Several elements of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel—most obviously the name babel, which is simply the Hebrew term for Babylonia—suggest that it either reflects some historical event in ancient Mesopotamia or is based on Mesopotamian legend. According to Christoph Uehlinger, however, there is little concrete reason for believing this:

Since the time of the rabbis in late antiquity, people have searched for the city ruins and the tower of Babel. . . . The view that the mythical tower of Babel was a memory of this historical building has become so compelling that modern scholars hardly question it. However, . . . the equation is far from obvious. . . .

[Although] there are indeed close parallels elsewhere to the narratives [in the opening chapters of Genesis] about the creation of the world and of humanity, early cultural heroes, and the flood, no parallel earlier than the Hellenistic period is known for the Babel story. . . .

Because of the conspicuously sociopolitical message of this very short story, which expresses a fear of losing social cohesion, some scholars [more convincingly] understand [it] as a critique of empire-building and metropolitanism, which was purposefully inscribed into the earliest history of postdiluvian humanity.

On Wednesday, a double bombing in Jerusalem left two dead, and many others injured—an attack the likes of which has not been seen since 2016. In a Jenin hospital, meanwhile, armed Palestinians removed an Israeli who had been injured in a car accident, reportedly murdering him in the process, and held his body hostage for two days. All this comes as a year that has seen numerous stabbings, shootings, and other terrorist attacks is drawing to a close. Yaakov Lappin comments:

Unlike the individual or small groups of terrorists who, acting on radical ideology and incitement to violence, picked up a gun, a knife, or embarked on a car-ramming attack, this time a better organized terrorist cell detonated two bombs—apparently by remote control—at bus stops in the capital. Police and the Shin Bet have exhausted their immediate physical searches, and the hunt for the perpetrators will now move to the intelligence front.

It is too soon to know who, or which organization, conducted the attack, but it is possible to note that in recent years, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has taken a lead in remote-control-bombing terrorism. Last week, a car bomb that likely contained explosives detonated by remote control was discovered by the Israel Defense Forces in Samaria, after it caught fire prematurely. In August 2019, a PFLP cell detonated a remote-control bomb in Dolev, seventeen miles northwest of Jerusalem, killing a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl and seriously wounding her father and brother. Members of that terror cell were later arrested.

With the Palestinian Authority (PA) losing its grip in parts of Samaria to armed terror gangs, and the image of the PA at an all-time low among Palestinians, in no small part due to corruption, nepotism, and its violation of human rights . . . the current situation does not look promising.