Sodom and Gomorrah, in both the Bible and the Quran, are object lessons about the wages of sin. The religious texts describe how both cities were obliterated by heavenly wrath as divine punishment. As seen below, the Sodom and Gomorrah accounts might have been based on a real life natural disaster.
The Biblical Account of Divine Destruction From the Heavens
The best known Sodom and Gomorrah account is that contained in the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis. God informs Abraham that Sodom and the nearby city of Gomorrah are to be destroyed for their wickedness. Abraham pleads for the lives of righteous inhabitants, especially his nephew Lot and his family. The Lord agrees to spare the cities if fifty good people could be found in them. Abraham bargains Him down to ten. So God sends two angels, disguised as men, to Lot in Sodom.
Not long after the disguised angels’ arrival, a depraved mob surrounds Lot’s house, and demands that he hand over his guests so they could slake their lusts upon them. The horny mob turns a deaf tear to Lot’s entreaties. So the angels blind the crowd, and tell Lot to flee the city with his family, and not look back. As God rains down fiery destruction, Lot’s family escapes and is spared the heavenly wrath. Except for Lot’s wife, who looks back and is immediately turned into a pillar of salt.
A Real Life Holy Lands City Destroyed From the Heavens
All in all, the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah is a great story packed with action and drama. However, is there is any basis for it in ancient historic facts? As seen below, there just might be. Not the bits about angels and wives getting turned into pillars of salt. The part about the heavens raining down fiery destruction upon a city. It began one day, circa 1650 BC, as the inhabitants of a Bronze Age city a few miles northeast of the Dead Sea went about their daily business, blissfully ignorant of the doom headed their way.
Unbeknownst to the residents of what is now known as Tell el-Hammam, an archaeological site in Jordan, an unseen icy space rock was hurtling their way at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour. As it ripped through the atmosphere, the small asteroid left a fiery trail in its wake. Then, it burst about two and a half miles above the ancient city. The explosion was roughly 1000 times more powerful than the nuclear blast that destroyed Hiroshima. Those unfortunates whose eyes had been focused on the plunging space rock when it blew up were instantly blinded. In a minor mercy, they did not have long to contemplate their loss of sight.
The Destruction of Tell el-Hammam From the Sky
In a flash, Tell el-Hammam was transformed into an inferno. Wood and clothes burst into flames, while pottery, bricks, swords, spears, and metal began to melt as air temperatures spiked about 3600 degrees Fahrenheit. A few moments later, the shockwave arrived. Winds whose speed exceeded 740 mph tore through the city and destroyed all in their path, sheared the top of the ruler’s four-story palace, and blew the wreckage into the next valley over. Everybody in the city, an estimated 8000 people, and every animal, perished, mangled, ripped apart, their bones broken, and their body parts burnt. The shockwave continued on, and a minute later, slammed into biblical Jericho about fourteen miles west of Tell el-Hammam, and brought down its walls.
Scholars believe that this ancient catastrophe gave rise to the biblical narrative about Sodom and Gomorrah. For a decade and a half, archaeologists oversaw excavations by hundreds of people at Tell el-Hammam. Their findings were examined by dozens of scientists in the US, Canada, and the Czech Republic. One thing that jumped out was a five-foot-thick layer from around 1650 BC, comprised of charcoal and ash, intermingled with melted metal, melted pottery, and melted bricks. There was also shocked quartz, generated at pressures of 725,000 psi or more, and diamonids, wood and plant particles turned tough as diamonds under great heat and pressure.
Did Tell el-Hammam’s Destruction Inspire the Sodom and Gomorrah Narrative?
The excavations at Tell el-Hammam offer evidence of an intense firestorm. However, it was not a fire caused by ancient warfare, an earthquake, or volcano: they don’t generate enough heat to melt metal, pottery, or bricks. The only known culprits that could inflict such damage are nuclear blasts, and asteroid airbursts. Nuclear weapons were unknown 3650 years ago, so that narrows it down. Tell el-Hammam and its environs were abandoned for centuries after the disaster. It is believed that the explosion vaporized and deposited so much Dead Sea salt water in the area, that it became impossible to grow crops.
It took about 600 years before rainfall washed out enough salt to render the soil sufficiently productive for habitation to resume. Accounts of the ancient city’s destruction were probably passed down the generations as folklore. It is quite possible that a version made it into the Old Testament and formed the basis of the Sodom and Gomorrah narrative. Similarities about cities near the Dead Sea destroyed by fire and rocks from the sky make it plausible – even likely – that the biblical narrative can be traced to the air burst that demolished Tell el-Hammam.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Daily Beast – The Giant Space Rock That Wiped Out Biblical Sodom
Encyclopedia Britannica – Sodom and Gomorrah
