In the first episode of this series we saw that the memory of Eden was not erased. After the Flood, it was inherited by the descendants of Noah, who attempted to recover it in their own way and without returning to the Creator.
The peoples who inhabited the ancient region of Sumer were a mixture of descendants of Ham and Shem—people who knew the story of Adam and Eve, the fall, the judgment of the Flood, and the Voice that once guided our first ancestors. That memory even came to be expressed in their art, in their buildings, in their symbols, and in the way they conceived existence.
According to the Bible, Sumer and Babylon were founded by descendants of Noah. Nimrod, grandson of Ham, raised cities such as Babel and Akkad. Asshur, a descendant of Shem, founded the northern region. Archaeology confirms that the first civilizations arose in these areas, which aligns with the biblical account.
Ezekiel confirms the geographical origin of the Israelites in the land of Shinar, where Noah and his sons settled after the Flood:
“And she increased her harlotries; for when she saw men portrayed upon the wall, images of the Chaldeans portrayed in vermilion, girded with belts on their loins, with dyed turbans on their heads, all of them having the appearance of officers, after the manner of the men of Babylon, of Chaldea, the land of their birth, she lusted after them at first sight…”
(Ezekiel 23, Reina-Valera 1960)
According to Genesis, Noah was the tenth from Adam, and Abraham the twentieth. Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldeans, in Sumer, and was a descendant of Shem, son of Noah. This shows that the inhabitants of Babel knew very well the story of Adam, the Garden, and the expulsion—because they were direct descendants of those who lived it and transmitted it.
In the book Cory’s Ancient Fragments, the author comments, regarding the writings of the Babylonian priest and historian Berossus, that it was surprising to find such a close coincidence between his historical information and the Bible’s information about the ten generations from Adam to Noah—not related in names, but in number. In other words, outside Hebrew belief we find a priest of the god Bel confirming the biblical account of the generations from Adam to Noah.
The Tower of Babel was not only an architectural feat. It was a spiritual act of rebellion—an attempt to reach the Kingdom without having learned to keep the Word. Babel tried to be a human copy of the Garden of God: a construction of power without obedience, a city where man made himself god, and where religion was born as a system of spiritual self-sufficiency. There a form of communication with heaven was conceived—a heaven from which they had been separated because they transgressed the first spiritual Law: not to involve themselves with the evil that already existed.
The name “Babel,” in Akkadian, means “gate of heaven” (bab-ilu).
And this meaning connects deeply with what humanity still remembered: that there had been a portal between heaven and earth, an entry into the domains of God. But instead of waiting for the fulfillment of the Word and the path traced by the Creator, they tried to open that gate on their own, on their own terms.
The ziggurat of Babylon was called “the house of the foundation of heaven and earth.” The name the Babylonians gave the tower was not merely poetic. It was deeply spiritual, and it revealed a sacralized, geomantic conception of space, ground, and stones.
Although “geomancy” did not yet exist as it would later develop in the Arab or Greek world, the Babylonians did have a sacred conception of reality. The “foundation” referred to in the name was the base on which they built their spiritual belief. This name does not refer only to a physical building. It is loaded with spiritual meaning.
The word “foundation,” in this context, points to a place of connection or a cosmic axis—as if there were a spot on earth that sustained the link between planes, the heavenly and the earthly. Just as had occurred between the Garden of God and the earth. By using terms such as “house” and “foundation,” the idea is implicit of a primordial stone or a sacred cornerstone—very similar to the later Hebrew concept of the cornerstone, or even to the idea of sacred stones in other cultures.
In its most ancient essence, geomancy was not superstition. It was the belief that certain places carry an energy, a spiritual connection, an alignment with the divine or celestial order. The Babylonians designed cities according to the stars or the cardinal points. They placed temples in strategic locations. They associated stones with deities or with “foundations” of the cosmos. They used materials and forms according to spiritual meanings. That is why the Tower of Babel was not merely a physical tower, but an attempt to restore—or to usurp—the “center of connection” between heaven and earth.
But that title did not belong to Babel. The true foundation between heaven and earth was the Garden of God, planted by Him, where spiritual creation lived in harmony through obedience to His Voice. The Garden was not only a place; it was access—an open portal to the divine, sustained by obedience. The point of connection between the celestial and the earthly plane.
According to the Book of the Life of Adam and Eve, the first human beings were created of light, spiritual, and lived in a state of direct connection with God. When they broke the covenant, they were transformed, expelled from the Garden, and lost that entrance. As the text says:
“We no longer belong to the inhabitants of the Garden, for from now on we are of the earth and dust… We will not return to the Garden until the day Elohim has promised to save us.”
Although Hebrew tradition interpreted the word Babel as “confusion,” in the original language—Akkadian—Bab-ilu means “the gate of God.” The French archaeologist André Parrot explained in his book The Tower of Babel that the traditional translation of Babel as “confusion” presented an insurmountable difficulty. The scholar warned that the narrator of the passage “…connected Babel with the Hebrew root balal, which means to confuse or to mix. But in reality, the term Babel is formed directly from the Akkadian bab-ilu, which means ‘gate of god.’”
That name reveals what they truly desired: to return to heaven, to reconnect with lost power, but on their own terms—not by fulfilling their part of the Covenant. The city of Babylon and the tower Bab-ilu were a human replica that symbolized the Garden of God—without light, without meekness, and without obedience to God’s spiritual laws, which kept open the true gate and true foundation of the house between heaven and earth.
André Parrot notes in one of his books that in that era everything was religion in a way we could hardly understand today. It was lived and breathed.
They called man Galu, a word meaning “god is man,” and Dr. Hugo Radau said that the Sumerian believed god was the image of man. From those ancient times comes the human concept that god is an invention of man—and for justified reason God calls Babylon, the successor of the religion created by man, “arrogance.” These expressions reflect the persistent idea that the human being could reach divine power and spiritual self-sufficiency by his own means—an idea sown from the beginning with the serpent’s promise: “you will be like gods.”
A cylinder seal dated to about the middle of the third millennium B.C., preserved today in the British Museum, clearly shows this memory. It depicts a god-man, a woman, a tree, and a serpent—a scene that evokes the moment when our ancestors chose another path, departing from the Voice that formed them. The Sumerians venerated serpents, portraying them in art with human forms and heads, believing they provided protection, wisdom, and fertility.
Along with this memory was also the memory of the Garden of God, whose entrances had been sealed until man learned to obey His Voice. But instead of waiting for that moment, those peoples sought an alternative entrance. They raised ziggurats as stairways to heaven, attempting to reach the divine plane through their own hands rather than through reconciliation with their Creator.
The Tower of Babel was a visible expression of that decision: a gate built by man—not to enter the Garden with humility, but to claim access to power through self-sufficiency. It was a deliberate attempt to be like gods, but without God.
In his book Sumer, Parrot notes that in that era art cannot be separated from history. We are speaking of the third millennium before Christ, precisely when the construction of Babel was undertaken.
The earliest expressions of art in Mesopotamia also testify to this ancient memory. According to Parrot’s studies and Malraux’s testimony in the preface to Sumeria, the first inhabitants of the region began their art by imitating. What they imitated was creation itself, because their earliest figures were human, animal, and forms inspired by a deep religiosity that preceded organized religion.
This places the origin of Mesopotamian art in protohistory, in an era before the rise of temples, priesthoods, and city-states. Therefore, the accounts they later wrote on clay tablets did not originate at that moment; they came from an ancestral memory—the memory of the beginning. A memory shaped according to their own conception, yet still bearing traces of a truth older than civilizations themselves.
This impulse to record creation and lived experience through art was not exclusive to Mesopotamia. Ancient civilizations in different parts of the world also left testimony of their inner world long before developing writing. The cave paintings of Altamira in Spain, or those of Patagonia in South America, show that the human being, even in very early stages, felt the need to leave traces of existence, of connection with the transcendent, and perhaps of what was remembered or intuited about the beginning. These manifestations indicate that spiritual memory did not begin with organized religions; it was present since prehistory—a deep memory later molded by civilizations according to their own understanding, culture, and aspirations.
Art in these ancient cultures was not merely decorative—it was sacred and magical. Images had power. They were spiritual portals, living representations of deities or invisible forces. To paint, sculpt, or model a figure was to invoke a presence, and often incense or magical words were offered to it.
This approach to art extended into architecture as well. The Tower of Babel was not only a monumental construction; it was a work of sacred art, a collective spiritual project. They wanted to return to the Garden—not through humility or obedience, but through illusion, through a kind of magical art that promised to restore access to Eden.
That is why, when God shows Ezekiel the priests worshiping images painted on the walls of the temple, He is not merely revealing betrayal, but a profound substitution: the living Voice had been replaced by the enchanted image.
Berossus, historian and priest of Bel in Babylon, knew closely the spiritual traditions of his culture. What he wrote about it was a collective memory preserved in temples, symbols, and walls painted with sacred history. As a priest, he had direct access to those visual accounts—because in Babylon, as in Sumer, history was transmitted through art.
Art, myths, and ziggurats were attempts to preserve and reinterpret that original memory, but from a spiritual self-sufficiency that rejected the Creator and Source of life.
Perhaps that is why the only commandment God gave specifically regarding worship was clear and direct: “You shall not make for yourself an image.” An order that needs no explanation… yet when we see all this, its reason becomes evident: God knew the image would replace His Voice, and that art without His Spirit would raise towers again instead of opening hearts.
Science, for its part, has also tried to understand the origin of these ancient peoples. Although it cannot speak of spiritual lineages as the Bible does, it has discovered that Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Hebrews shared territory, culture, and in many cases, a common root.
The Sumerian language is an enigma: it resembles no other known language. But Akkadian—the language that later dominated Babylon—is a Semitic language related to Hebrew, the language of Abraham’s descendants. This is not accidental. According to Scripture, all these peoples descended from Noah’s sons who settled in the plain of Shinar, exactly where the first Sumerian cities arose.
Archaeology has revealed a network of shared traditions: lists of antediluvian kings, accounts of creation, a fall, and a great flood—preserved in tablets, inscriptions, and walls. Those stories did not originate in a single people; they seem to arise from a common spiritual memory, interpreted in different ways by cultures that were in some sense related.
That is why, when some claim that the Hebrews copied the flood story or the garden story from other ancient cultures, they do not understand that it is not plagiarism, but divergent echoes of the same ancestral root. What distinguishes the biblical account is not only its antiquity, but its focus: a history centered on the Voice of God and not on multiple gods, on spiritual obedience and not on human power. In light of all this, the command not to make an image gains even more meaning. It was a warning not to fall into the same paths.
Ancient man in the Euphrates Valley created his own god, made in his image and likeness. He ignored the true Creator and established his own worship system, which included sanctuaries, priesthoods, religious structures, and an attempt to reach God’s domains by force. This spiritual self-sufficiency was defined by God as arrogance through the prophet Jeremiah:
“I set a trap for you, and you were caught, Babylon, without realizing it; you were found and seized, because you rose up against Yahweh… Behold, I am against you, ‘Arrogance,’—declares the Lord Yahweh of Hosts—because your day has come, the time when I will punish you. ‘Arrogance’ will stumble and fall, with no one to raise her up. I will set fire to her cities, and it will devour all her surroundings.”
This arrogance was spiritual, because they rejected the true God for the worship of man himself.