The Book of Mormon and the Tower of Babel: A Scholarly Response

Examining the claim that the Book of Mormon’s dependence on the Tower of Babel narrative renders it non-historical — and why that claim fails under rigorous scrutiny.

Overview of the Critique

The LDS Discussions website argues that the Book of Mormon is fatally undermined because its Jaredite narrative in the Book of Ether depends on the Tower of Babel being a literal, historical event — and that the Tower of Babel, on the evidence of linguistics, archaeology, and biblical scholarship, is merely an etiological myth. The argument proceeds in a chain: if Babel is myth, the Jaredites are fictional; if the Jaredites are fictional, the twenty-four gold plates are fictional; if the plates are fictional, the Nephite interpreters (Urim and Thummim) are fictional; and therefore Joseph Smith’s entire prophetic claim collapses.

This response examines each link in that chain. It does not argue that the Tower of Babel was necessarily a global geological event matching a 19th-century literalist reading. What it demonstrates is that the LDS Discussions critique systematically mischaracterizes the state of scholarship, employs a false dilemma between “global mythological event” and “historical impossibility,” ignores substantial archaeological evidence, and fails entirely to engage the robust apologetic and scholarly literature that has addressed these questions for decades. When the actual evidence is assembled, the case against the Book of Mormon on Tower of Babel grounds dissolves.

Claim 1: Language Diversity Before Babel Proves Babel Is a Myth

The critique cites written records in Sumerian (c. 3500 BCE), Egyptian (c. 3300 BCE), Akkadian (c. 2800 BCE), Canaanite, and Eblaite (c. 2400 BCE) to argue that language diversity predates any plausible Tower of Babel date. This is a legitimate observation about ancient writing systems — but it does not say what the critique claims it says.

The dates given are dates of written attestation, not dates of language origin. Writing systems are invented to record languages that already exist. Sumerian writing was invented to record a spoken language that predates the cuneiform tablets by an unknown but significant margin. The existence of writing in 3500 BCE says nothing about when the spoken language differentiated from a common ancestor. The critique silently substitutes “earliest writing date” for “language origin date” — a fundamental category error.

Genesis 10 and Genesis 11 represent different literary strata — the so-called J and P sources — that were editorially interleaved. The ancient editors knew these texts covered different perspectives on the same underlying reality. Far from proving Babel is myth, the compositional complexity of Genesis demonstrates exactly what we expect of ancient Near Eastern textual tradition: non-linear narration, overlapping genealogies, and theological commentary interwoven with historical summary. This is normal for the genre.

Furthermore, a large body of scholarly opinion holds that the Tower of Babel narrative describes a regional event — specifically, the Mesopotamian heartland — not the origin of all language on earth. Dr. John Walton (Wheaton College), one of the foremost experts on Genesis in its ancient Near Eastern context, argues that the text refers to “one people” using “one language” (a lingua franca or administrative language) in the land of Shinar (lower Mesopotamia), not a universal claim about all humanity. On this reading, the critique’s entire linguistic argument is aimed at a strawman — a 19th-century naïve literalism that no serious LDS scholar actually defends.

“The story of the Tower of Babel is describing a historical situation in Mesopotamia — not an explanation of how all the world’s languages came to be. The scope is regional, the people are one group, and the event is the disruption of a unified cultural and linguistic project in the ancient Near East.”
— John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One and associated scholarship on Genesis 10–11 (InterVarsity Press)

The critique’s linguistic argument only succeeds if one assumes Babel must mean “origin of all human language globally.” That assumption is neither required by the text nor supported by the best current scholarship on ancient Near Eastern narrative. The argument fails on its own terms.

Claim 2: Babel Is a Copy of Sumerian Myths — Therefore It Never Happened

The critique cites the Sumerian composition “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta” (c. 2100 BCE) and an Assyrian text about the confounding of tongues as parallels that prove Genesis’s Babel narrative is derivative mythology. This argument contains a well-known logical fallacy: the genetic fallacy. The existence of thematically parallel texts does not establish that the event described never occurred. If a real, memorable civilizational rupture took place in ancient Mesopotamia — a political, ecological, or administrative collapse that scattered a previously unified population — we would expect multiple cultures to preserve independent memory of it in their oral and written traditions. Parallel traditions are evidence of a shared historical memory, not evidence of wholesale fabrication.

Furthermore, the critique’s claim that the Pentateuch was compiled in the 6th–5th century BCE and therefore could have borrowed from Babylonian sources during the captivity is a mainstream scholarly position — but it cuts both ways. If Israelite editors living in Babylon were encoding real historical memory of Mesopotamia’s great ziggurat culture in their text, that text reflects genuine historical knowledge of real buildings, real kings, and real events. The theological packaging is literary; the historical substrate is real.

This is precisely what David Bokovoy’s argument about Babylonian polemic confirms, though the critique misreads its own citation. A polemic against ziggurat worship would be pointless unless ziggurats — and the cultural-religious claims attached to them — were real and historically present in the experience of the Israelite authors. The argument from literary borrowing proves too much: it establishes that the Babel narrative is theologically interested, not that the underlying event is fictitious.

Claim 3: The Book of Ether’s Connection to Babel Proves the Jaredites Are Fictional

This is the pivotal claim, and it rests on an unexamined assumption: that an ancient text recording a real migration cannot use the language, imagery, and theological framework of a sacred narrative tradition. This assumption is false, and it is refuted by the very nature of ancient historiography. Ancient historians did not write in the mode of 21st-century empirical scholarship. They wrote within narrative frameworks drawn from their sacred traditions, using the idioms available to them. A Jaredite scribe preserving the memory of his people’s origin would naturally frame that origin within the most powerful narrative available — the story of the great scattering, the time of the tower. This is not evidence of fiction. It is evidence of a sophisticated literary tradition encoding real memory in culturally resonant form.

Moreover, the LDS Discussions critique entirely ignores the most sophisticated scholarly engagement with this question. Walker Wright’s peer-reviewed study in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship (Volume 62, 2024, pp. 319–333) demonstrates that the Book of Ether’s opening narrative is a deliberate, carefully constructed anti-Babel polemic — a theological counterpoint to the Babel narrative that only makes sense if both the author and the expected reader knew the Babel story as a framework. Wright identifies six systematic contrasts between the Babel narrative (Genesis 10–11) and the Jaredite origin narrative (Ether 1–6):

Walker Wright — “The Man with No Name,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, Vol. 62 (2024), pp. 319–333

The brother of Jared is deliberately left unnamed throughout the Book of Ether — a pointed contrast to the Babel builders who sought to “make us a name” (Genesis 11:4). The mighty unnamed man falls down before God on a mountain of “exceeding height,” achieving what the tower-builders could never reach: actual divine presence. Babel’s people resist the divine command to fill the earth; the Jaredites obey it, spreading across the promised land. Nimrod is a “mighty hunter” who stands against the Lord; the brother of Jared is a “mighty man highly favored of the Lord” who falls before him. Language at Babel is confounded; language among the Jaredites is preserved. The tower reaches toward heaven and God must ironically descend to see it; on Mount Shelem the brother of Jared ascends and is received into God’s presence.

Wright draws on John D. Currid (Against the Gods: The Polemical Theology of the Old Testament, 2013), Michael S. Heiser (The Unseen Realm, 2015), Bruce K. Waltke (Genesis: A Commentary, 2001), Augustine (The City of God), Philo of Alexandria, and Josephus (Jewish Antiquities).

This level of systematic literary inversion is the signature of an author who knew the Babel narrative with intimate precision and was consciously writing against it. The critique treats the Book of Ether’s relationship to Babel as a liability — proof of dependence on myth. The actual literary evidence demonstrates sophisticated engagement with the Babel tradition that is consistent with, and actually argues for, antiquity of composition. A 19th-century New England farm boy improvising fiction would not have constructed a six-point anti-Babel polemic invisible to readers for nearly two centuries.

Claim 4: There Is No Archaeological Evidence for the Tower of Babel

This claim is directly and definitively refuted by the archaeological record. The critique makes no mention of the Tower of Babel Stele — a baked clay tablet discovered in the ruins of Babylon, now held in the Schøyen Collection (Oslo), examined and published by Dr. Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian at SOAS, University of London, one of the world’s leading experts on ancient Mesopotamia.

The stele is a black ceremonial stone approximately 50 centimeters tall bearing a relief carving showing a stepped tower with seven levels and a figure identified as Nebuchadnezzar II. The inscription reads in part: “Etemenanki, Ziggurat Babel” — explicitly identifying the structure — and boasts: “From the Upper Sea [Mediterranean] to the Lower Sea [Persian Gulf] the Far-Flung Lands and Teeming Peoples of the Habitations I Mobilized In Order to Construct This Ziggurat of Babylon.” Professor George’s published assessment: “This is a very strong piece of evidence that the Tower of Babel story was inspired by this real building.”

The Etemenanki ziggurat itself was excavated by German archaeologist Robert Koldewey beginning in 1913. Its foundations are still visible at Babylon in modern Iraq. The base measured approximately 91 meters (300 feet) per side; the structure originally stood seven to eight staged levels tall, estimated at 70–90 meters in height. The “Esagila” cuneiform tablet from Uruk (229 BCE, a copy of an older text, now in the Louvre) provides detailed architectural specifications for the entire temple complex. Andrew George published an authoritative reedition of this tablet in 1992, and it is among the most studied documents in Assyriology.

The Tower of Babel, understood as Etemenanki in Babylon, is one of the best-attested architectural monuments of the ancient world. It was a real building. It was enormous. It was built by the mobilized labor of peoples from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The critique’s failure to mention any of this is not a minor oversight — it is the omission of the most directly relevant physical evidence.

Claim 5: The Valley of Nimrod Reference Proves Fictional Borrowing from Genesis

The critique notes that Ether 2:1 places the Jaredites in “the valley of Nimrod, being called after the mighty hunter” and argues this proves the Book of Mormon is borrowing fictional Genesis geography. This argument actually proves the opposite. The name Nimrod for a geographical location in Mesopotamia is not a Genesis invention — it is attested in ancient Near Eastern geography. The ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud (ancient Kalhu, excavated by Austen Henry Layard beginning in 1845) preserves precisely this name. The presence of a “valley of Nimrod” in the Jaredite narrative is consistent with a text originating in a real Mesopotamian geographical context, not evidence of 19th-century fiction-writing.

Furthermore, Walker Wright’s analysis demonstrates that the Nimrod reference serves a deliberate literary function as part of the anti-Babel polemic: the Jaredites’ departure from the “valley of Nimrod” is their exodus from the entire symbolic world of Babel’s civilization. They are leaving the domain of the proud “mighty hunter” to follow a humble “mighty man highly favored of the Lord.” The geographical name is not incidental. It is theologically load-bearing — and its presence in the text is a mark of ancient literary intentionality, not anachronistic borrowing.

Claim 6: If Babel Is Mythical, the Nephite Interpreters Cannot Be Historical

This is the most ambitious link in the critique’s chain, and it fails because it rests on all the prior failures. The argument is: Babel must be historical for Jaredites to be real; Jaredites must be real for the twenty-four plates to exist; the twenty-four plates must exist for the interpreters to exist; the interpreters must exist for Joseph Smith’s translation claims to be true. Pull out Babel and the chain collapses.

But “Babel” in this chain does not mean “a global supernatural event with no historical basis whatsoever.” As demonstrated above, it refers at minimum to a real, attested building complex in ancient Babylon around which profound cultural and religious memory crystallized across multiple ancient Near Eastern traditions. A group departing the Mesopotamian cultural sphere during the period of the great ziggurats — carrying records on metal plates — is not historically implausible. Metal-plate record-keeping is extensively attested in the ancient Near East, confirmed by inscriptions on bronze, silver, and gold from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The practice is not an anachronism; it is an ancient standard for preserving records of real importance.

The chain of inference the critique constructs is only as strong as its weakest link. The weakest link is the premise that Babel is “simply a myth with no historical basis whatsoever.” That premise is not supported by the evidence the critique itself cites, and it is directly contradicted by the archaeological record the critique omits. Remove that false premise and the entire chain falls apart — not in the direction the critique intends, but in favor of the plausibility of the Book of Mormon narrative.

The Deeper Issue: What “Historical” Actually Requires of Ancient Texts

The LDS Discussions critique operates with an unspoken and undefended principle: that if a text contains any mythological or etiological elements, the entire text must be non-historical. This principle, if applied consistently, would render virtually all ancient historiography — including the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and the Sumerian King List — “fictional.” Ancient authors did not distinguish between theological interpretation and historical record the way post-Enlightenment Western historians do. They embedded real events in theological frameworks because for them, the theological meaning of an event was inseparable from the event itself.

The Book of Ether presents a text that, at the level of literary structure, behaves exactly as we would expect an authentic ancient Near Eastern record to behave: it uses the available sacred narrative framework (the Babel tradition) to anchor a migration story, it employs a systematic anti-Babel polemic consistent with ancient Hebrew polemical theology, it references real Mesopotamian geographical names, and it presents metal-plate record-keeping that matches attested ancient practice. None of these features are consistent with 19th-century American frontier fiction. All of them are consistent with genuine antiquity.

Whether God literally touched sixteen stones, whether the brother of Jared literally saw the finger of the Lord, whether the migration literally happened precisely as described — these are theological questions that lie beyond the reach of archaeology and linguistics. What archaeology and linguistics can tell us is whether the cultural and historical context of the Book of Ether is authentic. And on that question, the evidence is consistently favorable to the Book of Mormon, not against it.

Summary: Six Decisive Failures in the LDS Discussions Argument

1. Category error on writing dates. Earliest writing dates are not earliest language-divergence dates. The linguistic argument against Babel’s historicity uses the wrong kind of evidence.
2. Strawman on scope. The leading scholarly model (Walton and others) holds that Babel describes a regional Mesopotamian event, not the global origin of all language. The critique refutes a position no informed scholar holds.
3. Genetic fallacy on mythology. Parallel mythological traditions do not establish that an event never occurred. They establish that the event was memorable enough to enter multiple traditions — which is evidence for, not against, a real historical kernel.
4. Omission of decisive archaeological evidence. The Tower of Babel Stele, the Esagila cuneiform tablet, the excavated foundations of Etemenanki at Babylon, and the published scholarship of Prof. Andrew George (SOAS) are nowhere mentioned. These constitute direct physical evidence for the reality of the Babel building and its cultural significance.
5. Failure to engage the scholarly apologetic literature. Walker Wright’s 2024 peer-reviewed article demonstrating the six-point anti-Babel polemic in Ether, BYU RSC scholarship, and Interpreter Foundation materials are all absent from the critique’s engagement.
6. Invalid chain of inference. The critique’s logical chain collapses at the first link because Babel as a historical-cultural event is archaeologically attested. The presence of mythological elements in the narrative does not negate the historical substrate on which those elements operate.

Conclusion

The LDS Discussions argument that the Book of Mormon is non-historical because it depends on the Tower of Babel narrative does not hold up under scholarly examination. The Tower of Babel, understood as the Etemenanki ziggurat complex at ancient Babylon, is one of the most archaeologically documented structures in the ancient world. The Babel tradition is attested across multiple ancient Near Eastern cultures — a pattern consistent with real historical memory, not independently invented mythology. The Book of Ether’s use of the Babel framework is not naïve borrowing of mythology; it is a sophisticated anti-Babel polemic that only makes sense from within an ancient literary tradition that knew the Babel story as sacred history.

The critique requires the reader to accept, without argument, that any text containing mythological or etiological elements is thereby entirely fictional. That principle, applied consistently, would eliminate most of ancient world literature from historical consideration. It is not a scholarly standard. It is a polemical standard deployed selectively against Latter-day Saint scripture.

The Tower of Babel was real. The Book of Ether’s engagement with the Babel tradition is literarily sophisticated and entirely consistent with ancient authorship. The scholarly conversation on these questions — far richer than LDS Discussions acknowledges — continues to produce findings that are consistent with, and in several respects remarkably corroborative of, the ancient origins of the Book of Mormon.

Selected Sources and Further Reading

Walker Wright, “The Man with No Name: The Story of the Brother of Jared as an Anti-Babel Polemic,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, Vol. 62 (2024), pp. 319–333. interpreterfoundation.org

Andrew R. George, “The Tower of Babylon Stele Found in Babylon,” Iraq (Cambridge University Press); reedition of the Esagila tablet (1992). Archaeological coverage: Madain Project — Tower of Babel Stele.

John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (2009) and Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (2006). InterVarsity Press. On the regional scope of the Babel narrative within ancient Near Eastern genre.

John D. Currid, Against the Gods: The Polemical Theology of the Old Testament (2013). Crossway. Documents the systematic use of polemical inversion in the Hebrew Bible against surrounding cultures — the framework within which the Book of Ether’s anti-Babel structure operates.

Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (2015). Lexham Press. Links the Babel narrative to the Genesis 6 divine rebellion through linguistic analysis of “mighty ones.”

BYU Religious Studies Center, “The Tower of Babel, the Jaredites, and the Nature of God,” in They Shall Grow Together. rsc.byu.edu

Interpreter Foundation, KnoWhy OTL06C, “What Was All the Confusion About at the Tower of Babel?” interpreterfoundation.org

Michael R. Ash, “Is the Tower of Babel Historical or Mythological?” FAIR Latter-day Saints Blog, November 2014. fairlatterdaysaints.org