Split Decision

Originally I wasn’t planning on discussing chapter 13 of Genesis because it didn’t seem that significant. To briefly recount the passage, disagreements arise between herdsmen for Abram and those for his nephew Lot. Abram proposes that they separate from one another and offers Lot first choice. Lot chooses the well-watered Jordan valley and they part amicably.

My initial impression was that the episode merely serves to explain how Abram’s nephew found himself in the city of Sodom; this point is key to Abram’s rescue of Lot in the following chapter. The passage has been sermonized as contrasting the generosity of Abram vs. the selfishness of Lot or as an example in conflict resolution. But a closer reading of the text indicates that this is a critical moment in Abram’s life.

A Little About Lot

We first encounter Lot in the genealogy of Terah in Gen 11:27-32 where Lot is mentioned as the son of Haran, who then dies. When Terah leaves Ur, he takes his son Abram and his orphaned grandson Lot with him and they settle in Haran. Abram later leaves Haran for Canaan and brings his nephew Lot along (12:4-5). We don’t hear of Lot again until he is mentioned going up from Egypt with Abram to the Negeb (desert region in southern Canaan) in 13:1.

The implication from all this is that Abram has adopted Lot as his heir. After all, we were told early on in 11:30 that Abram’s wife, Sarai, is barren. YHWH also told Abram in 12:2 that he would become a blessing and that the land of Canaan would be given to his descendants (12:7). Not having any children of his own, Abram must have assumed that his descendants would be through Lot, unless by some chance Sarai was to conceive or Abram took another wife.

This has two important implications. First, Abram’s welfare was key to fulfilling the promise. As long as he was alive, he could still father a child (through Sarai or someone else). Second, Lot was his backup plan. If something were to happen to Abram or he could not father a child of his own, as his heir Lot would inherit the land of Canaan and fulfil the promise of being a great nation.

From this perspective, Sarai’s welfare was secondary. Knowing this helps us understand Abram’s motivations in Egypt in passing off Sarai as his sister in 12:10-20. In order to fulfill the promise, Abram needed to preserve his own life at all costs. If that meant selling off Sarai to Pharaoh, then so be it. Little did Abram realize at the time that Sarai was absolutely necessary to the promise. His mistaken actions actually put the promise at risk and YHWH had to bail him out by causing a plague in Egypt that led to Pharaoh expelling Abram and his people.

Choice of Lot

Gen 13 literally returns Abram to where he was before his excursion into Egypt. In 12:8 he pitched his tent in the hill country between Bethel and Ai and then travelled by stages – presumably following the flocks as they grazed – down to the Negeb. When famine hit the region, Abram continue moving on to Egypt. In 13:1-3 this migration is reversed. Abram went up from Egypt to the Negeb and then travelled by stages back to “the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had formerly stood.”

Lot makes his choice (artist unknown)

By this point, the flocks and herds owned by Abram and Lot were too numerous for the land to support and quarrels developed. Instead of remaining together and over-grazing the land, Abram proposes they go their separate ways and thereby utilize the resources of the entire land. As the elder, Abram could have selected the best portion for himself, but instead he allows Lot to choose and Abram will take what remains. Lot chooses the well-watered plain of Jordan and sets out eastward, leaving Abram to settle in the land of Canaan.

As mentioned above, I never saw this passage as all that significant. But biblical scholar Larry Helyer has studied the passage in detail and sees implications in Lot’s choice for his status as Abram’s heir.

Helyer [1] points out that Bethel sits atop the ridge of hills that runs through central Canaan. It also sat between the northern pasturage centered around Shechem and the southern pasturage centered around Hebron and Beesheba. The stories in the Jacob cycle are located on the northern pasturage and those in the Abraham cycle are mostly associated with places set in the southern pasturage.

According to Helyer, Abram is presenting Lot with a choice of northern or southern pasturage. You can visualize the two of them standing on the ridge overlooking the land with Abram saying, “If you prefer the left, I’ll go to the right; if you prefer the right, I’ll go to the left.” If they are facing west, the “left” is the southern pasturage and the “right” is the northern pasturage.

Abram provides a binary choice that would keep the land “in the family”, but Lot thinks outside the box. Lot looks behind them and sees how well-watered is the whole “kikkar of the Jordan”. Usually translated as “plain of the Jordan,” kikkar means something round and flat. It could be referring to a circular oasis, a flat plain, or an area bounded by a loop of the Jordan. Whatever the “Jordan Disk” was, it must have been a sight to behold. The narrator compares it favorably to both YHWH’s garden in Eden and Egypt.

Legal Separation

Lot leaves Abram and heads east, finally pitching his tents near Sodom, one of the cities of the Jordan Disk. The narrator does some foreshadowing here of events in Gen 19, informing us that YHWH has yet to destroy Sodom and the other cities of the Disk because of their great wickedness. The reader would be left to wonder what will befall Lot when his new home is destroyed, but Abram would be unsettled for a completely different reason.

From Abram’s perspective, Lot’s choice meant his heir would be leaving the promised land of Canaan. The Jordan River marks the eastern boundary of Canaan. By choosing to live among the cities of the Disk, on the eastern bank of the Jordan (the Transjordan), Lot has removed himself outside the boundaries of Canaan; he will no longer have a share in the promised land. He won't be inheriting the family business.

YHWH tries to cheer up Abram by confirming (13:14-17) that all the land he can see will indeed be given to his descendants. But the problem still remains that Abram has no descendants of his own. That particular plotline is still unresolved and will continue to work its way through the rest of Abraham’s story.

[1] “Abraham’s Eight Crises,” Bible Review, Vol. 11, No. 5 (October 1995), pp. 20-27, 44.

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.