Sodom and Gomorrah are perhaps the best known of the five “cities of the plain” which feature so prominently in Genesis — and a byword for God’s destructive wrath. The historic city and location of the cities has long been debated. But, the Biblical and other Hebrew sources are clear that they were located near the Dead Sea.
New archaeological research argues that not only has the precise site been identified, but so has the cause of the cataclysmic destruction of the cities.
A research team including East Carolina University’s Dr. Sid Mitra, professor of geological sciences, has presented evidence that a Middle Bronze Age city called Tall el-Hammam, located in the Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea, was destroyed by a cosmic airburst.
The excavation that began in 2005 has focused on a city-wide, 1.5m thick layer of carbon and ash, dating to about 1650 B.C., 3,600 years ago. What sets the layer of destruction apart is its unusual features, including shocked quartz, melted pottery and mudbricks, diamond-like carbon, soot, remnants of melted plaster, and melted minerals including platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite and quartz.
“They found all this evidence of high-temperature burning throughout the entire site,” Mitra said. “And the technology didn’t exist at that time, in the Middle Bronze Age, for people to be able to generate fires of that kind of temperature.”
The site includes a massive palace complex with thick walls and a monumental gateway, much of which was destroyed.
Shocked quartz has a microscopic structure markedly different from normal quartz. Its unique structure is formed by intense pressure: it was first discovered following underground nuclear testing. But it is also found in craters formed by meteor impacts.
The researchers developed a hypothesis that there had been a meteorite impact or bolide — a meteor that explodes in the atmosphere. The researchers compared the airburst to a 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a 50-meter-wide bolide detonated, generating 1,000 times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb […]
The researchers considered and dismissed other potential processes that could explain the destruction, including volcanic or earthquake activity, wildfire, warfare and lightning, but none provided an explanation for the various lines of evidence as well as a cosmic impact or airburst.
Besides the analysis of soot at the site which pointed to very high-temperature fires, other evidence such as the directionality of the debris and the presence of shocked quartz supports the meteor hypothesis. The destruction layer also has a high concentration of salt, which would have destroyed agriculture in the area.
Genesis 19:24 describes sulfur raining down out of the heavens and the destruction of the cities and all those living in them, as well as the vegetation in the land.
The paper, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea”, speculates that such a remarkable catastrophe as a meteor exploding in the atmosphere and destroying whole cities may have generated an oral tradition that ultimately became the source of the Genesis story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
“So some of the oral traditions talk about the walls of Jericho (about 13 1/2 miles away) falling down, as well as the fires if they’re associated with Sodom,” Mitra said. “Again it’s science; you look at your observations, and in this case it’s the historical record, and you see what you hypothesize and if it fits the data, and the data seem to fit.”
Science Daily
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