Comments on: Where Is Sodom?

By: Daily Bible Text Alerts

Daily Bible Text Alerts — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:15:13 +0000

[...] sent to subscribers. Do you want to get free Bible verses delivered to your phone via SMS text . Where Is Sodom?: Genesis 13, archaeology and Biblical geography … Sign up today! Permalink: [...]

By: The Naked Bible » Why Sodom and Gomorrah are Not Located at Tall al-Hamman

The Naked Bible » Why Sodom and Gomorrah are Not Located at Tall al-Hamman — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 20:05:16 +0000

[...] month it will receive the widest hearing to date. I thought it might be helpful for readers of Biblical Archaeology Review to know where to go for another [...]

By: Klea

Klea — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 14:12:11 +0000

I am just amazed the more I look into the age of the earth-I find more reasonable to believe that this is a very young Earth and that the theory that this evolved over millions of years is mis-information with an agenda.Whatever we all have an instinct to dig and uncover and discover-”There is nothing new under the sun” so we keep finding the answers one by one-even the age of the Earth.

By: Jim Campbell

Jim Campbell — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 22:19:32 +0000

Arlan, are you actually interested in narratives associated with this dig? If yes, why not look fairly at the Biblical evidence? Genesis 13: 4 places Abram and Lot at an altar between Bethel and Ai, some 15 mi north-west of the Dead Sea, when they agree to go their separate ways. Verse 10 has Lot looking over the Plain of the Jordan River, i.e. the region immediately north of the Dead Sea – which the Bible claims was as fertile as the Garden of Eden because the Lord had not yet destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah – as far as Zoar. Sodom and Gomorrah were on the Jordan River Plain or why imply that their destruction would waste the Plain? And that extended to Zoar, which explains why Lot and his family had time to get from Sodom to Zoar between early dawn and just after sunrise [Genesis 19: 15, 23]. The confusion that seems to have arisen – having some archaeologists place Zoar at the south-end of the Dead Sea – is from references in Isaiah and Jeremiah over a thousand years later to another ‘Insignificant’ town of refuge in Moab. My experience is that place-names which are commonly descriptive are seldom unique – we’ve got two Torran Turachs (‘Towering Conical Hills’) on the island where I live.
The dating is a different matter: Steven Collins claims that he has triple-dated his finds, but considering that (a) radiocarbon dating procedures were still being ‘calibrated’ as late as 2008 [Ramsey] and are very sensitive to ambient radiation conditions right along the time-line, (b) ceramics typology obviously depends locally on the social dynamics of distribution (at a guess, city-states in the back-of-beyond aren’t going to be great at off-loading fine pottery to their hinterlands), and (c) I can’t see there being much wood left to tree-ring date in a land where even the building foundations were consumed, it would take a fair amount to convince me that the archaeological dating was right on the button. I’ve looked at how the Bible dates the events in Abraham’s fairly well-travelled and eventful life and, even though you don’t see many men who live to 175 these days, the narrative is consistent. The attempt to conventionalise his days by assuming some attributed ‘demi-god’ length of years, sounds like flanneling to me. Convince me that all cosmic ray fluxes have been accounted for, that there is no natural radioactivity in the Jordan Valley – Siddim Valley regions, and that there was no nuclear component to God’s weapon (6 or 7 centuries might be about right for medium half-life isotopes to leach out of the soil), and I might be persuaded to risk doing my head in by taking ‘formulaic Hebrew life-numbers’ for the patriarchs seriously.
Now, whether you’ve heard of the Elamite kings outside of the Scriptures is neither here nor there – everybody’s trawling for scraps of information in a nearly empty ‘trashcan’. Any narrative from these early eras needs to be considered as a potential witness unless it can be proved to be fictitious. Nobody had a clue that the Egyptians considered the Hittites to be a super-power in the 13th century BC from Rameses II’s depiction of the map-rewriting battle of Kadesh (who today had even heard of that?) until very recently, when lost libraries containing letters between these empires were recovered in Hattusa. Before that they were considered to be some mysterious race or tribe for which the only evidence, just about, was the Bible’s reference to King David’s general, Uriah, and the Genesis 14 history that you were trashing. Given the racial and linguistic mix in the Near East in the early 2nd millennium BC, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were umpteen names that each of these kings was known by… and how do you know these weren’t just honorifics? For example, unless you knew something about Roman Empire history you probably wouldn’t consider that Augustus (mentioned in the Bible) was just an honorific given to the Emperor Octavius by the Senate; or, in the Books of Daniel and Ezra, there’s references to Darius the Mede and Darius the Great – there is a strong suspicion that Darius is an ancient Achemenian honorific refering to a war leader of noble birth. We probably know a lot less than we think we do, and maybe even what we make out – so let’s not be trashing any ‘trash’ till we’re really sure it is just that, eh?

By: Jim Campbell

Jim Campbell — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:34:47 +0000

Sorry, Jerry, it’s not what the Bible or the geologists say. Genesis 14: 4 identifies the Salt Sea (i.e. the Dead Sea) with the Valley of Siddim before God destroyed the Cities of the Plain [Genesis 19: 24, 25]: the sea occupied most of the valley as it does today. Besides if the Tall-el-Hammam excavations are Sodom, then from the lay-out of the skeletons, whatever phenomenon destroyed the city came in from the east. If it were an asteroid it would have had to do a right-angle turn to enter Siddim Valley – it’s not the way a flying rock travels. As far as I know, there haven’t been any craters found so far, and not all Earth-impactors cause craters, e.g. Tunguska was an airburst that levelled 800 sq mi of forest but left no crater.

By: Jerry Knoblet

Jerry Knoblet — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 02:30:49 +0000

Did you ever consider the idea that before Gen. 19, there may have been no Dead Sea? When the Dead Sea was created, it replaced the River/Valley of Siddim? Gen. 19 describes a massive destruction that puts a crater in the earth. The book of Genesis is indeed the book of beginnings.

By: Jim Campbell

Jim Campbell — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 01:19:45 +0000

Marylin, if it had been an asteroid it would have had to be a pretty small one, comparable to the Tunguska cometary fragment, for the affected region seems to have been the east side of the Jordan River Plain. If it had done all the things you said, do you think Abraham would still have been alive to see the devastation, standing as he was, between Ai and Bethel, a mere 5 mi from the edge of the Plain?

By: BrianM

BrianM — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:27:01 +0000

Krissy,
Your unbelief locks you out of truly understanding the Bible. Very similar to a message I heard yesterday about Nicodemus & Jesus. Nicodemus knew all about the Scriptures but he didn’t understand what the O.T. & Jesus was saying until he was born from above. Obviously, you have a pre-supposition that disbelieves the Scriptures before looking at them.

By: Jim Campbell

Jim Campbell — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 13:57:08 +0000

Sorry, Caroline, but the two events are located too far apart for Thera’s ash to have dumped on Sodom, and besides volcanic ash cools fast as it expands in the stratosphere. As far as I’m told, the ash is purely from things burning as described in Genesis 19: 24, 25 – it doesn’t have the chemical signature of the nearest known sources of possible volcanic activity, the Harrat Ash Shaam on the Syrian border or Jordan’s Mt. Nebo, where Moses was shown the Promised Land before passing away.

By: Jim Campbell

Jim Campbell — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 22:23:20 +0000

If Oun’s comment about ‘salt’ refers to the turning of Lot’s wife into a pillar of the stuff, look at the Hebrew word used – ‘masha’. Apart from ‘salt’ it can also mean ‘pulverized powder’, not difficult to believe for searing temps >2000°F.