Babel, in Hebrew  confusion , the name of a town and a tower that are mentioned in the book of Genesis,  chap. ii.  located in the land of Shinar, now Chaldea, near the Euphrates, which the descendants of Noah undertook to build before they spread across the face of the earth, and which they planned should reach sky. But God repressed the puerile pride of an undertaking that men would have certainly given up of their own accord. The project is attributed to Nimrod, the grandson of Ham: he wished to make his memory eternal and to prepare himself a shelter from a new flood. The tower of   Babel  was built in the year 1802 after the creation. Peleg, the last of the patriarchs of the family of Shem, was then 14 years old; and this date agrees with the astronomical observations that Callisthenes sent from Babylon to Aristotle. These observations were made in the year 1903 after the creation; and this is exactly the interval of time that passed from the foundation of the tower of  Babel  until the entrance of Alexander in Babylon. The body of the tower was made of bricks joined together with tar. But it had only reached a certain height when the workers fell out and had to give up their work. Certain authorities attribute the origin of the world’s different languages to this event: others add that the pagans who heard about it confusedly later imagined that it was a war waged by giants against the gods. Casaubon thinks that the diversity of languages was the effect and not the case of the division of the peoples; that the workers of the tower of  Babel  finding themselves, after working for a long time, still just as far away from the sky, gave up, just as children would give up when, wanting to hold the sky in their hands, they walk towards the horizon; that the peoples then dispersed and their language grew corrupted. A quarter of a league east of the Euphrates are ruins that are imagined, on very little evidence, to be those of the famous tower.