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Tanchuma Noach

Midrash

About this book
Chapter 18

The Holy One, blessed be He, thereupon declared: You evil men, because you have sinned with the words Come, let us, I shall confound you through those very words, as it is said: Come, let us go down there and confound their language (ibid., v. 7). R. Hiyya the son of Abba said: One third of the tower they erected was consumed in fire, another third was swallowed into the earth, and the remainder was left standing.⁠ Yet if one climbed to the summit of the remaining third, the palm trees in Jericho below appeared no larger than grasshoppers.

Texts in conversation

Compare Jubilees 10:26 and Tanchuma Noach 18

Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions · Rabbinic

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Summary

The Rabbinic Midrash Tanchuma Noach follows a tradition found in Jubilees where the Tower of Babel is not left standing but violently destroyed. This detail, not found in the Hebrew Bible, fills a narrative gap by giving the tower a definitive end.

Passages

Jubilees 10:26

Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions
25 For this reason the whole land of Shinar is called Babel, because the Lord confused all human language there, and from there they were dispersed into their cities, each according to his language and his nation. 26 And the Lord sent a mighty wind against the tower and overthrew it upon the earth, and it was between Asshur and Babylon in the land of Shinar, and they named it 'Overthrow'. 27 In the fourth week in the first year [1639] in its beginning in the thirty-fourth jubilee, they were dispersed from the land of Shinar.
170–125 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Jubilees

Tanchuma Noach 18

Rabbinic · Midrash
The Holy One, blessed be He, thereupon declared: You evil men, because you have sinned with the words Come, let us, I shall confound you through those very words, as it is said: Come, let us go down there and confound their language (ibid., v. 7). R. Hiyya the son of Abba said: One third of the tower they erected was consumed in fire, another third was swallowed into the earth, and the remainder was left standing. Yet if one climbed to the summit of the remaining third, the palm trees in Jericho below appeared no larger than grasshoppers.
500–800 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in Tanchuma Noach

References

"... There remained only to ask what finally happened to the tower, which, according to verse 5, had not only been started but perhaps even completed ('And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built'). The Bible says nothing of its fate. God makes the speech of the builders unintelligible and scatters them over the face of the earth, but the tower itself is not mentioned again, and one might presume from the text that God left it standing where it was ... Interpreters thus concluded that the tower was left as an unfinished monument, a view that seemed to confirm the claim of some that this or that half-destroyed or unfinished structure in the ancient Near East was in fact the abandoned tower. Indeed, if the tower now lay in ruins, perhaps it had not merely been abandoned, but destroyed ..."
James L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 128–129.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Jubilees 10:26 and Tanchuma Noach 18

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