Nimrod’s city of Babel was thus a fourfold city. That empire- which we might call the “First Babylonian Empire” was thwarted by the Confusion of Tongues. After the Dispersion, we therefore find the Sumerians (put in Biblical parlance, we should perhaps call this culture the Shinarian culture) living in these cities: Uruk, Akkad, and Babylon are all names well known to historians of the ancient Near East. But God has divided the power of the idolatrous nations by pitting them against each other. These cities are in a regular contest for hegemony, and an ambition one encounters in a number of ancient conquerors appears to be the ambition to reforge the primordial unity of this imperial culture. The first such attempt to reforge the world empire occurred immediately after the Dispersion, when Nimrod went “from” Shinar to the land of Assyria and founded another fourfold set of cities, the first of which was Nineveh. Moses describes these four cities as the great city (Genesis 10:11-12). The founder of the First Babylonian Empire was thus also the founder of the First Assyrian Empire. It is my strong suspicion that it is this historical fact which accounts for the persistent Assyrian conviction that they possess the divine right of kingship over Babylon. When Tukulti-Ninurta I sacked Babylon in 1233 BC, he wore the title of the “King of the Four Corners of the Earth.” For most kings of Assyria prior to Tukulti-Ninurta, the royal title was “Viceroy of Asshur” (the deified ancestor Asshur mentioned as founder of the Assyrian people in Genesis 10:22). But in bringing Babylon under Assyrian rule, Tukulti-Ninurta had secured the old throne of his predecessor’s world-state.
In fact, Nimrod was a well-known character to the ancient chroniclers, among whom he was known as Ninus, the founder of Nineveh. A fragment from the Roman chronicler Aemilius Sura preserved in the History of Rome by Velleius Paterculus (Book I, Chapter VI) states that there were 1,995 years from the “beginning of the reign of Ninus” to the defeat of Kings Philip and Antiochus by the Romans in the Macedonian-Roman war which ended in 197 BC. This traces the beginning of Ninus’ kingship over Assyria to 2191 BC- a date which a number of other figures preserved by ancient authors converge upon for the accession of Ninus and/or the founding dates of their nations. For example, Varro, (De Rustica III.1.3) identifies the “oldest of all cities” as Thebes in Greece, which he identifies as 2,100 years old. Varro lived from 116-27 BC, such that his date for the founding of Greek Thebes matches the date for the accession of Ninus. The exile of the northern and southern kingdoms was not, therefore, enacted simply by two separate great powers, one of which had replaced the other. Rather, the histories of Assyria and Babylon had been joined since the empire of Nimrod. These are the two principal fragments of his world empire. God tore this empire into pieces- and yet He did not revoke His intent for mankind to glorify and cultivate the world so that God’s City would be built with the collaboration with the Children of Adam. In Genesis 12, God elects the Seed of Abraham to fulfill this global purpose.
We will find, remarkably, that in the last phase of history prior to the coming of Christ, God allowed the unity between Assyria and Babylon to reform- but in a new way. The polity which is born out of this reformation is the very polity into which Jesus Christ stepped. We will continue studying this in future posts.