The Materials Used to Build It
M. M. Kalisch, Ph. D. Genesis 11:4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach to heaven; and let us make us a name… The materials generally used for the construction of Babylonian buildings are here most faithfully described (ver. 3). As in Egypt, the edifices of Mesopotamia consisted of sun-dried, but often also burnt bricks, baked of the purest clay, and sometimes mixed with chopped straw, which materially enhances their compactness and hardness; these bricks were generally covered with inscriptions, promising to prove of the greatest historical value. But instead of mortar, the Babylonians used as a cement that celebrated asphalt or bitumen, which is nowhere found in such excellence and abundance as in the neighbourhood of Babylon. One of the most gifted of the modern explorers declared the ruins of Birs-Nimroud a specimen of the perfection of Babylonian masonry, and remarked, "that the cement by which the bricks were united is of so tenacious a quality, that it is almost impossible to detach one from the mass entire" (Layard, "Nineveh and Babylon," p. 499). Nothing but the violence of a fearful conflagration, the ravages of which are manifest in the ruins of Birs-Nimroud, would have been able to annihilate a building which appeared to be beyond the destructive power of time. (M. M. Kalisch, Ph. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. WEB: They said, "Come, let's build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let's make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth."