Sodom and Gomorrah: legendary cities under a magnifying glass of skepticism

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

About two thousand years BC, two strangers came to visit a resident of the city of Sodom named Lot. Lot invited them into the house, washed their feet, gave them drink and fed them. But then the Sodomites knocked on the door of the house. They came in a large crowd and demanded to give them guests in order to … have sex with them. Lot refused. The Sodomites insisted. Desperate, Lot offered them his virgin daughters. But the Sodomites wanted only his guests and had already begun to make their way into the dwelling.

Then the guests dragged Lot into the house, locked the doors, and sent blindness to the Sodomites. The visitors said that they were actually angels sent to earth to end Sodom. The angels told Lot to take his wife and daughters and get out of the city as quickly as possible. They were forbidden to look around on pain of death.

Lot ran away with his relatives. Meanwhile, God sent fire and burning brimstone to Sodom. The city died, the townspeople were burned alive or suffocated. Lot's curious wife could not resist and looked back at the burning Sodom. As a punishment, she was turned into a pillar of salt.

What is true and what is fiction in this strange story? Was there a legendary city, whose name has become a household name? Why did its inhabitants behave so inadequately? And what actually happened to Sodom and Gomorrah?

Where is this street, where is this house?

Archaeologists began looking for Sodom and Gomorrah as early as the 19th century. The first results were disappointing. In 1847-1848. the expedition to the Jordan Valley was carried out by US Navy Lieutenant William Lynch. Having described the flora and fauna of the valley and the Dead Sea, he did not find a trace of ancient settlements that could somehow be connected with Sodom and Gomorrah. Nevertheless, Lynch remained optimistic: he continued to believe that the shores of the Dead Sea were densely populated, but then the settlements died from some kind of "concussion, which was probably preceded by an eruption of fire."

In the 1920s, the American historian William Albright was persistently looking for the "city of sin". He and his disciples succeeded in excavating a Bronze Age sanctuary at Bab Ed-Dhra. Keen archaeologists have hypothesized that it was used by the people of Sodom for religious rituals. In the 1960s, a cemetery was found in Bab-Ed-Era, the remains of houses and fortress walls. It turned out that it was not just a sanctuary, but a real city that existed in the Bronze Age.

Interestingly, around 2350 BC. e. Bab Ed-Dhra was completely destroyed by fire - charred bricks and ceramics confirm this. But the cause of the fire remains unknown - as well as whether Bab-Ed-Dhra was that very Sodom.

Active searches for Sodom and Gomorrah at the bottom of the Dead Sea have not yielded noticeable results so far. Scientists cannot even agree on where to look for the "city of sin" - in the south or in the north of the reservoir. Archaeologists have not found anything in the Sodom Mountains, despite the fact that there are many pillars of salt. One is even called "Lot's wife."

At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, British archaeologists argued that Sodom was buried in the northeast of the Dead Sea, and the Americans - that it was in what is now Jordan, in the Bronze Age settlement of Tel al-Hammam. Russian biblical scholars at the same time believed that Sodom should be sought in the south of the Dead Sea. The enthusiasts of the Bab-Ed-Dra theory also remained.

Unfortunately, all the ruins found belonged to very small settlements. There was nowhere even a hint of a metropolis surrounded by fortress walls. Even in Tel Al Hammam, with a noticeable population density, nothing resembling a large city was found.

But the main problem is that science, religion and politics are closely intertwined in the search for the "city of sin". It is vital for zealous Jews to find biblical artifacts in Israel. Zealous Protestants, English and American, just need to find them - no matter whose territory. Failures do not disappoint them - people simply believe that everything on earth should be as the Bible says.

Scientists-atheists are frankly annoyed by this fuss. For several centuries, skeptics have argued that all the texts of the Old Testament were not composed two thousand years BC. uh, and much later. Their content is not a description of historical events, but pure fiction.

The scandalous story about Sodom and Gomorrah could appear, for example, as a fantasy of people of the first millennium BC. e about what the cities of the Bronze Age could have been, by that time turned into neglected ruins. Or "Sodom" could not be the name of a specific settlement, but simply a household name for a city with its ugly manners and sexual licentiousness.

The theory that Sodom and Gomorrah is purely literary imagery has been around for many years. But archaeologists are optimistic. They refer to ancient historians who also wrote about the sad fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Skeptics retort that all these historians lived two thousand years later than the events described and simply uncritically retold the legends and myths of the Jewish people.

Fire and brimstone

Nothing is clear about the catastrophe that destroyed the "city of sin." Most of all, its description resembles a volcanic eruption. However, geologists claim that all volcanic activity in the Jordan Valley region ceased tens of thousands of years before Abraham and his nephew Lot.

The Greek historian and geographer Strabo believed that Sodom was destroyed by an earthquake. It triggered the emergence of hot bitumen that flooded the city and made the area uninhabitable. Today, proof of this version is trying to find Andrei Nikonov, chief researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Earth. O. Yu. Schmidt.

He believes that Sodom was destroyed by a "powerful earthquake", which led to a "regional environmental disaster."

The Roman historian Flavius Josephus wrote that Sodom was burned by "flaming bolts." Perhaps he was referring to a severe thunderstorm that led to the fire. Or so poetically the historian described the fall of the meteorite.

The version of the meteorite - "heavenly fire" - adhered to Tacitus. In 2008, it was creatively reimagined by British rocket scientists Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell. They offered their own interpretation of the cuneiform tablet found at Nineveh. On the night of June 29, 3123 BC. er, a certain Sumerian astronomer drew on this tablet the trajectory of a huge meteorite falling. The celestial body exploded in the air over the Mediterranean. This heavenly fire burned, according to the British, Sodom and Gomorrah. True, according to the Bible, fire came from heaven a thousand years later.

Recently, a sensational report was made by the American archaeologist Philip Sylvia, who worked for a long time on the excavations in Tel Al-Hammam. According to him, radiocarbon analysis showed that local settlements were destroyed by high temperatures around 1700 BC. e. Characteristically melted minerals indicate that a huge meteorite exploded here in the atmosphere, comparable in size to the Tunguska one. The explosion caused the release of salts from the Dead Sea. They covered the soil in a continuous layer and made the area uninhabitable.

Since the settlements of Tel Al-Hammam are often identified with Sodom and Gomorrah, there was a reason for sensational news such as "the city of sin was destroyed by a meteorite." But scientists urge not to rush to conclusions. It is also difficult to prove the explosion of a meteorite that did not leave a crater behind. And the fact that the legendary Sodom was located right here, on the territory of present-day Jordan.

What is Sodom?

The name Sodom has long become a household name, derivatives from it, denoting homosexual practices, entered European languages. But no evidence has yet emerged that local residents really preferred same-sex sex.

For a long time, historians did not have a single artifact at all confirming the existence of Sodom. The sensation was the excavations of Ebla, an ancient settlement fifty kilometers from Aleppo, carried out in the 1960s-1980s by Italian archaeologists. Here in 1975 a huge royal archive was discovered - about 20 thousand clay cuneiform tablets dating back to the 3rd millennium BC. e. On the tablets of Ebla, both Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned as trading partners of the local kingdom.

But if vases, sculptures, poetry and prose permeated with homosexual eroticism have come down to us from Ancient Greece, then archaeologists have not yet found anything like this on the scorched earth of the Middle East. We still have no confirmation of the "Sodom riot". Although it is not difficult to imagine what a cult place for LGBT tourists the Jordan Valley could become.