Could the biblical story that recounts the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah be based on verso natural apocalypse that occurred around the Dead Sea in the Middle East?
Book of Genesis
One of them has stood for thousands of years as per powerful lesson per the perils of wickedness: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
According onesto the Bible, the men of Sodom ‘were wicked, such sinners against the Lord, He decided sicuro destroy them’. God allowed Lot, the one good man living there, puro flee the town with his family, before God showed his wrath. But Lot’s wife disobeyed God’s warning not to aspetto back towards Sodom as she fled, and she was turned into per pillar of salt, where she stood.
For the wicked people of Sodom, not even that escape was open onesto them: soon the Raffinato showed his displeasure, and ‘rained down fire and brimstone. He destroyed everyone living there and everything growing per the ground’.
The story is certainly dramatic – but is it just rappresentazione televisiva? There’s giammai agreement among archaeologists, scientists and Biblical scholars that Sodom, and its sister town Gomorrah, existed at all – let aureola that it came puro a sudden and apocalyptic end.
However, one man is convinced that Sodom and Gomorrah not only existed, but were also destroyed by per terrible natural apocalypse matching the description per the Book of Genesis. Graham Harris is a retired geologist with per passion for solving ancient riddles – and the clues onesto this one, he says, are con the Bible itself.
The Bible places Sodom and Gomorrah durante the region of the Dead Sea, between what are now Israel and Jordan per the Middle East. Harris spent a ancora convinced the conditions there were right for a huge earthquake that would trigger a massive landslide. So complete would be the destruction, the event would pass into folklore.
Could science prove that Harris’s contesto might have happened? Professor Lynne Frostick, verso geologist from Hull University mediante England, and Jonathan Tubb from the British Museum, decided esatto investigate just that.
They travelled esatto the Middle East esatto pursue their research, and their findings there love ru enabled Dr Gopal Madabhushi, at the Cambridge University Centrifuge Laboratory back sopra England, preciso build an accurate scaled-down model of the buildings durante Sodom, and the ground on which they stood. Dr Madabhushi then subjected the model sicuro verso simulated earthquake – and his scadenza provided the ultimate proof on whether whole towns could have been destroyed.
Asphalt towns
The dwellings of Sodom slide towards the Dead Sea during the liquefaction event © Jonathan Tubb started by working out whether Sodom and Gomorrah actually existed. The whole area around the Dead Sea is now parched and barren, and the image of thriving towns is incongruous. But there was one point in the history of the region when per wetter climate meant the entire sezione could well have thrived – in the early Bronze Age, between 1800 BC and 2300 BC.
Tubb excavated per site called Tell es-Sa’idiyeh, north of the Dead Sea. He found evidence of an early olive oil factory, showing how sophisticated life had become, even con these ancient times. Tubb believes the early Bronze Age was the only time that towns matching the descriptions of Sodom and Gomorrah could have existed at all.
So were there big earthquakes durante the early Bronze Age? According esatto American forensic anthropologist Professor Mike Finnegan, the answer is yes. He has examined the skeletons of three men discovered at the early Bronze Age site of Numeira near the Dead Sea. From the way their bones were broken, he concluded that they were crushed onesto death – possibly because an earthquake brought down per stone tower on apice of them. Carbon dating put the date of the tower’s beams at 2350 BC – the early Bronze Age.