New research seems to confirm the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah: the impact with an asteroid may have destroyed the two Jordanian cities.
The city of Tall El Hammam, in the Jordan Valley, has been the subject of extensive excavations for about twenty years. The evidence brought to light by archaeologists seems to agree: the immense city of the Bronze Age brought to light a few kilometers north of the Dead Sea corresponds to the biblical descriptions of the city of Sodom.
A new study, published in Nature, seems to confirm the biblical version of the “rain of sulfur and fire” that destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
In Genesis it is written that “The Lord caused a rain of sulfur and fire to fall from heaven on Sodom and Gomorrah” that destroyed the cities, killing all the inhabitants and setting fire to the vegetation.
Gli antichi interpretarono tale atto di distruzione come una punizione divina: le più recenti indagini sul sito di Tall El Hammam confermano il racconto biblico della “pioggia di fuoco”, e rivelano che tale immane distruzione potrebbe aver avuto tutt’altra origine.
L’analisi dei materiali trovati durante gli scavi della città giordana, infatti, indicano che il sito fu colpito da temperature superiori ai 2000°C, ovviamente impossibili da produrre con la tecnica disponibile all’epoca.
La distruzione di Tall El Hammam avvenne attorno al 1650 a.C.: in quegli anni, la città individuata come Sodoma era un fiorente centro abitato, tra i più grandi dell’area del Giordano, più grande addirittura della ricca Gerusalemme.
The city, archaeologists point out, seems to have been completely abandoned around that date, along with at least 25 other minor settlements in the area of the South of the Jordan, indicating that the destructive event described by the Bible could refer to a real catastrophic event that wiped out the population of Sodom and Gomorrah.
After having excluded, among the causes, the volcanic and tectonic activity of the area, scientists now seem to lean towards a precise explanation: Sodom was destroyed by the explosion of a meteorite.
Meteorite impact
The research published in Nature investigates the characteristics of the unique findings that emerged during the excavation of the large archaeological site of Tall El Hammam: in addition to evidence indicating exposure to very high temperatures, researchers have identified so-called “impact quartz.”
As James Kennett, a geologist at UC Santa Barbara, explains, the existence of such a rock formation can only be explained by assuming an extremely high pressure change, of the sort caused by an asteroid exploding in the air.
The asteroid that must have caused the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah must have been even larger than the bolide that caused the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Russia, releasing about 1000 times the energy of the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima.
The asteroid that caused the end of Tall El Hammam was even more destructive, according to scientists: the explosion killed more than 8 thousand people, and the “fragmentation of the skeletons” identified by archaeologists would seem to indicate an event of unprecedented violence.
It would even seem that the change in pressure caused by the huge explosion of the asteroid in the skies of Sodom could be the cause of the particular salinity of the nearby Dead Sea: the evidence seems to indicate that significant amounts of salt have risen from the ground, causing the desertification of the surrounding areas.
Tall El Hammam was therefore destroyed by an asteroid, the evidence is in agreement. Unfortunately, there are no texts contemporary to Genesis that confirm the oral tradition of the great destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The temptation to believe that this is just the scientific explanation of a biblical story does not leave indifferent the archaeologists, who conclude “the description of the catastrophic event may have come to us through an oral tradition that, over time, may have taken the form of the story written in the Bible about the destruction of Sodom”.