Type "Babylon" into Google Maps and you arrive at 32.54°N, 44.42°E — about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad, near the Iraqi city of Hillah. The site that Genesis 11 names is one of the most-excavated archaeological zones in the world. The walls, foundations, and ziggurat platform are still there. The city the verse calls Babel and the city Iraqi state archaeologists call Babylon are the same set of mounds.
A Verse and a Tower
Genesis 11 records what the Hebrew Bible places at the start of recorded urban history. The verse is brief. The ambition is enormous.
"And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."
The Hebrew word for tower is migdal. The Hebrew name Babel is glossed in verse 9 as related to the verb balal — to confuse. The Akkadian inhabitants would have heard Bab-ilim — gate of god. Same syllables, two readings. The verse takes care not to deny that the tower was real; it argues with the city's account of itself.
Nebuchadnezzar's City
The Babylon best known to Bible readers is not the patriarchal city of Genesis 11 but the empire of Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BC), the king who destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and carried Judah into exile. His city had double walls 18 kilometers in circumference, eight gates (the Ishtar Gate among them — its blue-glazed reliefs now in Berlin's Pergamon Museum), and the Etemenanki ziggurat — the most plausible historical referent for the Tower of Babel. Nebuchadnezzar's building inscription survives: I made the temple-tower's top reach the sky. The verse and the inscription match each other almost word for word.
The Twentieth Century at Babylon
German archaeologists excavated Babylon systematically from 1899 to 1917, removing the Ishtar Gate to Berlin and producing the first detailed maps. Iraqi work continued through the twentieth century. In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein had a palace constructed on the original mounds and ordered partial reconstruction of Nebuchadnezzar's walls — using new bricks stamped with his own name. The reconstruction is controversial; many of the structures now visible mix ancient and modern courses. What is genuinely first-millennium-BC and what is 1980s is not always obvious from a photograph.
What Remains Today
Damage during the 2003 Iraq War — including a US/Polish military base on the site — provoked international outcry. UNESCO inscribed Babylon as a World Heritage Site in 2019, partly to formalize protection going forward. Today the site is open to visitors. The Etemenanki platform is still visible. The processional way along which the Ishtar Gate stood is still walkable. The Hanging Gardens have not been definitively located; some scholars argue they were at Nineveh, not here.
Babylon Today
Hillah, the modern Iraqi town next to the site, has about 600,000 people and depends partly on the river the Babylonian inscriptions called the Euphrates — same river, same channel, same name. Across history, Babylon has been a place name, an empire, a metaphor, a Rastafarian shorthand for systems of oppression, and the subject of one of the saddest songs in the Hebrew Psalter. By the rivers of Babylon is, geographically, this place. The verse from Genesis is the same verse the rest of the Bible keeps having to argue with.
One verse named the city. The Bible never stopped having that argument.