Baḥya ben Asher, who lived and taught in Saragossa, Spain in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, authored several works of rabbinic scholarship, drawing on philosophical as well as traditional sources. In the most famous of these, his commentary on the Bible, he suggests a surprising reason for the construction of the Tower of Babel:

If sanctions, diplomacy, and covert sabotage fail to prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining nuclear weapons, it will be up to the IDF to do the job—as America will be unlikely to attack Iran, and the Gulf states lack the ability to do so. But it is not clear that the Jewish state has the necessary armaments. John Hannah writes: