The Tower Of Babel Series

Another story in Sura 2:102 mentions the name of Babil but tells of when the two angels Harut and Marut taught magic to some people in Babylon and warned them that magic is a sin and that their teaching them magic is a test of faith. A tale about Babil appears more fully in the writings of Yaqut (i, 448 f.) and the Lisan al-?Arab [ar] (xiii. 72). However, without the Tower: humanity were swept together by winds into the plain that was afterward called "Babil," where they were assigned their separate languages by God and were then scattered again in the same way. In the History of the Prophets and Kings by the 9th-century Muslim theologian al-Tabari, a fuller version is given: Nimrod has the Tower built in Babil, God destroys it, and the language of humanity, formerly Syriac, is then confused into 72 languages. Another Muslim historian of the 13th century, Abu al-Fida, relates the same story, adding that the patriarch Eber (an ancestor of Abraham) was allowed to keep the original tongue, Hebrew in this case because he would not partake in the building.

Although variations similar to the biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel exist within the Islamic tradition, the central theme of God separating humankind based on language is alien to Islam, according to the author Yahiya Emerick. In Islamic belief, he argues, God created nations to know each other and not to be separated.[39]

Book of Mormon

In the Book of Mormon, a man named Jared and his family ask God that their language not be confounded at the time of the "great tower." Because of their prayers, God preserves their language and leads them to the Valley of Nimrod. From there, they travel across the sea to the Americas.

Despite no mention of the Tower of Babel in the original text of the Book of Mormon, some leaders in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints assert that the "great tower" was indeed the Tower of Babel - as in the 1981 introduction to the Book of Mormon - despite the chronology of the Book of Ether aligning more closely with the 21st century BC Sumerian tower temple myth of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta to the goddess Innana. Church apologists have also supported this connection and argued the reality of the Tower of Babel: "Although many in our day consider the accounts of the Flood and tower of Babel to be fiction, Latter-day Saints affirm their reality." In either case, the church firmly believes in the factual nature of at least one "great tower" built in the region of ancient Sumeria/Assyria/Babylonia.

Gnosticism

In Gnostic tradition recorded in the Paraphrase of Shem, a tower, interpreted as the Tower of Babel, is brought by demons along with the great Flood:

Moreover, he caused the Flood and destroyed your (Shem's) race to take the light away from the faith. But I proclaimed quickly by the mouth of the demon that a tower came up to be up to the particle of light, which was left in the demons and their race - water - that the demon might be protected from the turbulent chaos. Furthermore, the womb planned these things according to my will, that she might pour forth completely. A tower came to be through the demons. The darkness was disturbed by his loss. He loosened the muscles of the womb. Moreover, the demon who would enter the Tower was protected so that the races might continue to acquire coherence through him.