Living IN the World but not OF the World 2007) claims that “Shinar” means “to shake out” because this is what God did at Babel to disperse mankind. For instance, Ball (1895) executes some rather interesting linguistic maneuvers to show that “Shinar” may well mean “date palm.” Stinehart (2010) makes a rather complicated case for the meaning, “with the Hurrian brothers,” based on the assumption that Shinar is a Hurrian, not Semitic, word. There is a very wide range of proposed meanings of the name “Shinar,” including some that seem rather a stretch. We will have further occasion to refer to Semitic language variations of place names in this paper. 1 This is not an exhaustive list, but it makes the point that when dealing with the ancient Middle East, a place name can hide out under various spellings. 35–36) Sangara, Singara, Sinar, Sanhar, Sangar, Sanar (Albright 1924) plus Senaar in the Brenton LXX, and Sennaar in the NETS LXX. The many Semitic languages, plus transcription from their writing systems, would also account for the claimed spelling variations of “Shinar.” Some versions of “Shinar” are Sanhar (Dillmann 1897, p. 71–73, for a discussion of the ancient Semitic languages.) These Semitic languages were spoken in many parts of the ancient Middle Eastern lands. Ancient languages such as Akkadian and Chaldean were Semitic Assyrian, Aramaic, and Arabic are included in this group as well. 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
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