To explain this anger, it was held that it must have been provoked by human sin.
Out of this conception explanatory myths and legends grew as thickly and naturally as elms along water-courses; of these the earliest form known to us is found in the Chaldean accounts, and nowhere more clearly than in the legend of the Tower of Babel.
The inscriptions recently found among the ruins of Assyria have thrown a bright light into this and other scriptural myths and legends: the deciphering of the characters in these inscriptions by Grotefend, and the reading of the texts by George Smith, Oppert, Sayce, and others, have given us these traditions more nearly in their original form than they appear in our own Scriptures.
The Hebrew story of Babel, like so many other legends in the sacred books of the world, combined various elements.

By a play upon words, such as the history of myths and legends frequently shows, it wrought into one fabric the earlier explanations of the diversities of human speech and of the great ruined tower at Babylon.

The name Babel (bab-el) means "Gate of God" or "Gate of the Gods." All modern scholars of note agree that this was the real significance of the name; but the Hebrew verb which signifies TO CONFOUND resembles somewhat the word Babel, so that out of this resemblance, by one of the most common processes in myth formation, came to the Hebrew mind an indisputable proof that the tower was connected with the confusion of tongues, and this became part of our theological heritage.
In our sacred books the account runs as follows: "And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
"And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
"And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.

And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
"And they said, Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
"And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
"And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
"Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
"So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
"Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth." (Genesis xi, 1-9.) Thus far the legend had been but slightly changed from the earlier Chaldean form in which it has been found in the Assyrian inscriptions.
Its character is very simple: to use the words of Prof.Sayce, "It takes us back to the age when the gods were believed to dwell in the visible sky, and when man, therefore, did his best to rear his altars as near them as possible." And this eminent divine might have added that it takes us back also to a time when it was thought that Jehovah, in order to see the tower fully, was obliged to come down from his seat above the firmament.
As to the real reasons for the building of the towers which formed so striking a feature in Chaldean architecture--any one of which may easily have given rise to the explanatory myth which found its way into our sacred books--there seems a substantial agreement among leading scholars that they were erected primarily as parts of temples, but largely for the purpose of astronomical observations, to which the Chaldeans were so devoted, and to which their country, with its level surface and clear atmosphere, was so well adapted.

As to the real cause of the ruin of such structures, one of the inscribed cylinders discovered in recent times, speaking of a tower which most of the archaeologists identify with the Tower of Babel, reads as follows: "The building named the Stages of the Seven Spheres, which was the Tower of Borsippa, had been built by a former king.