The Tower of Babel by
Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563)
"
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."
It is interesting to me that this is seen as a bad thing by God. I must admit I've aways found the story of the tower of Babel interesting. plus I really like towers, it seems the ideal construction method really. Brueghel's painting is Beautiful, it seems so much more evocative of the
possibilities of people cooperating, rather than the foibles. Instead of a lesson against pride, I wish we could take this as a lesson in the power of working together towards odd tasks.
Perosnally I Think They Were Just Bored And Thought building a tower to heaven sounded fun. Which sort of reminds me of a quote from
The Book of The Seven Seas, "At first I thought I might go fishing, but that seeming dull I resolved on a voyage around the world." The quote is by Joshua Slocum about his 3 year journey, the first ever solo-circumnavigation of the globe, begun in the spring of 1895.
FUN FACT: (if it really could be defined as such) while the height of the tower is something of contention, it is listed in a couple of places:
The Book of Jubilees: 5433
cubits and 2 palms (according to ancient measurements, one cubit is twenty-four inches) putting the height of the tower at about 10,866 feet tall, about 8.75x taller than the Empire State Building, or nearly 2.5 kilometers.
A typical mediaeval account is given by:
Giovanni Villani (1300): He relates that "it measured eighty miles round, and it was already 4,000
paces high (5,920 m (19,423 ft)) 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 (= 8 miles), according to the local inhabitants.
The 17th century historian
Verstegan provides yet another figure - quoting Isidore, he says that the tower was 5164 paces high, about 7.6 kilometers, 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 wide 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.
So the height kind of tends to vary from story to story, but is sort of universally immense by modern standards.
And finally, a contemporary author looking at it from an engineering perspective wrote, in his book, Structures or why things don't fall down (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 (2000 kg per cubic metre) and the crushing strength of these materials is generally rather better than 6000 lbf per square inch or 40 megapascals. Elementary arithmetic shows that a tower with parallel walls could have been built to a height of 7000 feet or 2 kilometres 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 in breathing before the brick walls crushed beneath their own dead weight."
Most of this was taken from the Wikipedia Article
here.
