Shinar's Beginning and End

And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.Genesis 10:10

A lady asked me if I could get her an "original" (Latin Mass) Bible. Her mother was concerned that the modern Catholic church was going liberal. The lady wanted to please her mother. I was quite naive in those days and gave her one from my bookshelf.

I had looked at the notes in the updated Douay-Rheims Bible, and saw that the teaching of those days was that Babylon, or Shinar, referred to the city of Rome. It is common in some circles to teach that everything in the Bible is symbolic, not literal. I was surprised to see, according to the notes, that the fall of Babylon meant the fall of Rome. An evil last Pope and apostasy of the church was to occur. Besides being a hopeless case of self-reference complex, it is a plain mangling of scripture.

There are eight references to Shinar in the Bible, Gen. 10:10 being the first. The last, portraying the latter days of Shinar, are in Zechariah 5:11. Babylon, a later New Testament form of Shinar, concludes in the book of Revelation. Sorry Rome, and the Roman Catholic church, but Shinar means the region and city of Babylon.

The Roman church has many similarities to Babylon in customs, dress, and theology, but in order to qualify as Shinar or Babylon, a city would need to be between two rivers. The Tiber is not the Tigress and the Euphrates. Now Rome is old, but Shinar is the oldest civilization known, far older and in a very different location. It is the site of Nimrod, and later of Abraham. How bizarre to have as the psychologists might say, a bad case of "Shinar envy".