As we shall see further on, the language spoken in Shinar was one of the rather large family of related Semitic languages, of which Hebrew is a member, all with their own slightly different spelling variations of words. The word that is translated “Shinar” in our Scripture is often assumed to be the Hebrew form of this place name, but this is not necessarily the case, since Shinar was not a land where Hebrew was the local language. Our search for the Tower of Babel will therefore begin by locating the land of Shinar. In Shinar they rebelled against God and set out to build a city and tower to make a name for themselves and keep from scattering (Genesis 11:4).

Genesis 11:2 says that they eventually settled in a plain in Shinar according to the Jewish historian, Josephus (1736a) (Antiquities 1:4:1), this was the first place where the multiplying group of people lived after leaving the mountains. Keywords: Tower of Babel, Shinar, Erech, Akkad, Calneh, Tell Brak, Tell Fakhariya, Tell Aqab, Khabur River, Mesopotamia, geology of Mesopotamia, Babylon, archaeology, ancient history, Middle East, remote sensing IntroductionĪfter the biblical Flood of Genesis 7–8, Noah and his family came out of the Ark in the mountains of Ararat to start new lives in a strange world. River triangle, not far from Tell Brak, which is the missing city of Akkad.

Northeastern Syria today and that the remnants of the Tower must be located in the Upper Khabur However, an analysis of history, geography,Īnd geology, shows that Shinar cannot have been in the south, but rather was a territory in what is Mesopotamia and that Babel was located at Babylon. Widely considered that Shinar, where the Bible says the Babel event took place, was a territory in south The enduring archaeological question, therefore, is where the Tower of Babel was built. That took place after the worldwide Flood, at a time when the earth’s population still lived together in The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is believed by many to be the record of a real historical event

Where was the tower of babel