Archaeologists and theologians are working together to analyze recent discoveries and explain what happened to the ancient city of Sodom found in the Bible’s Old Testament book of Genesis.
Dr. John Bergsma, a professor of theology at Steubenville, Ohio’s Franciscan University, thinks the evidence uncovered at Tall el-Hammam located in the southern Jordan Valley may have been caused by a very large exploding space rock, according to The Daily Star.
Tall el-Hammam’s sudden disappearance about 3,600 years ago has been a mystery to archaeologists for years. In the city’s ruins, there are no signs of an extended military siege or conflict. However, other signs point to a different catastrophic cause, the outlet reported.
One thing that drew Bergsma’s interest was the marks of extreme heat left on pottery fragments, human skeletal remains, and other artifacts, Relevant magazine reported. This type of heat damage could possibly be from a giant asteroid exploding above the city similar to what Genesis 19:24-25 describes in the Old Testament.
“Then GOD rained brimstone and fire down on Sodom and Gomorrah—a river of lava from GOD out of the sky!—and destroyed these cities and the entire plain and everyone who lived in the cities and everything that grew from the ground.”
The evidence points to a sudden, high-temperature destructive event that occurred. Smithsonian Magazine reported that pottery pieces from the site showed melting on the outside, but were left untouched on the inside.
In addition, pottery shards found at the Tall el-Hammam site were also covered in Trinitite. It is the glassy residue that was left on the desert floor after the plutonium-based Trinity nuclear bomb test on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The glass is primarily comprised of arkosic sand including quartz grains and feldspar that has been melted by an atomic blast.
The presence of Trinitite adds weight to the theory that a high-energy event, like an asteroid explosion/impact, occurred in the area, according to Relevant.
Bergsma also told the outlet about the unique grotesque condition of the human remains at the dig site.
“Human skeletons are complete up until about halfway up the backbone, and then there’s just a scorch mark, and there’s nothing on the top of the body,” he described. “They found massive evidence that a huge heat blast from the sky…incinerated these twin cities on the Jordanian side of the river.”
Destructive Force Several Times Larger Than Siberian Explosion
Steven Collins, dean of the College of Archaeology at Trinity Southwest University, and the lead archaeologist at Tall el-Hammam has theorized the airburst over the city might have been even larger than the Tunguska Event of 1908, an asteroid explosion over remote Siberia that caused massive destruction, according to Relevant. It would have expended even more energy than when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in August of 1945.
According to NASA, on June 30, 1908, an asteroid plunged into Earth’s atmosphere and exploded in the skies over Siberia. Local eyewitnesses in the sparsely populated region reported seeing a fireball and hearing a large explosion. They also reported massive forest fires, and trees blown over for miles. Because of the remoteness of the site, the event garnered little attention. The first scientific expedition did not reach the area until 1927, but still found ample evidence of the asteroid’s destruction caused by the shock wave and heat blast from the aerial explosion.
As CBN News has reported, Collins co-authored a paper that confirmed the city was destroyed by a “thermal event.”
“The violent conflagration that ended occupation at Tall el-Hammam produced melted pottery, scorched foundation stones, and several feet of ash and destruction debris churned into a dark gray matrix as if in a Cuisinart,” he noted.
Read more at: cbn.com