No Way, We Found the Biblical Sodom!
I watched this documentary last night.
Dr Steven Collins was reading in Genesis 13–15 twenty some odd years ago and said to himself “we’re looking for Sodom in the wrong place.”
He went to Bethel and Ai - where Abraham and Lot split ways - and looked Eastward, like Lot would have done. The “Jordan plains” before him were North of the Dead Sea.
The current archeological was that Sodom and Gomorrah were somewhere in the South East region of the Dead Sea, if they ever really existed. He knew that couldn’t be the case since that area was too far to be seen with the naked eye.
Dr Collins therefore got permission from the country of Jordan to dig at Tall el-Hammam, a large hill that was the most likely spot for the ancient city of Sodom.
When his digging unearthed a much bigger city than he was expecting, he called in help from the renowned archeologist Leen Ritmeyer. Ritmeyer was at first skeptical that this could be Sodom, but after several monumental discoveries in the mound, he is convinced that this is the ancient city.
This is what they found:
- A huge gateway that is described in Genesis 19:1.
- People buried in layers of ash in all sorts of contorted ways.
- A piece of pottery that was coated on one side with a translucent mineral called Trinitite, which was first discovered in New Mexico in the sand which had been melted by the atomic bomb blast.
If you’re interested in digging in more, I found the following resources also helpful:
- Dr Collins’s book on the discovery
- A presentation by Dr Collins
- A presentation by Leen Ritmeyer
