Good day, dear Take in Mind readers!
When we created our site, one of the main ideas was our wish to objectively discuss any hypothesis and fact, and it’s really doesn’t matter how fantastic and illogical it may seem at first, or how much it’s accepted by the “official” science.
Together with our readers, we have repeatedly proved to ourselves that monumental ideas, which were once considered an immutable axiom, have lost their value over time, and vice versa, what has once been considered a fairy tale is now ordinary and routine. We are inspired by the experiences of many great scientists of the past. Previously, who didn’t laugh at the “absurd” ideas of Heinrich Schliemann about the reality of the legendary treasures of ancient Troy? Or the “ridiculous” toys of Leonardo da Vinci? Or the fantastic projects of Tsiolkovsky, who was a provincial teacher? The list can get very long.
Biblical stories receive a special “honor” from the scientific skeptics. In our “enlightened” epoch, it is only possible to speculate the possibility that some of the stories described in the Testaments may have a real basis. Alas, the main skeptics’ argument, “How can you prove it?” is indeed very difficult to refute. And by the way, if someone ventures talking about Divine participation, this scientist will immediately cast a shadow on his own reputation. Therefore, in our subjective opinion, such brave attempts to find out the truth are worthy at least respect.
According to the Old Testament, the city of Sodom (along with other cities of the so-called “Sodom Pentapolis”) was located in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea. However, no one knows where exactly the city was located. So, even the ancient Greek philosopher Strabo suggested that Sodom was located not far from the Masada fortress to the southwest of the Dead Sea. But, despite the titanic attempts that have been done by scientists, this question remained unanswered.
An interesting hypothesis was proposed several decades ago that the city of Tel el-Hammam, destroyed more than three and a half millennia ago, was the real Sodom of the Testaments. In that period, Tel el-Hammam was a large, walled city in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea. The settlement existed for over 3,000 years from the Chalcolithic era (around 4,700 BC) until its destruction around 1,550 BC. Before its destruction, Tel el-Hammam was one of the largest cities in the region (after Tel Hazor and Ashqelon).
Since 2005, the scientists from the School of Archaeology, Veritas International University, Santa Ana, CA, and the College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University, Albuquerque, NM, with the help of numerous volunteers, have begun excavations in Tel el-Hammam. As a result of the work, a large ancient settlement was found, surrounded by a powerful rampart. Year after year, archaeologists have dug up the ruins of houses with thick brick walls. Even ovens for bread were found!
A few weeks ago, scientists published in a very respectful Scientific Reports journal (11: 18632 (2021) a new report about the recent findings, dated ~1800- ~1550 B.C. period. In this article, the scientists have attempted to shed light on the events that caused the destruction of Tel el-Hammam.
So, in addition to the usual samples that are typical to ancient cities destroyed by war and earthquakes, the results of excavations have revealed very unusual materials. Scientists were surprised to find shards of ceramics, the outer surface of which melted into glass, “bubble”-melted mudbrick, partially melted, charred bones and grains. All these are signs of an abnormally high temperature, which was impossible to achieve with the technology of that time. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 °C. Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+ m of the 4-to-5-story palace complex and the massive 4-m-thick mudbrick rampart, while causing extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans – those were practically ground up by the explosion.
Ten possible processes (causes) of the city’s destruction were properly examined, including anthropogenic activity, fire, earthquake, volcanic eruption, lightning, crater-forming fall, and an explosion of a space object. As paradoxical as it sounds, numerous experiments and simulations have shown that the most plausible reason for the destruction of Tel el-Hammam is an air explosion of a space object in the size of the Tunguska meteorite in 1908.
The scientists suggest that such a grandiose catastrophe as the destruction of Tel el-Hammam by a cosmic object could give rise to an oral tradition, that eventually became the written biblical account about the destruction of Sodom. The description of the destruction of Sodom in the Bible may well be explained by the explosion of a cosmic object, namely:
“Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground…. And Abraham looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.” (Genesis 19: 24-25, 28, King James version).
The airburst, according to the paper, may also explain the “anomalously high concentrations of salt” found in the destruction layer — an average of 4% in the sediment and as high as 25% in some samples. It is possible that the event’s impact partially hit the Dead Sea, which is rich in salt, and, as result, salt was spread far and wide — not just at Tall el-Hammam, but also nearby Tell es-Sultan and Tall-Nimrin (both then destroyed). The high-salinity soil could have been responsible for the so-called “Late Bronze Age Gap”, in which cities along the lower Jordan Valley were abandoned, dropping the population from tens of thousands to maybe a few hundred nomads. Previously fertile lands became practically barren. New communities in the area reappeared only 600 years later…
The famous American economist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) once said: “The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before”. Without a doubt, archaeologists (along with historians, geologists, physicists, and others) have done a truly amazing job.
The findings in Tel el-Hammam have given rise to a huge number of new questions, and the answers to even some of them will lead to real shocks in the scientific world. For the respected skeptics of any biblical “fairy tales” – you can, of course, argue with theories, but ignoring the facts is a very ignoble matter. Yes, there are no known ancient writings or books of the Bible, other than Genesis, that describe what could be construed as the destruction of a city by a similar event. But, even if this is not the case, at least since the publication of this work, the Bible’s and apocryphal testaments, folk legends, and other “frivolous” sources will simply have to be taken seriously. Moreover, similarly to Ariadne’s thread will surely lead us in the future to amazing discoveries, in comparison with which the finds of Indiana Jones will be trite and boring. Do you agree with us?
References:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3
Featured image: Sodom and Gomorrah afire by Jacob de Wet II, 1680.
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