Tower of Babel
1
7.7
- proper noun
- /ˈtaʊər əv ˈbeɪbəl/
- Literature
:
Torre de Babel
- The story of the Tower of Babel teaches us about the consequences of pride and ambition.
Then the flood comes, or you erect the Tower of Babel.
- Then the flood comes, or you erect the Tower of Babel.
- Why is the temple of Marduk, the city God of of Babylon, on top of the Tower of Babel?
- And so how do you get this Tower of Babel to communicate and to align on something?
Examples
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It may have begun at the Tower of Babel, when Nimrod, aptly named, decided he was wiser than God and set out to bring the whole world together in one place in defiance of the wishes of the Almighty.
Blog text (3) -
You know what happened to the Tower of Babel, don't you?
Fiction book (1997) -
But now the Tower of Babel is ancient history.
Fiction book (1998) -
And so how do you get this Tower of Babel to communicate and to align on something?
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Once he had done that, he found a way to get them to do what he wanted to do, and that first project was in building the Tower of Babel.
Blog text (3) -
I can find religious ideas interesting in some ways, but mostly on the basis of, "So that's why they believed there are different languages?" for the Tower of Babel story and other oddities.
Blog text (34) -
We are descended from the peoples of the time of Nimrod, the time of the Tower of Babel... that is when the great migration came from the cradle of civilization, the Middle East.
Blog text (34) -
At the time of Nimrod, while the Tower of Babel was being constructed, Yahweh confounded the peoples and gave them their own languages so that they could not communicate with each other.
Blog text (34) -
His earliest myths attest to that fear: Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus.
Fiction book (1998) -
In the city of Babylon, the Tower of Babel was said to be an attempt to reach the heavens.
Synonyms
11
9.9
A tall tower people try to build to reach heaven that God stops by making them speak different languages
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is literally composed from 'tower' + 'Babel', so at a structural level it denotes a tower associated with Babel and is partially transparent. However, the specific biblical story and the extended metaphorical meanings (divine intervention, language confusion, human ambition) require cultural or background knowledge that a B1 learner who only knows the constituent words may not have, so the meaning is not fully predictable from the parts.
Etymology
Tower of Babel comes from a Bible story where people built a very tall tower, but God made them speak different languages so they could not understand each other. That's why Tower of Babel is used today for a place or situation of 'confused' talk or 'failed communication'.