I guess what is most interesting in the article Huggy provides is how much Babel Tower myth grows spontaneously and organically, like all myths do all the time and believers just accept it and don't even notice that it changes. Like this part:
Nowhere in the Bible is it mentioned that the tower is ziggurat and they even go furthering the myth by saying there were even seven steps “proportions of the 7 steps including the temple on the top,” Again, all that is said in Bible is that few men got together and started building the tower with brick - and that's it. There is no shape described, no time-frame, just that it was in or around Babylon. It could be ziggurat, then it could be some other building; it could have seven steps, but it could have no steps or hundred steps.
Babylon is one of the oldest cities in history and someone wrote that someone sometimes tried to build a tall building, so because it's so vague you can make a claim that it is historical because for the thousands of years that Babylon existed someone probably was trying to build a tall building and it probably collapsed - so what? This happened all the time. Just in medieval times hundreds of churches collapsed shortly after being built and even during building because not many people had good enough knowledge of building high buildings.
btw this is all that Bible says about the tower of Babel
Quote:The inscription also depicts the Tower of Babel from a front view, “clearly showing the relative proportions of the 7 steps including the temple on the top,” the Schøyen Collection stated.
The stele even features a line drawing of the ground plan of the temple, revealing both the outer walls and the inner arrangement of rooms.
Moreover, captions clearly identify the tower as the “great ziggurat of Babylon.”
Nowhere in the Bible is it mentioned that the tower is ziggurat and they even go furthering the myth by saying there were even seven steps “proportions of the 7 steps including the temple on the top,” Again, all that is said in Bible is that few men got together and started building the tower with brick - and that's it. There is no shape described, no time-frame, just that it was in or around Babylon. It could be ziggurat, then it could be some other building; it could have seven steps, but it could have no steps or hundred steps.
Babylon is one of the oldest cities in history and someone wrote that someone sometimes tried to build a tall building, so because it's so vague you can make a claim that it is historical because for the thousands of years that Babylon existed someone probably was trying to build a tall building and it probably collapsed - so what? This happened all the time. Just in medieval times hundreds of churches collapsed shortly after being built and even during building because not many people had good enough knowledge of building high buildings.
btw this is all that Bible says about the tower of Babel
Quote:Genesis 11:1-9
11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they 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; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"