New Archaeological Evidence Points To Sodom And Gomorrah's Location

For centuries, skeptics have dismissed the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah as myth. The story seemed too dramatic, too supernatural to be a historical fact. But new archaeological findings near the Dead Sea are forcing even doubters to reconsider. Dr. Titus Kennedy, a field archaeologist with the Discovery Institute, has uncovered compelling evidence that matches the Bible's description of divine destruction from above.

The breakthrough centers on a geographic anchor that has been hiding in plain sight for millennia. Of the five cities mentioned in Genesis as located in the Jordan Valley, one, called Zoar, was never lost to history. Named in numerous ancient documents and located on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, Zoar provides the key to finding its infamous neighbors. Kennedy, who headed excavations in the area of ancient Zoar, explains that when angels came to save Lot from Sodom, he escaped to Zoar that same day. This means archaeologists searching for Sodom have a limited area to cover.

The answer lies in the nature of the destruction itself. For years, the leading candidate for Sodom has been Bab edh-Dhra, an Early Bronze Age city on the southeastern shore of the Dead Sea within a day's walk of Zoar. Kennedy reports that mass charnel houses have been found there, where the dead were buried above ground instead of being interred in caves. These burial sites show evidence of fires that started from their roofs and spread downward. "This hints that the destruction came from above and was not deliberately set from within the tombs," Kennedy said. This matches precisely what the Bible describes.

The Bible records the fate of these cities with chilling clarity: "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And He overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground" (Genesis 19:24-25). The Hebrew word gofrit, translated as brimstone, refers to sulfur, and Kennedy's excavations have revealed sulfur balls embedded in the soil around the Dead Sea, golf-ball to tennis-ball-sized spheres that are extremely flammable.

About 20 kilometers south of Bab edh-Dhra lies the site of Numeira, tentatively identified as Gomorrah. There, Kennedy discovered human skeletons beneath a collapsed tower. "We don't usually find complete skeletons just lying around in excavation sites from this period," Kennedy noted, because it was customary to bury the dead in sealed tombs. This suggests a sudden catastrophe in which people died where they stood, much like what happened in Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Two other nearby sites, Feifa and Khanazir, which may have been the remaining cities of the five-city grouping, also showed signs of sudden destruction and fire. All five cities existed in the Early Bronze Age and were fortified. Then they were abandoned. Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira were definitively destroyed by massive fires, and at Feifa and Khanazir, where illegal digging has occurred, ash layers have been discovered. Meanwhile, Zoar remained occupied not just for centuries but for millennia, still existing in the Byzantine period and beyond, retaining its name as the Bible indicates.

The archaeological evidence for Zoar's survival is matched by repeated Biblical references. Moses mentioned Zoar in Deuteronomy 34:3 as a geographical boundary. The Sages understood that Zoar's preservation served as testimony to God's judgment on the other cities. Isaiah and Jeremiah both referenced Zoar as a living city in their times, in stark contrast to how they spoke of Sodom as destroyed and desolate.

Near Zoar, Kennedy excavated a cave containing Early Bronze Age pottery. Byzantine Christians built a church there, inscribed with the name "Church of Saint Lot," the cave where Lot and his daughters fled after arriving in Zoar. The location fits the Biblical description perfectly. Genesis 19:30 states that Lot "went up out of Zoar and dwelt in the hills with his two daughters, for he feared to dwell in Zoar." Looking at the area today, hills rise directly to the east of where ancient Zoar stood, and just to the northeast sits this ancient cave. "We can't say for sure that it's the place," Kennedy acknowledged, "but it certainly fits things as far as the geography and the chronology and the tradition."

The competing theory places Sodom at Tall el-Hammam, a Middle Bronze Age city northeast of the Dead Sea. Researchers there believe the site was destroyed by a meteor impact, based on a 1.5-meter-thick carbon- and ash-rich layer of destruction. But Kennedy points to a fatal flaw in this identification. After its destruction in the later Middle Bronze Age, Tall el-Hammam was reoccupied. 

It was inhabited during the Iron Age, when Isaiah and Jeremiah prophesied that Sodom remained an abandoned ruin. It was still occupied in the Roman Period when Jesus said that Sodom "would have remained until this day" if it had witnessed his miracles, implying it no longer existed. Tall el-Hammam contradicts the Biblical record that Sodom was never rebuilt.

The southeastern sites near Zoar have a documented history spanning decades of research. After a decade of digging, archaeologist Phillip Silvian of Trinity Southwest University reported in 2018 that the 15-square-mile circular Middle Ghor was a fertile plain, populated continuously for at least 2,500 years. Some form of catastrophe 3,700 years ago brought this to a sudden end, wiping out an estimated 40,000 to 65,000 people who inhabited the area. The event was so catastrophic that the region remained unpopulated for 600 years.

Studies of 120 small settlements in the region showed signs of extreme, collapse-inducing heat and wind. Pottery was exposed to such intense heat that it melted into glass. Zircon crystals in those glassy coats formed within one second at extremely high temperatures, perhaps as hot as the surface of the sun. The researchers suspected a huge meteor strike, but found no crater. They concluded that a meteoric airburst occurred, similar to the 1908 Tunguska Event in Siberia, where an explosion flattened 770 square miles of forest without leaving an impact crater.

A 2021 study published in the journal Scientific Reports involved 21 co-authors from across the United States, Canada, and the Czech Republic, including archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, and cosmic-impact experts who spent 15 years analyzing Tall el-Hammam. They determined that bricks melted at temperatures of 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than a volcano. They concluded that about 3,600 years ago, an icy space rock measuring 50 meters across entered the atmosphere at 38,000 mph and exploded about 2.5 miles above the ground. The resulting blast was about 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

The storm traveled 14 miles across the valley, toppling the walls of Jericho and burning it to the ground. Shockwaves from the explosion pushed a bubbling brine of Dead Sea salts over once-fertile farmland. Located in an arid region, it would take several centuries of minimal rainfall to wash away enough salt deposits to allow a return to agriculture. Radiocarbon dating places the destruction within 50 years of 1650 BC.

The evidence drew criticism from some in the scientific community. An opinion piece in Sapiens Anthropology Magazine called the claims "pseudoscientific," and critics questioned whether altered images were used as evidence. Steven Jaret and R. Scott Harris suggested that standard smelting processes caused the extreme heat affecting the pottery. Paul Braterman dismissed the researchers as representing "an unaccredited Bible college," and James Hoffmeier questioned their credentials.

Silvian responded forcefully, calling the accusations of photo manipulation "categorically false" and noting that critics made "ad hominem attacks against the authors and the institutions with which we are associated. None of their comments addresses the science within our paper." He called it "a classic example of character assassination substituted for a rational discussion of the evidence."

The debate took an unexpected turn when Dr. John Bergsma, a Catholic theologian and professor at Ohio's Franciscan University, publicly acknowledged that he now believes Tall el-Hammam represents Biblical Sodom. For Bergsma, who had been skeptical of fantastic Biblical accounts, the turning point came 15 years ago at a Society of Biblical Literature conference where he heard Stephen Collins present his research. 

When Bergsma asked what destroyed the cities, Collins showed him glazed pottery from the Bronze Age, a technique not invented until a thousand years later. "That glass layer that you get when you basically set off an atomic bomb in the desert," Bergsma explained. "This pottery was raised to over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit for a brief moment."

"That really changed my perspective on the Old Testament," Bergsma said, "because what it pointed out to me was that things that sounded so outlandish to be history, that even I, as a believer, was tested and tempted to discount, were suddenly shown to be a historical event."

Kennedy's approach differs from that of the Tall el-Hammam researchers in his strict adherence to both archaeological and Biblical evidence. The Madaba Map, a mosaic constructed around 542 AD on the floor of a church in Jordan, shows Zoar on the southeastern shore of the Dead Sea, with Lot's Cave marked next to it. Josephus, in the first century, wrote that the Dead Sea extended as far as Zoar. 

Eusebius of Caesarea, in the third and fourth centuries, placed Zoar on the southeast side of the Dead Sea. The fourth-century Roman military document Notitia Dignitatum mentions a Roman encampment at Zoar, and eight tombstones of Roman military officers have been found there. The pilgrim Egaria from about 380 AD wrote about the bishopric of Zoar, and a tombstone has been discovered with a Greek inscription for Opsis, the bishop, from about 369 AD.

The cumulative evidence is striking. Multiple ancient sources confirm Zoar's location. Archaeological excavations reveal destruction from above at sites within a day's walk of Zoar. The timeline matches the Biblical chronology. The nature of the destruction matches the Biblical description. And the long-term abandonment of the region matches the prophetic declarations that these cities would never be rebuilt.

The skeptics who dismissed the Bible's account as mythology now face a mounting pile of physical evidence that demands explanation. Fire from heaven no longer sounds like ancient superstition when pottery melted at temperatures hotter than the sun's surface and entire cities were incinerated in moments. The question is no longer whether divine judgment fell on Sodom and Gomorrah. The question is whether modern archaeology has finally located where it fell.

Originally published at Israel 365 News