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Das Bild des Turms von Babel hat gemeinhin eine negative Konnotation. Für Freimaurer, die ihre allegorischen Wurzeln kennen, so wie sie in den ältesten Dokumenten erzählt werden, unverzeihlich. Der Turmbau zu Babel ist ein Teil der legendären, also legendenhaften, Geschichte unseres Bundes.
Albert G. Mackey schreibt in seiner "History of Freemasonry" von drei unterschiedlichen Formen der Legende des Turms von Babel und zitiert das „Halliwell Gedicht“, das „Cooke Manuskript“, die „Anderson’sche und die York Konstitutionen“. Mackey bemerkt, wie die einstige Hochachtung für Babel sich im Laufe der Zeit änderte, und stellt fest:
„The proof of this is very palpable to any one who will carefully read the Halliwell poem, and compare its idea of the rise and progress of Geometry with that exhibited in the later manuscript Constitutions. These latter trace the science, as it is always called, from Lamech to Nimrod, who "found" or invented the Craft of Masonry at the building of the Tower of Babel, and then to Euclid, who established it in Egypt, whence it was brought by the Israelites into Judea, and there again established by David and Solomon, at the building of the Temple.“
„Hence, according to this latest form of the Legend, the Tower of Babel is degraded from the prominent place which was given to it in the older forms as the birth‑place of Masonry, and becomes simply the symbol of the darkness and ignorance of the profane world as contradistinguished from the light and knowledge to be derived from an initiation into the system of Speculative Masonry.“
"We see, therefore, that the Masons of the present day are wrong when they make Babel or Babylon the symbol of intellectual darkness, and suppose that there the light of Masonry was for a time extinguished, to be re-illumined only at the Temple of Solomon."
Siehe auch Smithsonian Channel