Temple, but as it would have taken two months for 10,000 men merely to remove the rubbish, he abandoned the attempt.  The ruins have been recently explored by Germans.  The embankments which regulated the flow of the Euphrates and Tigris have given way, and at the present time the whole region round Babylon is marshy and malarious.  In the words of Jeremiah, li. 43, “Her cities are a desolation, a sterile land, and a wilderness, a place wherein no man dwelleth.”]

[Footnote 137:  The Valley of Dura mentioned in Daniel iii. is here referred to.  See Dr. Berliner’s Beitraege zur Geographie und Ethnographie Babyloniens; also Layard’s Nineveh and Babylon, p. 469.  Cf.  Berachot, 57 b.]

[Footnote 138:  Bereshith Rabba, chap, xxxviii, says the tower was at Borsippa, and the ruins here spoken of are probably those of the Birs Nimroud, fully described by Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, chap, xxii, p. 496.  He says:  “The mound rises abruptly to the height of 198 feet, and has on its summit a compact mass of brickwork 37 feet high by 28 broad....  On one side of it, beneath the crowning masonry, lie huge fragments torn from the pile itself.  The calcined and vitreous surface of the bricks, fused into rock-like masses, show that their fall may have been caused by lightning.  The ruin is rent almost from top to bottom.  No traces whatever now remain of the spiral passage spoken of by the Jewish traveller.”  Cf.  Professor T.K.  Cheyne’s article, “The Tower of Babel,” in the new Biblical Cyclopaedia.  Nebuchadnezzar, in his Borsippa inscription, records that the tower, which had never originally been completed, had fallen into decay, and that the kiln-bricks had split.  These are the Agur bricks mentioned by Benjamin; cf.  Isaiah xxvii. 9.  Al-ajur is the word still used by the Arabs for kiln-burnt bricks.]

[Footnote 139:  Niebuhr, vol.  II, 216, gives a full account of his visit to the tomb.  Layard, speaking of Birs Nimroud, says:  “To the south-west in the extreme distance rise the palm-trees of Kifil, casting their scanty shade over a small dome, the tomb of Ezekiel.  To this spot occasionally flock in crowds, as their forefathers have done for centuries, the Jews of Bagdad, Hillah, and other cities of Chaldea....  It is now but a plain building, despoiled of the ornaments and MSS. which it once appears to have contained” (Nineveh and Babylon, p. 500).  Alcharizi composed a beautiful ode when visiting this tomb (chap, xxxv, also chap.  L).]

[Footnote 140:  This Mohammed, as in the case referred to p. 40, must have been a predecessor of the reigning Caliph, as the Prophet was never in Babylonia, and in no case would he have granted favours to the Jews.  It should be noted that the British Museum MS. on which our text is based, as well as the Casanatense MS., generally styles the Prophet [Hebrew].  The MS., on which the Constantinople editio princeps