tower of Babel Genesis 11 is surely to be associated with the ziggurat of Babylon there is no question that this is where the ziggurat of Babylon stood the Tower of Babylon and so it was destroyed and rebuilt many times we have in the ancient Babylonian records we have Hammurabi uh who ruled this city back in the uh 18th century BC he rebuilt the ziggurat then it was destroyed by sennacherib it was rebuilt by neba palazzar and Nebuchadnezzar then it was destroyed Again by the King of Persia Xerxes and so we have this common phenomenon here in archeology where the sacred place the sacred ground Remains the Same and the temples that were destroyed and then rebuilt were rebuilt one on top of another over time over thousands of years this is the common phenomenon that we have in all these archaeological sites where the temple stays the same it stays in the same place and if it's destroyed it's rebuilt in the same spot so that is why this is the logical place for the original building that was built here the Tower of Babel where God came down because of the rebellion of the people and Scattered the people and gave them different languages and confusion to learn more about evidence supporting the Bible you can order a copy of my book where God came down the archaeological evidence just click the link in the description below this video it's taken quite a bit to get out here to eridu my goodness it's it's out in the middle of nowhere it's been one of the candidates a few Scholars say that the Tower of Babel was here raining a lot here in Iraq and so we had to walk a long ways through the mud to get here and so this has been this has been excavated in the past the earliest levels here are very old they they've been dated by the archaeologist to 4 500 BC and so what we're looking at here is on the mound itself and this is where the ziggurat of iridu stood now some a few Scholars have said that this is where we should look for the Tower of Babylon that's one of the reasons I wanted to come out here was because of those claims however uh in the Bible it doesn't say that the Tower of Babel is the Tower of erudu it says that it's the Tower of Babel and Babel is the city of Babylon even if this city had a different name in ancient times even if that name was uh Babel meaning the Gate of God the city that the Bible is talking about in Genesis 11 is definitely the city that becomes known later as Babylon and so that's where we should look for the Tower of Babel but this is very interesting this is a very old cigarette and a very very old city so another thing that people get confused about with the city of Babylon is how old it is and the reason is that they have not been able to excavate as deeply in this site as they have in other sites so for example at the city of UR the river has moved far away from the site from Ur it's 10 miles to the west from the site and so this allowed uh excavations to go very deep the Euphrates River still passes right by this site and over the years dams have been put into the river to raise on purpose the water table for agricultural reasons in fact we can see that right here because this mound is surrounded by water anytime in a site you have admixture of material you have some material from those earlier levels represented in the upper levels and you have that here so you have material coming from the site that shows its great Antiquity in his excavation report col de vay wrote the existence of Babylon in prehistoric times before the fifth Millennium is proved by flint and other Stone implements it is impossible to carry excavations down to that depth owing to the rise in water level those earlier layers of the city are down there it's just that they're underwater they can't be dug and so this is a city of great Antiquity the material culture here goes back to that time period we should also keep in mind that Genesis 11 says that after he confused their language the Lord scattered them from there over all the Earth and they stopped building the city called Babel how long the city was abandoned for is not known so the city of Babylon is spoken of throughout scripture from The Book of Genesis the first book to the Book of Revelation the last book in the Bible and so the history of Babylon is connected all the way through scripture in Genesis 11 4 the people said come let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves later in history Daniel chapter 4 says King Nebuchadnezzar was walking on the roof of the Royal Palace of Babylon he said is not this the great Babylon I have built by my mighty power and for the glory of my Majesty of his view of the city what would have stood out the most would have been the tower he had built with a temple on top of it in the last book in the Bible the Book of Revelation the city of Babylon the great is used symbolically of the Abominations of the Earth where like a tower her sins are piled up to heaven God's judgment is then declared Fallen Fallen is Babylon the great in Revelation Babylon is the city that is used symbolically for wickedness and Rebellion against God and that is connected all the way back through its history all the way back to the Tower of Babel famous 300 foot ziggurat of Babylon is reduced to this even though it it's not much to look at as far as looking having magnificent ruins or something like that it is quite staggering to look at to understand the Judgment of God this is the Magnificent ziggurat of of history and Antiquity this is the one that was so impressive and isn't it ironic that through God's judgment it has literally been brought down to nothing and so this is what a ziggurat is of course this is It's a symbol of man thinking that he can work himself into favor and relationship with God a ziggurat gets three things wrong it gets wrong who God is who man is and the link between the two how the two can be connected and so in this concept of things um there's not very much separation between the god that's being worshiped and the people themselves it brings God down and it elevates man up and so in this concept you can actually make a Stairway to Heaven you can actually make a Stairway that leads up to the place where the god that's being worshiped dwells anybody that comes from a Biblical worldview looks at this and it's absurd the biblical account teaches us that God is uh holy that God is righteous that man is fallen and sinful and so the separation between man in God is is this huge void that can't be crossed there's nothing that man can do to cross that void of separation between man and God if it's going to be crossed then it's going to be the work of God that accomplishes that in order to be with God God has to come down and do the work and so the stairs the the way that we can be in relationship with God is Christ himself and Christ came down he did the work on the cross that is for the forgiveness of sin which separates man from God so that we can approach God and be in relationship with him and so the staircase in the gospel in the Bible is Jesus Robert colave died in 1925. fittingly his friends and colleagues marked His Grave by erecting a stone model representing his discovery of the Tower of Babel my book can be ordered through the link in the description please consider subscribing and to learn more about the archeology of Babylon watch this video

Channel: Expedition Bible

Views: 848,378

Keywords: Tower of Babel, Joel Kramer, Christian archaeology, Bible teaching, Christian, Expedition Bible, Bible, archaeology, Old Testament, the Bible is true, biblical archaeology, Christianity, Babylon, Iraq, Ur, Eridu, Genesis 11:1-9, Leonard Wooley, Robert Koldewey, ziggurat, Jesus is the ladder, tower temple, tower of babel, the tower of babel, ancient babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar, tower of bable

Id: cYc_VgjJfw8

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023