It is believed that the story of the Tower of Babel was written by a biblical narrator who probably wrote it during his captivity in Babylon and interpreted the word babel as a confusion, in this case a confusion of languages.

Described as a stairway between Heaven and Earth, the tower of Babel is mentioned in the Book of Genesis. It is a place where humans who were gathered in the land of Shinar, after the Great Flood, decided to build a giant tower. God, observing their city and tower, confounds their languages so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.

As people could not continue working by mutual agreement they stopped building their city and simply scattered from there over the face of the Earth. The unfinished tower and the city built around it were called Babel or Babylon.