THERE'S ONE MAP people want to see more than any of the 900 we have so far at The Casual English Bible® (TCEB). Sodom and Gomorrah.
Not surprisingly, given human nature, they want what they can’t have. They want to see two towns the Bible says were burned off the planet 3,000 years ago or more.
Map caption: HUNTING ERASED CITIES. Bible writers report that God burned Sodom, Gomorrah, and other cities on a plain, leaving nothing but scorched marks on the ground. Curious archaeologists say they may have found the cities—one with scorched ash a foot thick.
But people are curious. So, archaeologists camp out in the badlands south of the Dead Sea and look for scorched marks on the ground—because that’s all the Bible says God left after punishing the towns:
“He destroyed both cities and all the other cities of the plain, with all the people, animals, and even the crops and fields. The only thing left was scorched earth” (Genesis 19:25, TCEB).
Why God destroyed Sodom
The Bible doesn’t say much about why God erased Sodom and all the other cities in the plain.
A pair of angels said only:
“The screams of horror coming from this city and about this city are so loud that they have reached all the way to the LORD” (Genesis 19:13).
The angels should know. A gang of men in Sodom had just tried to rape them. The angels came to rush Lot’s family out of town before the sky fell. Lot was the nephew of Abraham, father of the Jewish people.
How did God destroy the cities?
What happened to the towns is a mystery. Was it supernatural or just a natural disaster?
“The LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in a firestorm of burning sulfur raining down from the sky in a lethal spray” (Genesis 19:24).
Lot’s Uncle Abraham watched this from a distance, in the hills of Hebron, above the plains.
“He looked out across the plain below him, toward Sodom and Gomorrah. The entire plain was engulfed in churning billows of smoke” (Genesis 19:28).
Theories about what happened
There are two main theories about how God destroyed the towns, and both start with an earthquake. This entire region sits on a major fault line that looks like a deep scar cut into the earth, extending from the Jordan River Valley south through Egypt and deep into Africa.
Theory 1: Underground pockets of gas explode
The land around the Dead Sea is rich in sulfur, salt, oil, and natural gas. The quake may have broken open pockets of gas, which were ignited by lamps or fires in town. An explosion like this might explain why Lot’s wife, who stopped to look at the explosion, “got caught in the fallout of the disaster. She became a pillar of salt” (Genesis 19:28).
Pillars of salt punching up through the land in the region testify about how much salt is in the ground.
Theory 2: Cities slid into the Dead Sea
Another theory starts with the cities built on sandy soil beside the shoreline of the Dead Sea. When the quake hit, for one horrifying moment, the trembling grains of sand became as fluid as water. And everything resting on top lost its grip and slid down into the sea basin below. In those instants, fires ignited belching pockets of natural gas released in the quake.
A geologist named Graham M. Harris wrote about this theory in the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology. He described what may have happened to the towns as “liquefaction.”
A team of geologists put that theory to the test: a geologist with the British Museum along with geologists from England’s universities of Cambridge and Hull. They built a scale model of towns and simulated an earthquake. When the quake hit a magnitude of six, the buildings on the model collapsed and slid down the slope, like skiing on water or slipping on ice.
There certainly was a slope. The shoreline of the Dead Sea is the lowest dry-land spot on earth at 1410 feet (430 meters) below sea level.
Where were the towns?
Many scholars say they may have found what’s left of Sodom, Gomorrah, and the other cities of the plain destroyed in the fire. They say these towns might have been among the ruins of five cities discovered at the southeastern tip of the Dead Sea, on Jordan’s side of its border with Israel.
Bab edh-Dhra was the largest of the towns. It may have been Sodom. Numeria may have been the similar-sounding Gomorrah. It’s better-preserved ruins were covered by ash—in some places a foot thick (a third of a meter). Lot and his daughters escaped to the town of Zoar, possibly the ruins of Gawr as-Safi, about 14 miles (22 km) south of Sodom.
Other scholars say the towns may have been in the basin, which is now covered by evaporation pools for harvesting minerals. In theory, what happened is that that southern tip of today’s Dead Sea had been dry land. But the earthquake released a flood of water from the north, which thundered over the cities in the southern plains.
Did God really do this?
Well, the anonymous Bible writer says so.
But some Christians say, “Not so fast.” Many people in Bible times seemed to believe that whatever happened was because God wanted it to happen. They reasoned that God, after all, created and controlled everything.
So, when they saw cities destroyed in a disaster, they presumed God was punishing them.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah was not initially written. The Hebrew language wasn’t invented yet. And the only Hebrew was Abraham. Scholars say most of the stories of the Jewish Bible, which Christian’s call the Old Testament, were passed along by word of mouth from generation to generation.
And perhaps, somewhere along the way, an imaginative grandpa added a few interesting details to the story.
Okay, that’s heresy some would say. “Common sense,” others might reply.
But we’re talking about something that happened 3,000 years ago, some Christians might remind us. And we have nothing solid in our hands to support the story. So, these folks might say we should get comfortable not knowing what exactly happened.
Still, others would argue we do have something in our hands to support the story: the Bible. And they would say that’s all we need.
Yet perhaps what we need as much as anything else is patience with each other, and a willingness to listen and to think.
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