Babel is the biblical name for Babylon, an ancient city in Lower Mesopotamia.
Babel is the biblical name for Babylon , an ancient city belonging to the region of Lower Mesopotamia . This town managed to become a power although over the years it lost importance until it was abandoned. Today, its ruins are in Iraqi territory.
According to Genesis , Babel was founded by Nimrod , a powerful tyrant - Noah's great-grandson - who opposed God . The city remained in history and in the popular imagination for an immense tower that sought 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.
Nimrod is also known as Nimrod and is a Mesopotamian monarch who founded the first kingdom after the Great 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 Yahwist writers, or between 1480 BC. C. and 1450 BC. C. in charge of Moses.
The tower of Babel
The Bible indicates that Nimrod ordered the tower of Babel to be built to reach heaven. God , seeing that people worked together with that objective, made the decision to confuse them and thus created different languages . Unable to understand each other, the men had trouble building the tower, which was erected defective and ultimately failed.
It is important to understand that if we were to take 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 ability 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 he finds around him.
With respect to etymology , it is quite likely 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 story of the emergence of the tower present in the Bible, for its part, this word could have derived from balbál , a verb that in Hebrew means "to confuse."
According to the Bible, the different languages were created by God to make the construction of the tower of Babel difficult.
Disorder or confusion
From this legend, the idea of babel (written with a lowercase initial letter as indicated by the Royal Spanish Academy in its dictionary ) is associated with confusion , disorder or disarray .
The concept is also used to name the heterogeneous . For example: "The meeting of the board of directors was a babel: no agreement was reached" , "We want the festival to be a babel, with artistic manifestations from various disciplines" , "Due to the immigration of recent decades, the city "It has become a babel."
The movie "Babel"
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 it, 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, an American couple who is on vacation in Morocco, and a nanny from Mexico who works in the United States. Joined.