I wondered what on earth I could teach my girls about the Tower of Babel. I mean, they have read their Bible. And they are very familiar with the story. What else was there? It wasn’t until I began digging a bit deeper, using the Mystery of History text as my starting point, that I realised just how much fun this could be.
Before we get to the activities we did alongside this lesson (some seriously funny ones at that!), I thought we could learn a bit more about The Tower of Babel first.
The Tower of Babel: A Homeschool Study
The story of the Tower of Babel is one of the Bible’s most famous stories. Even children who know little about ancient Mesopotamia may have heard of the enormous tower people attempted to build toward heaven.
Check out my HUGE ancient Mesopotamian Unit Study page:
But when we study the Tower of Babel alongside ancient Mesopotamian history, the story becomes even more interesting.
Where was Babel? What kind of tower might the biblical writers have had in mind? And could the great ziggurats of Mesopotamia help us understand the story?
Let’s take a closer look.
The Story of the Tower of Babel
The Tower of Babel appears in Genesis 11:1–9.
According to the biblical account, the people of the earth originally spoke the same language. As they travelled eastward, they settled on a plain in the land of Shinar.
There they decided to build a city and a tower.
They said:
“Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens…”
They wanted to make a name for themselves and prevent themselves from being scattered across the earth.
God saw what they were doing and confused their language so that they could no longer understand one another. The people were then scattered over the earth, and construction of the city stopped.
The place became known as Babel.
For a homeschool study, it is worth reading the whole passage together. It is only nine verses long, so even younger children can hear the complete account before investigating its historical setting.
Where Was Babel?
The biblical story places Babel in the land of Shinar.
Shinar is generally associated with ancient Babylonia in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq.
The Hebrew name Babel is also the name used in the Bible for Babylon, one of the most important cities in the ancient world.
This connection is immediately interesting.
Rather than imagining the Tower of Babel as an isolated tower standing in the middle of nowhere, we can place the story within the wider world of ancient Mesopotamian cities, temples, kings and monumental building projects.
Click here if you’d like to learn how to make your own paper mache map of ancient Mesopotamia:
Was the Tower of Babel a Ziggurat?
This is one of the most interesting questions to investigate with children.
Ancient Mesopotamian cities often contained enormous stepped temple structures called ziggurats.
A ziggurat was not simply a very tall building. It formed part of a religious complex and was associated with the worship of the city’s gods.
Ziggurats were constructed in stages or terraces, creating a huge stepped appearance. Their cores were generally made from mud brick, while more durable fired bricks could be used on the outside.
Genesis specifically mentions the building materials used at Babel:
“Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.”
It then explains that the builders used brick instead of stone and bitumen for mortar.
This is a lovely historical detail to notice with children because mud brick, fired brick, and bitumen were important building materials in ancient Mesopotamia, where good building stone was relatively scarce in the southern plains.
The Bible never actually calls the Tower of Babel a ziggurat, so we cannot simply say that it was one. However, knowledge of Mesopotamian ziggurats helps us understand the sort of monumental tower that an ancient audience might have imagined.
Etemenanki: The Great Ziggurat of Babylon
One Mesopotamian building is particularly interesting when studying the Tower of Babel.
Ancient Babylon possessed a huge ziggurat known as Etemenanki, associated with the god Marduk.
Its Sumerian name is usually translated as ‘House of the Foundation Platform of Heaven and Earth.’
Etemenanki was an enormous structure. Ancient evidence indicates that in its later form its base measured roughly 90 metres square, and it may have risen to a similar height.
It would have dominated the surrounding city.
For people approaching Babylon across the relatively flat Mesopotamian landscape, a structure of this size must have been an extraordinary sight.
Because Etemenanki was located in Babylon and because of its enormous scale, scholars have long discussed whether Babylonian ziggurat traditions may lie somewhere behind the biblical Tower of Babel story.
That does not mean archaeologists have discovered a building that can be labelled ‘the Tower of Babel.’ The relationship between the biblical story and particular Mesopotamian monuments is much more complicated.
This makes it an excellent opportunity to teach children the difference between evidence and interpretation.
We know Babylon existed and contained an enormous ziggurat.
We know that Mesopotamians built monumental structures from brick.
And, we also know that Genesis tells a story about people building a city and a great tower at Babel.
Exactly how those pieces of evidence relate to one another is a question historians, archaeologists and biblical scholars continue to discuss.
A Tower That Reaches to the Heavens
Children often imagine the builders trying literally to construct a tower all the way into heaven.
However, descriptions of extremely tall buildings as reaching towards heaven were not unusual in the ancient Near East.
The phrase communicates the enormous scale and ambition of the project.
This gives us another interesting question to discuss:
What were the builders really trying to achieve?
Genesis gives us an important clue:
“Let us make a name for ourselves.”
The story is therefore not simply about architecture.
It is also about human ambition, pride, power and the desire to create something so impressive that the builders themselves would become famous.
Why Did God Scatter the People?
Another detail is easy to overlook.
The builders say they want to build the city so they will not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.
But by the end of the story, that is exactly what happens.
God confuses their language, communication breaks down, and the people are scattered.
This makes the Tower of Babel story particularly interesting to study after the earlier chapters of Genesis. Children can look for repeated ideas about humanity, obedience, pride, judgement and the spreading of people across the earth.
Older children can go further and ask whether the story primarily explains the existence of different languages, teaches a theological lesson about human pride, describes humanity’s attempts to concentrate power, or does several of these things at once.
Babel, Babylon and Wordplay
The story also includes clever wordplay.
Genesis connects the name Babel with the Hebrew verb balal, meaning to confuse or mix.
The story therefore explains the name through language confusion.
But the Babylonian name for Babylon came from the Akkadian Bāb-ilim, commonly understood as meaning ‘Gate of God’ or ‘Gate of the God.’
This gives older children a fascinating glimpse of how biblical writers sometimes used names and wordplay in their storytelling.
Can We Find the Tower of Babel Today?
Not in the simple sense of finding an intact tower and identifying it as the biblical Tower of Babel.
Babylon itself, however, is a real archaeological site in modern Iraq.
Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of its temples, walls, palaces, streets and monumental buildings, including remains associated with the great ziggurat Etemenanki.
The Babylon visible through archaeology largely belongs to periods much later than the world traditionally associated with the early chapters of Genesis, which is another reason we need to be careful about making direct connections.
For children, this is an important historical lesson:
Archaeology does not always give us neat answers.
Sometimes it provides evidence that helps us understand the world in which an ancient story was told without proving every detail of the story itself.
The Tower of Babel: More Than Just a Tower
The Tower of Babel is only a very short biblical account, but it opens the door to an enormous amount of learning.
It can lead children into biblical studies, archaeology, ancient architecture, engineering, geography, languages and the history of Mesopotamia.
Most importantly, studying the historical world surrounding the story helps children move beyond the familiar picture of people simply building an impossibly tall tower.
They begin to see Babel within the landscape of ancient Mesopotamia, a world of vast cities, mud-brick buildings, towering ziggurats and ambitious rulers.
And that makes those nine short verses in Genesis an unexpectedly rich starting point for a homeschool investigation.
Tower of Babel: Reading
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Firstly, I read from the Mystery of History text book. Next, to supplement, I read the chapters about the Tower of Babel from the DK Family Bible (to this day, one of my favourite resources for Bible time). We also used the New Unger’s Bible Handbook to dig a bit deeper. If your looking for a book to read yourself, I can highly recommend Tower of Babel: The Cultural History of Our Ancestors by Bodie Hodge
Writing about Tower of Babel
Picture Narration of Bruegel’s ‘Tower of Babel’
Multimedia Options for Learning About the Tower of Babel
I read the girls three articles from the Kids Answers in Genesis Magazine
Tower of Babel: Digging Deeper – King Nimrod
Engineering Project: Build your own Tower of Babel
First, the girls tried building the tower with just plastic cups:
Then asked if they could try using paper to stabilise:
Which, of course, worked much better, giving the structure some much needed stability:
However, even the paper and cup tower needed the girls careful handling, otherwise they found this happen:
Oh dear! Back to the drawing board, so to speak:
Carefully, they tried to construct a tower higher than they were. They were determined this time:
But, alas, the paper cups had their own ideas!
Charlotte was having none of it! She helped her younger sisters build a tower which almost touched the clouds (or at the very least, was heading up towards the ceiling!):
Job done! The girls took photos and create a note page for their folders.
Tower of Babel Fun Game: Communication Confusion
This was a fun game to play:
So, Thomas had to say the number 1 card with his mouth full of marsh-mallows. Unfortunately, he found this very hard. Between gagging, I took some photos which he may very well kill me for putting on my blog 🙂
Charlotte took on card 2. We decided she had to attempt to get her point across using absolutely no speech, grunts or props 🙂 She hated this! Lol!
Gary tried to communicate card 3 using rhyming slang:
Lillie used Ob language to communicate card 4 ( she pre-prepared her card on a white board):
B7 did her card using pictograms/pictures on the white board:
…which she did with remarkable ease and so quickly, I managed to get only one photo.
Finally, it was A9, who finished off the Bible verse only mouthing her words, no whispering. This was much harder that I thought it was going to be…
This was GREAT fun 🙂
Possibly, I had more fun than the rest of them put together! Having created the game, I couldn’t actually take part. So, I just sat back and giggled at everyone else. There was a lot of fodder for teasing. Just saying.
Tower of Babel Multiple Language Pairs Game
A fun pairs game from Bible Story Printables. There are two cards for each language. The children placed them all face down on the carpet and took it in turns to pick up two at a time:
I was pleased by all we did. Next up, Gilgamesh!
I have also created a MEGA Mesopotamia Unit Study post which is full to the brim of free printables and heaps of activities. Do take a look!
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