The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

The story of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1–9) is one of the key episodes in the narratives of the Book of Genesis. In modern scholarship, various — often sharply divergent — datings of this pericope are proposed, as well as different interpretations of its place in the picture of the formation of the biblical text that was put forward by the Wellhausen school and remained the standard for academic biblical studies until the last third of the 20th century. Assumptions have been repeatedly expressed and continue to be expressed that the story of the Tower of Babel has a composite nature and is either “composed” from several different sources or breaks down into a more ancient “core” and later redactions. A view of biblical narratives, distinct from the one that dominated academic biblical scholarship from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, is offered in studies that foreground a literary approach to the biblical text. This approach allows for a different perspective on the question of the unity of the pericope Gen 11:1–9. 
The work presented to the reader’s attention is part of a large project to prepare a modern annotated translation of Gen 1–11, which is being carried out by employees, students, and graduates of the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, Faculty of Humanities, HSE University, under the general supervision of M. G. Seleznev. In addition to a new translation and a verse-by-verse (in complex cases, word-for-word) commentary, the reader is given the opportunity to argumentatively evaluate the pros and cons of individual interpretations of this pericope presented in modern biblical scholarship. Special attention in this study is given to the literary criticism of the Bible and to the parallels with Mesopotamian texts.