According to Genesis Chapter 11 of the Bible, the Tower of Babel (Hebrew: מגדל בבל Migdal Bavel) was a tower built to reach the heavens by a united humanity. God, observing the arrogance of humanity, resolves to confuse the previously uniform language of humanity, thereby preventing any such future efforts. The tower's destruction is not described in Genesis, but is mentioned in the Book of Jubilees, and elsewhere. The normal interpretive account of the story, as found, for example, in Flavius Josephus, explains the tower's destruction in terms of humankind's deficiency in comparison to God: Within a religious framework, humankind is considered to be an inherently flawed creation dependent on a perfect being for its existence, and thus, the construction of the tower is a potentially hubristic act of defiance towards the God that created them. As a result, this story is often used within a religious context to explain the existence of many different languages.
The height of the tower is largely a matter of speculation, but since the tower symbolically can be considered a precursor to humankind's desire to build tall structures throughout history, its height is a significant aspect of it. The tower commissioned by Nebuchadnezzar in about 560 B.C.E., in the form of an eight-level ziggurat is believed by historians to have been about 100 meters (328 feet) in height.