THE TOWER OF BABEL PART 4

by John Thomas Lowe
(Woodruff, S.C.)

PART 4
Enumeration of scattered languages
Several medieval historiographic accounts attempt to enumerate the languages scattered at the Tower of Babel. Because a count of all the descendants of Noah listed by name in chapter 10 of Genesis (LXX) provides 15 names for Japheth's descendants, 30 for Ham's, and 27 for Shem's, these figures became established as the 72 languages resulting from the confusion at Babel—although the exact listing of these languages changed over time. (The LXX Bible has two additional names, Elisa and Cainan, not found in the Masoretic text of this chapter, so early rabbinic traditions, such as the Mishna, speak instead of "70 languages".) Some of the earliest sources for 72 (sometimes 73) languages are the 2nd-century Christian writers Clement of Alexandria (Stromata I, 21) and Hippolytus of Rome (On the Psalms 9); it is repeated in the Syriac book Cave of Treasures (c. 350 CE), Epiphanius of Salamis' Panarion (c. 375) and St. Augustine's The City of God 16.6 (c. 410). The chronicles attributed to Hippolytus (c. 234) contain one of the first attempts to list each of the 72 people who were believed to have spoken these languages.
Isidore of Seville, in his Etymologiae (c. 600), mentions the number of 72; however, his list of names from the Bible drops the sons of Joktan and substitutes the sons of Abraham and Lot, resulting in only about 56 names total; he then appends a list of some of the nations known in his days, such as the Longobards and the Franks. This listing was to prove quite influential on later accounts that made the Lombards and Franks themselves into descendants of eponymous grandsons of Japheth, e.g., the Historia Brittonum (c. 833), The Meadows of Gold by al Masudi (c. 947) and Book of Roads and Kingdoms by al-Bakri (1068), the 11th-century Lebor Gabála Érenn, and the midrashic compilations Yosippon (c. 950), Chronicles of Jerahmeel, and Sefer ha Yashar.
Other sources that mention 72 (or 70) languages scattered from Babel are the Old Irish poem Cu can machair by Luccreth Mocca Chiara (c. 600); the Irish monastic work Auraicept na n-Éces; History of the Prophets and Kings by the Persian historian Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (c. 915); the Anglo-Saxon dialogue Solomon and Saturn; the Russian Primary Chronicle (c. 1113); the Jewish Kabbalistic work Bahir (1174); the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (c. 1200); the Syriac Book of the Bee (c. 1221); the Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum (c. 1284; mentions 22 for Shem, 31 for Ham and 17 for Japheth for a total of 70); Villani's 1300 account; and the rabbinic Midrash ha-Gadol (14th century). Villani adds that it "was begun 700 years after the Flood, and there were 2,354 years from the beginning of the world to the confusion of the Tower of Babel. And we find that they were 107 years working at it, and men lived long in those times". According to the Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum, however, the project was begun only 200 years following the Deluge.
The tradition of 72 languages persisted into later times. José de Acosta, in his 1576 treatise De procured indecorum salute, and António Vieira, a century later in his Sermão da Epifania, expressed amazement at how much this 'number of tongues' could be surpassed, there being hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages indigenous only to Peru and Brazil.
Height
The Book of Genesis does not mention how tall the Tower was. The phrase used to describe the Tower, "it is top in the sky" (v.4), was an idiom for impressive Height; rather than implying arrogance, this was simply a cliché for Height.  
The Book of Jubilees mentions the Tower's Height as being 5,433 cubits and two palms, or 2,484 m (8,150 ft), about three times the Height of Burj Khalifa, or roughly 1.6 miles high. The Third Apocalypse of Baruch mentions that the 'tower of strife' reached a height of 463 cubits, or 211.8 m (695 ft), taller than any structure built in human history until the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, which is 324 m (1,063 ft) in Height.
Gregory of Tours, writing c. 594, quotes the earlier historian Orosius (c. 417) as saying the Tower was "laid out foursquare on a very level plain. Its wall, made of baked brick cemented with pitch, is fifty cubits (23 m or 75 ft) wide, two hundred (91.5 m or 300 ft) high, and four hundred and seventy stades (82.72 km or 51.4 miles) in circumference. A stade was an ancient Greek unit of length, based on the circumference of a typical sports stadium of the time, about 176 meters (577 ft). Twenty-five gates are situated on each side, making all one hundred. The doors of these gates, which are of great size, are cast in bronze. The same historian tells many other tales of this city and says: 'Although such was the glory of its building still it was conquered and destroyed.'"
A typical medieval account is given by Giovanni Villani (1300): He relates that "it measured eighty miles 130 km round, and it was already 4,000 paces high, or 5.92 km (3.68 mi), and 1,000 paces thick, and each pace is three of our feet." The 14th-century traveler John Mandeville also included an account of the Tower and reported that its Height had been 64 furlongs, or 13 km (8 mi), according to the local inhabitants.
The 17th-century historian Verstegan provides yet another figure – quoting Isidore, he says that the Tower was 5,164 paces high, or 7.6 km (4.7 mi), and quoting Josephus that the Tower was wider than it was high, more like a mountain than a tower. He also quotes unnamed authors who say that the spiral path was so broad that it contained lodgings for workers and animals and other authors who claim that the path was wide enough to have fields for growing grain for the animals used in the construction.
In his book, Structures: Or Why Things Do not Fall (Pelican 1978–1984), Professor J.E. Gordon considers the Height of the Tower of Babel. He wrote, "brick and stone weigh about 120 lb per cubic foot (2,000 kg per cubic meter), and the crushing strength of these materials is generally better than 6,000 lbs per square inch or 40 mega-pascals. Elementary arithmetic shows that a tower with parallel walls could have been built to a height of 2.1 km (1.3 mi) before the bricks at the bottom were crushed. However, by making the walls taper towards the top, they could well have been built to a height where the men of Shinnar would run short of oxygen and had difficulty breathing before the brick walls crushed beneath their dead weight."