Babel is the biblical name for Babylon, an ancient city belonging to the Lower Mesopotamia region. This town managed to become a power although over the years it lost importance until it was abandoned. Today, its ruins are on Iraqi territory.
Babel was founded by Nimrod, a powerful tyrant – Noah’s great-grandson – who opposed God. The city remained in history and popular imagination for an immense tower that tried to reach the sky: the Tower of Babel. It is a construction that, according to historical data, may have existed in reality, although the data later merged with mythology.
The Bible indicates that Nimrod ordered to build the Tower of Babel to reach heaven. God, seeing that people worked together towards that goal, made the decision to confuse them and thus create the different languages. Unable to understand each other, the men had trouble building the tower, which was erected faulty and ultimately failed.
Nimrod is also known as Nimrod and he is a Mesopotamian monarch who founded the first kingdom after the universal Flood, a fact that places him as the first king in history. In the Bible we find it in chapter 10 of Genesis and its name is also identified with various ruins. According to the hypothesis about the authorship of the Bible on which we base ourselves, the first reference to this tyrannical character may have been conceived around the year 950 BC. C. by the Yahvist writers, or between 1480 a. C. and 1450 a. C. in charge of Moisés.
From this legend, the idea of babel (written with a lower case initial as indicated by the DigoPaulin its dictionary) is associated with confusion, disorder or disorder. The concept is also used to name the heterogeneous. For example: “The meeting of the directive committee was a babel: no agreement was reached”, “We want the festival to be a babel, with artistic manifestations of various disciplines”, “Due to the immigration of the last decades, the city it has become a babel ”.
With regard to its etymology, it is quite probable that the term babel derives from Bab-il, which in Akkadian can be understood as “gate of God.” This name, for its part, must also have been translated from the Sumerian Ka-dingirra (k). If we refer to the account of the rise of the tower present in the Bible, for its part, this word could have been derived from balbál, a verb that in Hebrew means “to confuse”.
It is important to understand that if we took the biblical story of the Tower of Babel literally, then we would accept that all languages were created in an instant by God, and that there were no centuries of cultural development that led to their emergence. This capacity of God is already exposed in Genesis, since when he creates Adam he also gives him a language so that he can name all the species that he finds around him.
In 2006, a film titled ” Babel ” was released, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, written by Guillermo Arriaga and starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Rinko Kikuchi, Adriana Barraza and Gael García Bernal, among others. With her, González Iñárritu completed his ” Trilogy of death “, whose other two films are ” Amores perros ” and ” 21 grams “. Broadly speaking, the story focuses on the experiences of three groups of people who are in different countries: a girl who lives in Japan, a North American couple who are on vacation in Morocco and a nanny from Mexico who works in the United States.
