The sensational discovery captured international headlines in 2021: At the biblical site of Sodom—Tall el-Hammam—astonishing evidence was uncovered of a fiery cataclysm that obliterated the city in an instant, annihilating all inhabitants within half a second. Chemical analyses of remains from the site revealed temperatures briefly soaring to levels akin to the surface of the sun.
The article on this discovery is featured in The Armstrong Institute Biblical Archaeology magazine. In their latest issue, they discuss the bone fragments found at the site, explaining how the inhabitants died, the causes of their deaths, and if Sodom is mentioned in other texts besides the Bible. This discovery challenges previous beliefs that Sodom and Gomorrah were located in the South, asserting instead a northern location.
Facts from the Article about the Location of Sodom and Gomorrah
What was the destructive force that annihilated Sodom and Gomorrah like? Can we see evidence from the remains discovered at the Tall el-Hammam site? Superhot flash-heating was seen on some potter fragments. What does this pottery reveal? For that let's take a look at the article:
"Destroyed pottery with surfaces melted into glass. Melted bricks, melted plaster. Massive quantities of ash. Scorched remains of people and vessels, not just strewn at random, but directionally oriented in some sort of apparent "blast" direction. Mudbrick superstructures, up to 5 meters thick, sheared off at about waist height-the height of the rampart protecting them. The fragments of one particular vessel, which had a very unique design, were able to be traced-scattered along a 22-meter directional line spanning six rooms. And this destruction layer contained an unusually high salt content - "six times more concentrated than the Dead Sea."
The article confidently states that pottery is not the only type of remains discovered; skeletal remains have also been found.
"There are skeletal remains that lie as they fell, wrenched and contorted. There's human bone-scatter all through the final-day ash: human beings who blew apart before they fell....One example is a pair of prone skeletal legs and feet-everything from the mid-thigh up having simply sheared away, vanished-the "hyper-flexed toes" of which are "consistent with either perimortem or postmortem exposure to high temperatures." Another skeleton "was found buried in a crouching position with the hands raised to the face, a posture commonly adopted for protecting the head, as occurred during the volcanic eruption at Pompeii."
The article gives further details about how the inhabitants died from this airburst, which we will look at in a moment:
"Based on the distribution of human bones on the upper and lower tall (mound), we propose that the force of high-temperature, debris-laden, high-velocity blast wave form an airburst-impact:
1. Incinerated and flayed their exposed flesh
2. Decapitated and dismembered some individuals
3. Shattered many bones into mostly centimeter-sized fragments
4. Scattered their ones across several meters
5. Buried the bones in the destruction layer
6. Charred or disintegrated any bones that were still exposed.
An Airburst Destroyed Tall el-Hammam Better Known as Sodom
We have uncovered the specific details of how the inhabitants of Sodom met their end, but what could have led to such destruction? The article attributes it to an airburst. But what exactly is an airburst, and have there been previous occurrences? How intense is an airburst, and how does its destructive power compare to that of a bomb?
"The team presented the evidence that "a cosmic airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a 50-meter-wide bolide (meteor) detonated with -1000x more energy that the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The article documented the telltale signs at the site of an airburst event, noting that the destruction stratum contained concentrations of shocked quartz, diamondoids, iron-and silicon-rich spherules, and trace remains of melted platinum, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, quartz and iridium (the latter of which has a melting point of 2,500 Celsius, or 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit). ...Death would have been instantaneous, killing all living things in the area within a spit second. Sudden destruction-and even this is reflected in the biblical account. Lamentations 4:6:
(Lamentations 4:6) "For the punishment of the iniquity of the daughter of my people is greater than the punishment of the sin of Sodom, that was overthrown as in a moment, and no hands stayed on her."
Does the name Sodom only Occur in the Bible?
The last interesting fact I gleamed from the article was the name Sodom occurring in ancient text apart from the Bible.
"We have found Sodom in the Egyptian records"...I realized that there is the objective case shift from Egyptian into any of the Semitic languages in which you add the letter m, becoming Sutum or Sudum, which is exactly what we find in the Old Testament. So in the Middle Bronze Age Egyptian execration texts, the location of our site is called Sutu or Sudum. But that's not all. In the ensuing centuries, the Egyptian name for the area changed. "After the Middle Bronze Age, the name of the site changed to Abel. This is on the Egyptian map list from he 18th and 19th Dynasties, well documented," Collins continued. "The name of our site, of that area that we're in, went from Sutu to Abel. What does the Egyptian word Abel mean? It means to mourn a catastrophe. From Sutu to Abel-what happened, to take us from one to the other? There was an EVENT."
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