successors.”12 Yet, we know that part of this population was integrated into the various spheres of society, just as happened to other populations deported by the Assyrian and Babylonian armies. In fact, the Bible itself claims that Jehoiachin, the king deposed by Nebuchadnezzar and taken as a captive to the capital of Mesopotamia, was forgiven and “for the rest of his life ate regularly at the king’s table.”13 In addition, cuneiform sources such as contracts and lists of rations and work teams attest that Jews owned lands and other goods. The practice of deportation was common within Mesopotamia, which saw in it the possibility of nullifying insurrections and introducing labor, specialized or not, into society.14
But for centuries with no cuneiform sources to attest to its history, Babylon soon became a discourse about otherness. The “gate of the god,” as its Sumerian name “ká.dingir.ra” designed, transformed itself into Babel (a hebrew equivalent of the Sumerian name) and thus endured to this day.
1.1.2 In the Beginning, Nimrod
One of the most striking episodes in the Old Testament is the one reported in Genesis 11. After the great Flood sent by biblical God, the survivors of the catastrophe settled in the land of Shinar15 and started the construction of a “tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.”16 This description finds parallels in the Mesopotamian conception itself. Were not the ancient ziggurats, and in particular that of Babylon,17 the Etemenanki,18 thought of as a link between the earth and the heavens, between the human and the divine? Had not Nebuchadnezzar II concieved the famous monument in order that its summit reached the sky?19 The logic is the same; however, Genesis transforms its intention into an act of disobedience, into the purpose of “making a name.”
The construction of the tower was a topic much discussed by historians and philosophers from the Greek and Roman worlds. According to Flavius Josephus, it constituted an artifice devised to avenge the death of the ancestors who had collapsed in the stormy waters.20 Its height had been conceived in order to survive a new catastrophe. However, the plan of revenge would be delayed, since God had decided “Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”21 He thus prevented understanding between its builders and dictated the division ad aeternum among human beings, the dissolution of languages, and the dispersion of people across the earth’s surface.
Playing with the words babel and balal (that is, “confusion”), the biblical writer fixed the inescapable destiny of Babylon and its history of condemnation, defining it as a place of disorder, where consensus and common sense would henceforth constitute mere chimeras. The evocation of Babel and its tower, recurrent in medieval and modern arts, intended to stress the impossibility of realizing human supremacy before the divine, and to highlight the capitulation of autocratic power.
In a futuristic civilization such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, for instance, the tower represented an emblem of the unsustainability of society in the manner in which it was operating – basing the authority and power of some on the labor force of others. The Babel capitals that appear in an intertitle of the film, oozing what appears to be the blood of the tower’s builders, alluded, therefore, to the disapproval of political power, in a city whose utopian cloth would gradually be unveiled in the light of slavery. More than synonymous with confusion, Babel was synonymous with human inability to find viable solutions for its experience as a community and as a society in dialogue with the transcendent.
The Tower of Babel became an ex libris of Babylonian perfidy. However, in the Genesis passage referring to it, its mentor is not revealed. Who was behind its conception? The authorities? The king? And who would that monarch be? It is the Greek authors who offer the answer, relying on the verses of the Genesis preceding the episode of the construction. In these, the only biblical character that denotes a relationship with Shinar, the vast plain on which the monument is built, is Nimrod, which the Old Testament refers to as a “a mighty hunter before the Lord.”22
It is important to note the probability that the word Nimrod derives from the Hebrew verb דרמ (“to rebel”).23 If this is the case, the biblical writer would have placed in his etymology all the subversion and iniquity that was imputed to the builder. In fact, the name expressed the essence and nature of its bearer in the Semitic mentality. However, several questions persist about the character of Nimrod. Was this king inspired by a historical figure? Which one? Why does the Old Testament account associate him with Cush (commonly identified with the geographical area of Ethiopia)?24 Some authors have even advanced the possibility of Nimrod deriving from a “Hebrew compound” equivalent to the Sargonid dynasty,25 converging in its figure kings as important as Sargon of Akkad,26 who achieved the first great unification and expansion in Mesopotamian lands, and his grandson Narâm-Sîn, who deified himself, trying in a more consistent way to overcome his human condition. Others have associated him with Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I, who conquered Babylon in the middle of the thirteenth century BC, or even with the god of war Ninurta, who was, like Nimrod, a valiant hunter.
Although Nimrod has a special importance in the Bible as he is the first character associated with Mesopotamia, it is up to authors such as Philo of Alexandria or Flavius Josephus to transform him into the great leader of the construction27 and even into a supernatural being. They depict him as a giant, the first among humans: “he was a giant against God, which thus declares the opposition of such beings to the deity.”28 Later, literature would become interested in this character and the giant with his bow would incorporate mythological literary themes from Dante to Victor Hugo.
The French Romantic author, for instance, reflects on the power of Nimrod’s bow, underlining the sin that was committed with this weapon: “Nemrod eleva l’arc au-dessus de sa tête; le cable lâché fit bruit d’une tempête, et, comme un éclair meurt quand on ferme les yeux, l’effrayant javelot disparaut dans le cieux.”29 The arrow launched by Nimrod towards heaven punctuates the heretic king’s defiant attitude towards divine power. The bow symbolizes the insult committed by secular power against the biblical god and, in parallel, its doom. The cinema also reconstructed this interesting episode, but as it did so it was no longer a copy of the biblical account but a composite plot woven over centuries and centuries, with contributions from different historical agents, from the Greeks, to the Romans, to modern authors. In John Huston’s The Bible: In the Beginning … (1966), for instance, Stephen Boyd embodies the Babylonian king, throwing the arrow into the sky, smiling sarcastically at a god who he does not recognize. An identical scene is repeated in Abraham: The Friend of God (2008).30
1.1.3 Daniel and the Ruin of the Neo-Babylonian Empire
The Book of Daniel constituted a fundamental vehicle for the knowledge of the final moments of the Neo-Babylonian empire before the archaeological discovery of Mesopotamia. The Book describes the events that contributed to the takeover of the city by the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus the Great. However, given it was written during the second century BC,31 and is contextually dated to the government of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, there is a distance of about four centuries from the time it was written to the episodes it reports. Plus, despite Daniel being a captive who learned “the language and literature of the Babylonians,”32 becoming a reader of dreams, as an exiled he could hardly dissociate himself from his Jewish cultural and religious matrix. Thus, conflicts with the Babylonian authorities were soon felt.
As we read the Prophet’s Book, now that we are able to compare his account with the Babylonian sources exhumed during the nineteenth- and twentieth-century excavations, an important question arises: why is Nabonidus, the last king of the eleventh dynasty of Babylon, not mentioned? We know that he was absent from the city for years,33 settling in the desert of Tayma34 and leaving his son Belshazzar (known in Akkadian sources as Bêl-shar-uṣur35) in charge of the throne. Notwithstanding,
