Explosive Claims...

I don’t think anyone can accuse me of not keeping up with current events, but even a veteran news reader like me missed the reports that came out about a year ago from a team of researchers from Trinity Southwest University, an unaccredited theological school and Bible college in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Since 2005 they have been digging at the Tall el-Hammam site a few miles north of the Dead Sea in Jordan.

The Trinity Southwest team began digging there because they thought it might be the biblical city of Sodom. And then they began looking for evidence that it had been destroyed in some sort of fiery cataclysm to confirm their hypothesis. Because, short of finding a “Sodom City Limits” sign, how else can you conclusively prove you actually found the biblical city of Sodom?

Kaboom Town

The archaeologists from TSU say they found what they were looking for: widespread destruction over a 200 square-mile area north of the Dead Sea that left the region uninhabitable for six centuries. The researchers theorized the destruction was caused by shock waves of heat and pressure from a meteoritic airburst. Not only did the airburst kill everyone in the immediate vicinity, but a tsunami of superheated brine from the Dead Sea poisoned what had previously been a fertile area.

Artwork for a scene from a Christian movie called "God's Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah" by a group called Eastern Lightning (https://en.easternlightning.org/videos/destruction-of-sodom-and-gomorrah.html)

While extraordinary, these are not outlandish claims. Meteoritic airbursts do happen. The Tunguska event of 1908 is perhaps the most well-known. That event had an explosive force of 10-15 megatons and flattened trees over an 825 square-mile area in a forest in Siberia. More recently is the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded with a force of 400-500 kilotons over the southern Ural region of Russian in February 2013. 1200 people were injured, mostly from glass shattered by the pressure wave. It would have been much worse if the meteor had entered the atmosphere at a steeper angle; the main force of the blast would then have been directed towards the ground.

Dashcam footage of the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion.

The TSU researchers date the destruction of their site to ca. 1700 BCE, the Middle Bronze II period. They claim this is the time of Abraham. Many biblical scholars doubt there was a historical Abraham, but those who believe there are historical memories in the patriarchal narratives (Gen 12-50) would date them to the early 2^nd millennium. A meteoritic explosion causing the destruction of several Middle Bronze communities and the wasting of the surrounding lands could have been memorialized as a story of God bringing down his wrath on a wicked populace much as television preachers are quick to blame the sins of the victims of especially destructive hurricanes or earthquakes.

As you can imagine, the combination of the words “Sodom” and “meteor” is catnip to the media and the period of late Nov/early Dec 2018 saw titles in online articles such as:

“New Science Suggests Biblical City of Sodom was Smote by an Exploding Meteor”

“Biblical Sin City of Sodom Destroyed by Giant Meteor says Archaeologist”

“Scientists Find Evidence of Meteorite Responsible for Destroying Sodom and Gomorrah”

Fundamental Disagreement

You would think that such a confirmation of the Bible would make fundamentalists very happy. You would be wrong.

Some biblical literalists take a nihilistic approach. The Bible says God utterly destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Since they were utterly destroyed, there would be no ruins left to dig up. Alrighty.

Other literalists object to the time. According to them, the figures provided in the Bible date the overthrow of Sodom to 2067 BCE. If Tall el-Hammam was Sodom as the researchers from TSU claim, then its destruction ca. 1700 BCE doesn’t leave enough time for a 430-year sojourn in Egypt by the Hebrews before the exodus in 1446 BCE.

Dr. Steven Collins, the co-director of the dig at Tall el-Hammam, has been vociferous in his promotion and defense of the Hammam site as ancient Sodom. As an evangelical, he believes in the inspiration and authority of the Bible, but he does not take the patriarchal lifespans literally. For example, when the Bible says Abraham died at the age of 175, he says that number may reflect an actual age of 55 years plus three “honorific” supplements of 40 years. Otherwise, if 175 is taken literally as Abraham’s age, he would still be alive when his grandson Jacob was a teenager.

A final objection from literalists is to the place. They insist Sodom was south of the Dead Sea, not north of it. They reference Gen 14:3 placing Sodom in the “Valley of Siddim, which is the Salt Sea”. Dr. Collins argues that Gen 14 is describing the location of a battle, not the location of Sodom. He also points out that the “Southern Sodom Theorists” ignore Gen 13:10-12 which places Sodom in the “plain of Jordan” and that can only be north of the Dead Sea since the Jordan terminates in the Dead Sea.

The Better Argument

Examining both the Northern Sodom and Southern Sodom arguments, I would say that Dr. Collins makes the better case for a Northern Sodom. A destruction date of ca. 1700 BCE poses no difficulties for anyone who doesn’t take biblical chronology literally. The core reason for arguing for a Southern Sodom site like Bab edh-Dra appears to be that it gives you a destruction date of 2350 BCE (Early Bronze) which is a closer fit (but still not exact) to the Bible-generated date of 2067 BCE.

Dr. Collins does not believe in evolutionary theory or that the OT was composed from multiple sources. He can’t make the argument that the Bible is not always consistent. Any references to Sodom being south of the Dead Sea have to be argued away.

As someone who accepts a critical understanding of the Bible’s development, I can accept that the location of Sodom – assuming it actually existed – could have been misremembered, showing up north of the Dead Sea in some traditions and south of the Dead Sea in other traditions. It’s not a big deal to me either way.

My main interest is what evidence has been found for an aerial burst in the Dead Sea area. Ascribing the destruction of Sodom to a meteoritic explosion is an extraordinary claim. And, as Carl Sagan frequently said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” But it’s a potentially provable claim, so the evidence will either bear it out or not.

How does the evidence stack up? I’ll examine that in part two of this article.