...Requires Explosive Evidence

In part one of this article I examined a claim that the biblical city of Sodom had been destroyed by an exploding meteor. Part one mostly reviewed the surprisingly negative response from biblical literalists. In part two, I would like to survey the physical evidence presented to support the explosive claim.

Explosive Evidence

The claim was put forward in a paper presented at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). The paper’s authors were a team composed of excavators at the Tall el-Hammam site along with researchers from the Comet Research Group. The physical evidence presented in the paper was collected from the dig at Tall el-Hammam, claimed to be the site of biblical Sodom.

Tall el-Hammam. A "tall" or "tell" is is an artificial hill created by many generations of people living and rebuilding on the same spot.(Credit: Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East)

The paper presented at ASOR begins by noting that many archaeological sites in the Jordan plain north of the Dead Sea were abandoned in the Middle Bronze period (2000-1500 BCE) and remained unoccupied for centuries. The authors propose an exploding meteor as the explanation for the sudden end of the Middle Bronze Age civilization in that region.

Four main pieces of physical evidence were put forward:

1. Concussive evidence: Only stone foundations remain; the mudbrick superstructures are mostly missing. Very few intact pieces of pottery were found.
2. Directional evidence: Where tumbled mudbrick walls were found, they were northeast of the stone foundations. Pottery fragments were scattered in a northeasterly direction.
3. Chemical evidence: A salt and sulphate content of 6% in the ash layer marking the city’s destruction in the Middle Bronze Age. The chemical composition of the salts is virtually identical to that of Dead Sea water.
4. Thermal evidence: A small portion of pottery sherds are partially melted (“vitrified”) on the surface, indicating an exposure to temperatures between 8000° C and 12,000° C for less than a few milliseconds. A “melt rock” composed of melted and fused quartz and sandstone was found at another site 8.5 km away.

On my first read, I found this all very interesting but not completely convincing. I consider myself an educated reader but certainly no expert on Middle Bronze excavations. I did some Internet searches to see what experts had to say. The vast majority of articles were breathless announcements of the findings like those mentioned in my previous article. The only negative opinions were outright rejections (“this is pseudoscience”) with no assessment of the physical evidence.

Examining the Evidence

Barring analysis from an expert, I can only share my own thoughts.

Inhabited mudbrick structures need constant upkeep and will quickly deteriorate once they are abandoned. After all, the bricks are just dried mud. Only mudbricks that have been buried since their last use and thus protected from the elements will be uncovered on an archaeological dig. Archaeologists rely on stone foundations to tell them where mudbrick walls once existed. Therefore, an absence of mudbrick structures at Hammam is not at all unusual.

Similarly, unbroken pottery is more the exception than the rule at a dig. Only in an undisturbed burial context should you reasonably expect to find intact pots.

With respect to the directionality of the found remains for mudbrick and pottery fragments, maybe that had something to do with the prevailing wind direction for the area in ancient times. A steady wind off the Dead Sea could have blown debris material towards the northeast. Blown debris covering fallen mud bricks in the northeastern sections of the site would have preserved them from eroding away.

Wind blowing off the Dead Sea may have also had something to do with the concentration of salt and sulphates. These were found in the ash layer marking the end of the site’s Middle Bronze occupation. The site was unoccupied for six or seven centuries until the Iron Age. Core samples indicate that during the Middle Bronze the water level of the Dead Sea had fallen and the south basin was entirely dried up until around 1500 BCE. Over that time, salts blown off a desiccated Dead Sea could have accumulated in high concentrations just offshore.

Vitrified potsherd. Only the top 1mm of the 5mm-thick sherd was melted to glass. The next 2mm of clay was darkened and the bottom 2mm are the natural color. (Photo from paper discussed in this article.)

The vitrified potsherds seem like the strongest pieces of evidence for something unusual. Middle Bronze pots were fired at low temperatures of around 800° C.  They may not have had the technology to fire a pot hot enough to glaze it. But maybe they did. Had there been a flash thermal event of 8000° to 12,000° C, it seems to me that much more than just a few pieces of vitrified pottery would have been found. Sand anywhere in the vicinity should also have been turned the glass. Lightning is known to vitrify sand, soil, and rocks into fulgurite, so imagine what a thermal event such as what was proposed would have done.

The “melt rock” was a surface-level find, so who knows where and when it came from.

The paper goes on to identifier several typical markers of an airburst event. I’m not convinced that an aerial burst would generate those kinds of markers, but the point is moot because the authors go on to  admit that preliminary analysis reveals some of these markers at the Hammam site, “but not at compelling levels.” If it’s not compelling to them, it’s certainly ain’t compelling to me.

Evidence Demands a Verdict

One thing not mentioned by the article involves the conditions at other sites in the area. The Bible states that Sodom was only one of the “cities of the plain”. In addition to Sodom, there’s the well-known sister site of Gomorrah and the less-known cities of Admah and Zeboiim. Being the largest ruin in the area, Tall el-Hammam is supposedly the main city of Sodom and the neighboring Tall Kafrayn is assumed to be Gomorrah. Tall Nimrin is proposed as Admah and other sites for Zeboiim.

If a meteoritic airburst took out Sodom, it would have affected the neighboring cities as well. I reviewed the papers from the teams excavating Tall Kafrayn and Tall Nimrin and nothing out of the ordinary was mentioned there. Maybe I missed it. Or maybe the teams exploring those sites failed to spot salt haze and vitrified potsherds.

Where does this leave us? The physical evidence proposed for a meteoritic airburst hardly seems conclusive. There are simpler alternate explanations that come to my mind. I would think that an expert in the field would be able to suggest more likely explanations than what I was able to come up with. We would also need to see evidence from other sites in the Jordan plain, not just Tall el-Hammam.

I am sympathetic to the airburst theory. A major catastrophe like that would be remembered for centuries and handed down in legends. It would be cool if it were true. But based on the physical evidence presented, I have to conclude that it is not. Or at best, not proven.

Tall el-Hammam may have been the biblical city once known as Sodom, but that doesn’t mean it was destroyed by an exploding meteor.