Has Sodom Been Found?

Well, good afternoon, everyone. Good to see all of you. Sort of good to be up here speaking to all of you. We'll see.

It's been a while, and I have been very, very busy trying to catch up on ten years of work for some reason. I gave a little teaser and announcements shortly before the feast about something that I wanted to talk to you about, but was under a news embargo. At that time, regarding a recent, massive archaeological discovery, I personally think it is a world-changing discovery. That will be the subject that I'll talk about today.

The subject is, has Sodom been found? Has Sodom been found? Was Sodom a real city? The biblical story of the fiery destruction of Sodom and its wickedness sounds like a fantasy to many people. Many people dismiss it as a fable. Even a lot of professing Christians do not believe in the story just because it sounds too fantastic, too strange, too bizarre to have literally happened.

But do we have real evidence that Sodom existed and that it was destroyed as described in the Bible? I want to begin before we get into that particular topic. I want to talk a little bit about how do you identify a Bible site anyway? How do we know particular sites are those that were mentioned in the Bible? The remains of literally hundreds of villages, towns, cities, from biblical times, dot the Holy Land. A surprisingly large number of them have been identified that this is the location that is mentioned in the Bible. Virtually every significant site that is mentioned in the Bible has been identified along with dozens and dozens of smaller ones as well.

Some of the key ways to identify a biblical site are, first of all, the name has been preserved down through the centuries because the site was actively inhabited during all that time. A few examples of this would be Jerusalem, for instance, Damascus, Syria, Ammon, Jordan, and Jericho. That's one way we know about particular Bible sites. Another one that goes along with this is identified by inscriptions, where the inhabitants left an inscription saying, there are literally some city limit signs that have been discovered for some Bible sites.

We know that's the name of the town because of the boundary markers. They're called boundary markers, not city limit signs. But some of those have been found for a number of different Bible sites. Another way sites are identified is by process of elimination. You simply look at the evidence for it, look at other, maybe there's only three or four candidate towns in a particular area, and you can eliminate a number of those by process of elimination because they're already identified as another town or city, for instance.

Finally, the last area I'll talk about very briefly is that the geographic descriptions or factors that are identified in the Bible, for instance, is the site mentioned as being located on a body of water, like the Mediterranean Sea or the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee, or something like that. Is it east of this other city or north of this city or something like that? Is it located in this particular valley or along this particular road? And so on. So what does the Bible tell us to look for in a particular site? Does it give us geographic markers?

Actually, I was talking with Don Arms just before services. The site of Sodom has more geographic markers identifying it than any other biblical city, even more than Jerusalem, believe it or not. So I don't have time to go into all of that. I'll just cover a handful of those today.

So let's get into a few of those markers that tell us where Sodom was located. So if we're going to find Sodom and tell whether it was really existed or not, we need to know where to look for it. So Sodom does appear quite early in the biblical account in Genesis 13 with the story of the patriarch Abraham. In Genesis 13, verse 2 tells us that Abraham was a brum.

He was a very wealthy man, very rich in livestock, silver, and gold. As it tells us here in verse 2. In the next verse, we see that he travels from Egypt back up north to the Holy Land. Our story picks up between Bethel and I.

Continuing with the story, the next verse, we find that he was traveling with his nephew Lot.

Lot also has flocks and herds and tents. Today we would call Abraham and Lot Bedouins. Bedouins are people who live in tents, very large tents, about half the size of this room, with their family, their servants, dozens to hundreds to thousands of sheep and goats and camels, and so on. So they are traveling around from place to place. They are following the pasturage for their animals there. So Abraham and Lot were, as we saw here, at Bethel and I.

Now, where are those locations? They've been identified in fairly recent years in the mountainous area north of the city of Jerusalem. This is a, geographically, spine of mountains and hills. It runs north-south through the middle of the land of Israel. Bethel and I are in this hilly area along a spine of mountains running through the land there. But they have a problem, a slight problem, we read about in verse 6, that the land was not able to support them, that they might dwell together.

For their possessions were so great that they could not dwell together. And there was strife between the herdsmen of Abraham's livestock and the herdsmen of Lot's livestock. So what we're being told here is there's simply not enough grass to go around. They have so many animals, so many goats, so many sheep, so many camels that they can't feed them all as they're traveling together. So they're going to have to divide up and dwell in different parts of the land.

So Abraham has a very generous solution. Verse 8, he said to Lot, Please let there be no strife between you and me, and between my herdsmen and your herdsmen, for we are brethren, we are kin. Abram is Lot's uncle there. And Abram continues, Abraham, Is not the whole land before you? Please separate from me. If you take the left, then I will go to the right, or if you go to the right, then I will go to the left.

And in verse 10, Lot lifted up his eyes, and saw all the plain of Jordan, that's talking about the Jordan River Valley there, that it was well watered everywhere before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Like the garden of the Lord, like it's so well watered, it looks like Eden. And like the land of Egypt, as you go toward Zor, Egypt was very lush because of the Nile River there that would come through and flood every year. And provide so much water that they were able to grow three crops a year there in Egypt.

So let's examine then what we're told in this story about the location of Sodom. So, actually, let me finish the story. A couple of verses I didn't get to. Then Lot chose for himself all the plain of Jordan, and Lot journeyed east. That's important. He journeys toward the east. And they separated from each other. A brahm dwelt in the land of Canaan, the hilly country that I just talked about there, and Lot dwelt in the cities of the plain down in the Jordan River Valley, and pitched his tent even as far as Sodom.

And then there's this rather ominous statement that is interjected here. So let's examine the clues we've been given here about the location of Sodom and see what we're told here. First of all, Bethel and I, as I mentioned, are on this central spine just a few miles north of Jerusalem.

They're mentioned together, Bethel and I, in biblical languages, that means they're located very close together, typically, in the Middle East. They're mentioned together, Bethel and I, in biblical languages, that means they're located very close together, typically within a mile, mile and a half of each other, kind of like one's a city and the other's a suburb of it or something like that. So they're on this mountainous ridge.

And from here, as we read, Lot lifted up his eyes and saw all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere. Like the Garden of Eden and like Egypt, very lush because of the Nile River. So from these mountains that overlook the Jordan River Valley off to the east, Lot chose that lush area and journeyed east. So this tells us Lot's direction of travel. From Bethel and I, he journeys to the east, very clearly spelled out there in Scripture for us.

And it tells us where he settled. He traveled as far as Sodom and settled there. So Sodom, therefore, has to be somewhere over here to the east of Bethel and I in the Jordan River Valley and that area there. So this next photo here shows roughly the view of Abram and Lot would have had from the foothills over here looking across the Jordan River Valley here over toward what is today Jordan. Now, this is a much higher angle because this is taken from an airplane. But you get the idea.

They could look out over this plane and see that it was indeed well watered. You can see all the agricultural fields and so on there. This is actually the Jordan River here cut into this little canyon in the bottom of the valley here today. That's what it looks like today. So we see the direction of travel and where Lot goes and settles at Sodom. So we learned quite a bit more about the specific location of Sodom when we examine the word plane, the Hebrew word that is translated plane here in verse 10, 11, and 12.

The plane of Jordan, or the plane of the Jordan, is the way we would put it in English. The Hebrew word here is kakar. K-I-K-K-A-R. It's a very interesting word. It means, from the complete word study dictionary Old Testament, it means something that is round, such as a coin or a talent, a district, meaning a geographic area around a place, a loaf of bread, not a big puffy loaf of bread like ours, but pita bread, flat bread, from that time.

It indicates something round, disshaped, and circular. And I might also add flat because all these objects are flat as well. And when it's translated plane, the word is also translated talent and other things it refers to. It's even used of the moon. Because what does the moon look like from Earth? It looks like a flat disk up in the sky there. So it's translated a number of different ways. But whenever it is translated plane, it is always in connection with the Jordan River or the Jordan River Valley.

So it seems to indicate, seems to be used as a very specific geographic term whenever it is translated plane there. So interestingly, eight different Hebrew words are translated plane in the Bible in the sense of a level area of valleys, meadows, low places. But only kikar is used in connection with Sodom and Abraham and Lot and the plain of the Jordan River Valley. So it seems to be describing a very specific geographical feature or area in the Jordan River Valley. And looking at it from a satellite photo, what we're looking at here, again this doesn't show any national boundaries or anything, but here's the Dead Sea, the northern end of the Dead Sea.

Here's the hills of Israel over here. Here's the modern-day Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. And this word kikar, meaning something that is flat and round, actually if you look at it on a topo map or actually if you go there and travel through this area, as I have, as several others have, who've been here, it's like you're standing in the middle of a plate or a shallow bowl because you look up to the north and to the south and the mountains form a circle around there.

So this area is why it's called in the Hebrew Bible a kikar, something that is flat and round. And it's very obvious when you go to this particular area and stand in the middle of that, you're standing in a flat, round area with mountains forming a circle all the way around you. It's very, very plain once you were there. It doesn't show up quite as well on this map because you're seeing more of the vegetation here, but it's very obvious topographically when you go there and see that. And dissecting this kikar, this round area, is the Jordan River, this thin strip of green going through there.

And there are also various springs and streams coming out of the mountains from either side, from the Israeli side, or from the Jordanian side, making this a well-watered plain or kikar of the Jordan back in Abraham's time and Lot's time there. Now, on the eastern side, so again Abraham and Lot are over here, Lot travels east across this area as far as Sodom.

So, it's interesting, on the east side of this are the remains of a very large ancient city, buried city, that we'll be talking about today called Tal El Hamam. It is huge. An archaeological group has excavated the site for the last 15 seasons, and they have found powerful evidence pointing to it as the possible site of ancient Sodom.

Now, for about the last, oh, since the 1800s, the common view of Sodom and Gomorrah, the location, was that they were at the southern end of the Dead Sea. And probably a lot of you have read that or heard that in different places, but is that possible in light of the geographic markers that we just read here? Very plain markers from the book of Genesis. And some people think they're actually underneath the waters of the Dead Sea in that area.

And that view was made popular back in the 1800s when they excavated a few ancient settlements down in this general area. However, those settlements have been dated centuries earlier, way earlier than the time of Abraham and Lot and Sodom.

So, date-wise, they just do not work. They're far too old for that there. And there is no physical evidence for Sodom and Gomorrah actually existing down here in the southern area of the Dead Sea. And also, the Bible's description of this as being a well-watered place just does not work either at the southern end of the Dead Sea, because there are no rivers.

The Jordan River comes into the Dead Sea from the north, but there's nothing entering or exiting from the south. And there aren't the kind of springs and streams coming down from the mountains down here. You can see in the difference of the grain in this satellite map here versus up here. So that doesn't work either. The description of Sodom and Gomorrah doesn't work.

Another real problem with this view is that from where Abram and Lot are up here at Bethel and I, when Lot looks out over the well-watered plain of the Jordan, you can't see the southern end of the Dead Sea from up here, because there are mountains blocking your way. It would be like going up to Mount Evans here in Colorado, and you can see Denver just fine, but you can't see Colorado Springs at all, because the view is blocked by the mountains here.

Same type of thing here. So the southern end of the Dead Sea just is not even visible to Abraham and Lot when they divide up where they're going to go. Only the northern part, northern tip of the Dead Sea, is visible from this area. So again, that idea of Sodom and Gomorrah being down here just does not work when you look at the evidence that's recorded there in the Bible.

So let's briefly summarize what we have learned so far here. Abraham and Lot decide to separate at Bethel and I in the highlands overlooking the Jordan Valley. Lot looks out at the plain of the Jordan, the cacar, the round circular flat plain of the Jordan, and he chooses to go there.

Which direction does he travel? From Bethel and I. He travels east, not south. Lot moves through this plain, traveling as far as Sodom, indicating that Sodom is on the other side of this plain. And the area is well watered, like Eden. And problems with the southern Dead Sea location, it's nowhere near the area where Lot and Abraham separated.

It is not a well watered plain of the Jordan because there is no river, no springs, no streams and that kind of thing. Also, the biblical description of the location doesn't fit because it could not be seen from the area Bethel and I. And Lot journeys east to go to Sodom, not south.

And the geologic description doesn't fit. There is no circular plain or similar feature down at the southern end of the Dead Sea. We find yet another clue to the location of this area. Several centuries later, this is when the time of the Exodus, or actually when the Israelites are preparing to enter into the Promised Land, they come in from the east side, from what is today the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, cross over the Jordan River into the Promised Land. And before they do that, they stop not far from there at the top of Pisgah, a mountain called Pisgah, which looks down on the wasteland.

And wasteland here is a Hebrew word that means waste, wilderness, desert, or a desolate place. If any of you have been to Mount Nebo, let's see, if you raise your hands, anybody been to Mount Nebo? Yeah, several of you here. Mount Pisgah is half a mile away, something like that. So it's essentially the same place. And if you've been to Mount Nebo, you know where you are. You look down, you see the Jordan River spread out below you, and then the Promised Land on the other side.

So Mount Pisgah is looking out from the same area as Mount Nebo, and what lies below it?

Not a lush, well-watered valley, but a wasteland. A wasteland. So how did it become, how did it change from a well-watered valley to an empty, desolate wasteland?

It became that way because of the destruction of Sodom. So again, it's talking about the same area. Just one is viewed from the east side, and one is viewed from the west side of the Jordan area, but the same area. So here is where Mount Nebo and Mount Pisgah are, and if you're looking out, yeah, there's what you see. You're looking out right over the plain of the Jordan. And you can see Tell El-Hamam right down here, quite easily visible from this area. Again, Abraham and Lot are looking out over this area, and it's well-watered. Several centuries later, the Israelites are looking out over the same area from the opposite direction, and it's a wasteland. So what happened? What happened here between those two events? Well, the Bible tells us. It tells us that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, burning them to ash and cinders. And it became a wasteland at that time, and was still a wasteland several centuries later. So what then does the Bible tell us about the possible location of Sodom? As we've seen, it tells us a great deal. Here in the clues we find in the Bible, and the geographic evidence very strongly points toward Tal-Al-Hamam being a likely candidate for the site of ancient Sodom. So now let's look at the story of what happened at Sodom, and see what the evidence at Tal-Al-Hamam tells us. So we read earlier about how Lot and Abram separated, and Lot chose to go to Sodom to live. And here's a computer-generated reconstruction of a typical city of that period. Cities, especially down in the Jordan River Valley, would have been made out of mud brick. Large mud bricks that are about, yay, yay big here. And that was the building material they had. They had plenty of clay, mixed it with water, put it in a wooden form, and baked bricks out of it. And that was common building material in much of the ancient world. And they would also have flat clay roofs, like are shown here. This is actually a depiction of the palace area at Tal-Al-Hamam. It was a four or five story building based on the size of the foundation and construction parallels with other cities and areas. So this is what Sodom would have looked like, kind of give us an idea of where Lot chose to settle there. And Sodom was large enough to have its own king with a quite large palace complex there. And most of us are probably familiar with the story of the destruction of Sodom. So I'll just hit some of the high points initially here. God, only a tiny handful of people escaped from the destruction of Sodom there. But before that happened, God, in the form of one of three men, the other two being angels, appeared to Abraham and told him what was going to happen. And if you remember the story, Abraham negotiates with God and says, Well, if there are 50 righteous people, will you spare the city? God agrees that he will. Well, what about if there are 40? And they negotiate it down to only 10. And finally, there aren't even 10 righteous people in the city of Sodom. So everyone is doomed except for Abraham's nephew Lot and his immediate family, his wife and his daughters. So the story of that destruction is recorded in Genesis 19. The introduction to the depravity of that city is frankly pretty shocking, even in our years today. Two angels in human form come to visit the city firsthand to see if it is as evil as its reputation has. Lot gives them a safe place to stay for the night. They're in the city, but the story takes a very dark turn. Because come dark, the men of the city surround Lot's house and demand that he bring out the two angels so that they can gang-rape them.

Again, pretty shocking. And Lot pleads with them, Please, my brethren, do not do so wickedly. And Lot even offers the mob his two daughters there. But the men threaten Lot. They are ready to break down the door. And the angels pull Lot back inside the house and strike the crowd, the mob, with blindness. And as a result of that, the gang-rape is not carried out there of the two angels. And it is from this account that the word sodomy entered our English language here. And the act of sodomy was outlawed for many, many centuries. But now it's not only approved and widely accepted, but the tables have turned such that if we view sodomy as evil or wrong now, you're the one who's viewed as the problem. You're the one who needs to be locked up. But the story doesn't end there. We'll pick it up again and start reading in verse 12. So Lot then goes to his sons-in-law, and he pleads with them, verse 14. And says to them, Take them out of this place, for we will destroy this place, because the outcry against them has grown great before the face of the Lord, and the Lord has sent us to destroy it. So Lot then goes to his sons-in-law, and he pleads with them, verse 14. And says to them, Get up! Get out of this place, for the Lord will destroy this city. But to his sons-in-law, he seemed to be joking. They had become very comfortable there in Lot. Lot is a big city. It's a prosperous city, a wealthy city. And they said, We don't have anything to worry about. God's not going to destroy this place. Sounds very familiar to many attitudes today. Verse 15, When the morning dawn, the angels urged Lot to hurry, saying, Arise, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be consumed in the punishment of the city. And while Lot lingered, the men took hold of his hand, his wife's hand, and the hands of his two daughters, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and sent him outside the city. What we're being told here is the angels literally grabbed them by the hands of the arms and pulled them outside the city.

Literally pulled them out. So it came to pass when they had brought them outside. Now outside, this is another indication. This is a walled city. It has a defensive wall around it. Lot is described as sitting in the gate. So not many...you had to have a pretty large city to have a walled city at that time, to have the resources to build defensive walls around that. So this is also an indication that Tel El-Hamam is the site here that does have these defensive walls that are being described here. Verse 17 again, So it came to pass when they had brought them outside that the angel said, Escape for your life! Escape to the mountains. The mountains are very near, just a couple hundred yards away. Escape to the mountains lest you be destroyed. Well, actually there are hills just a few hundred yards away that goes higher up into the mountains. So Lot then pleads that he not have to go all the way up into the mountains because there's wild animals up there and things like that. So he says, look, can I go to the nearby town of Zohar? And he does. There's several cities of the plain. There's Sodom and Gomorrah who are nearly always named together, indicating like Bethel and I, they are very close together within a mile or so. And then there's various other cities of the plain that are mentioned. There's five different cities who are part of this alliance there in the cities of the plain. So there's a number of cities around there, one of which is Zohar as well.

So Lot goes there and then continuing with the story in verse 23, The sun had risen upon the earth when Lot entered Zohar. Then the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah for the Lord out of the heavens. So he overthrew those cities, all the plain, the cakar, this big circular flat area, all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. So not just the cities are destroyed, but also the trees, the vegetation, the crops, the fields, everything is utterly wiped out. By this fire and brimstone coming out of the sky.

So everything is obliterated.

A word you might apply. God cauterized the earth because of the sins of the people at that time. Now where is Abraham living at this time? Well, Abraham is...they separated from up here. Abraham moved down near Hebron today, down there. So he's roughly 25 miles, something like that, from this. But obviously something has happened. Abraham realizes something has gone terribly wrong. He can't, because of his location over here in the foothills, can't directly see this area. So he has to hike within 10, 15 minutes or so, can go to the top of a hill and look off across the northern end of the Dead Sea.

And here is the account of what Abraham sees. So when Abraham looks across the northern end of the Dead Sea, this is kind of what he sees. Smoke ascending from what had been this lush, fertile, well-watered area dotted with a number of different towns and cities and villages there. The area that had been so lush is to be compared to the Garden of Eden, which was now a smoldering, smoking ruin.

Nothing. Nothing left there. And as we read as a leader, when the Israelites come through several centuries later, this area is still a wasteland because of the devastation that has taken place there. Now many people read passages like this describing this fiery destruction coming down out of the sky to destroy a city for the people's sins. And they ridicule them. They just think it's a gross exaggeration. It's a fable. It's impossible.

We can't really believe the Bible because it's full of myths and things like that. But is there any correlation between these passages that we've just read in the Bible and what has been discovered in recent years at the site of Tel-Al-Hammam? For the last 15 years, archeologist Dr.

Stephen Collins, executive dean at the Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a team of staff and dozens of volunteers have been excavating at Tel-Al-Hammam, a site they believe, based on the geographic markers that I read earlier, they believe to be the site of ancient Sodom. And one of those volunteers recently has been Don Harms here. So if you have questions about this, you can talk to him directly about it. I've met Dr. Collins on several occasions, heard him speak and lecture about this topic, and the geographic material came directly from him, from some of his lectures that I've heard.

The site of Tel-Al-Hammam is huge. This is what it looks like. The modern-day road that runs from Amman, Jordan to the Allenby Bridge over to Jerusalem is right here in the foreground. It literally cuts across the very edge of this ancient mound. I'll give you an idea of the scale. It's about a half a mile long there, what we're looking at. And the walled area enclosed about 90 acres. Now, for an ancient city in that time, that is huge.

I don't know of another city mentioned in the Bible other than Babylon or Nineveh or Rome that comes close to this size. 90 acres is about 10 times the size of Jerusalem at this time, or Jericho. So it's huge. It is a massive city-state for that time there. And in this mound are the layers, the destruction of several different occupational levels, different cities that have existed there, that have been destroyed and buried multiple times over the centuries. So through the course of their excavations there, and the excavation season there is basically January and February because the Jordan River Valley is so hot, so much of the year, that they can't dig in summer like most of the archaeological sites in Israel.

So they dig in the winter time when it's mild enough to actually work there. In recent years, they have compiled a huge amount of evidence there. Dr. Collins and his team. Another member of the team is Dr. Philip Silvia. And this passed autumn, right around feast time. Dr. Silvia published a peer-reviewed study paper. It appeared in scientific journals around the world, or was released to scientific journals around the world.

And the initial publication was in Nature Scientific Reports online. But what is striking about the paper is its examination of the archaeological evidence of destruction that has been accumulated over there over recent years, and how closely it fits the Bible's description of the destruction of Sodom. The evidence shows a sudden catastrophic destruction that came not from this earth. I'll repeat that. The evidence shows a sudden catastrophic destruction not from this earth.

Let that sink in, and I'll explain. Several of us have been following this for 16 years.

Some of us in our UCG Media department visited the site before they started digging there 15 seasons ago. This is Darris McNeely. You may recognize standing on top of the tell, looking off to the north. The Jordan River is behind him, and the Dead Sea is a little bright sliver right up above his head and going off the edge there.

It's hard to see there because there's so much haze and humidity in the Jordan River Valley. You don't have a lot of visibility, but the mountains of Israel are over here, and this is the Jordan River Valley. I visited there twice. Here I'm looking at a stone bowl used for grinding grain. They would pour wheat and barley in there. On my other hand is a grinding stone that would grind that around in that bowl and grind flour out of it.

This is another view from a top that is a half-mile long tell. Here's another photo of Tom Robinson there. He was there on that same trip. I show this one because if you look in the background, there are two other tells that are quite visible. This one is three-quarters a mile away, another one maybe a mile and a half, two miles away. This is probably Gomorrah. He's standing on or squatting on Sodom, and there's probably Gomorrah there because, again, the Bible links the two geographically, indicating they are in very close proximity to each other.

From this tell, you can look out and see at least five or six other tells around there. Those are probably the other cities of the plain that the Bible talks about. They were destroyed at the same time as Sodom here. I should note also that we do have some dating issues with their chronology. Our understanding of the time of Abraham and Lot and the destruction of Sodom would be about 200 years before they place the destruction of this site. I don't have an easy answer for that, but I do know that in the world of biblical archaeology, there are new things being found all the time that force archaeologists to re-examine some of their assumptions or conclusions.

I also know that dating period of the patriarchs is hard to pin down because it's not pinned to other external dates that we can prove elsewhere, like solar eclipses or conjunctions or earthquakes or things like that that are datable from other sources. I do think as more evidence is learned, as more excavation work is carried out, that we'll come closer to our dates.

There's about a 200-year difference there, but I don't see that as an insurmountable problem there. I think at some point we'll come to a meeting of the minds on this here. We don't have that now, but I did want to bring that out, just so you're aware of that. I will also add that a number of reputable archaeologists have also come to the conclusion, in spite of the dating differences there, that this is indeed the site of Sodom as well. They're basing that just on the evidence of the site itself, how compelling it is.

What have they found? Now let's get to the heart and core, the meat of the issue. What have they found here that points to this being Sodom and being destroyed by a source not from this earth? Well, let's talk about first of all the destruction. Here are four different photos showing what's called, in archaeological terms, a destruction layer. It's quite evident that each of these photos you see this dark, blackish-gray level of ash.

In this case, it's actually some charred roof beams, but you see this very clear layer of ash that indicates the city burned. Those are fairly common at ancient sites because cities would burn from warfare. The enemy comes in, conquers the city, burns it down like happened at Jericho in the Israelite conquest, Hutzer, other places like that. That's not unusual in itself. You expect to find that. What is unusual about this site is that ash layer is part of a destruction layer that's four and a half feet deep.

Four and a half feet deep of rubble, of shattered mud brick, pulverized mud brick, pulverized pottery, construction materials.

Four and a half feet of destruction is a bell in hurt. I can't think of any other ancient site with a destruction level that thick. That's unusual. The composition of that destruction level is unusual, too. Like I say, just pulverized mud brick, pulverized shattered pottery, melted building materials, melted from intense heat. I'll talk about that a little bit later here. What caused a massive destruction like that?

In the year 2014, the Comet Research Group, they're in Arizona. It's a group made up of comet scientists. They're not necessarily Christian, not necessarily Bible believers. They are predominantly scientists who like to study comets and specifically comet impacts on our planet, Comet Research Group. So they were invited to help analyze some of this destruction material to see if they could shed any light on the destruction here at Tell El-Hamam. Archaeologists have been studying it and excavating for 15 years, but when you get into some of the things they were finding, you need a whole different set of scientific disciplines to look at that. Physicists, nuclear physicists, things like that, astronomers, and so on. So they needed a totally different set of technical skills and expertise to determine what was going on here. And remarkably, the biblical story of destruction from the sky turned out to be supported by many lines of evidence that had been uncovered there. For example, let's look into some specifics now.

This is fairly common at sites. Here are two photos, the same thing. This is the foundation for this palace area here. Again, the typical building material is mud brick, but they don't put mud brick right down on the dirt. They put a stone foundation down first and then build on top of that with mud brick. Mud brick is quite durable. It's what the Israelites were building with down in Egypt. I've seen a number of mud brick walls in Israel that are 4,000 years old, and you can still make out the individual mud bricks. So it's a good, durable building material. What they found here is that there are maybe a few courses of mud brick up to a foot, a foot and a half, two feet thick. But above that, everything is sheared off. Gone.

Hundreds of thousands, millions of mud bricks, gone. Totally gone. Now usually if there were an earthquake or something like that, you would find the piles and piles and piles of mud brick around the foundations here, where they had fallen down.

But here it's all gone. Just absolutely gone. Something really unusual had happened. In this palace that I mentioned that was four or five stories high, based on the size of the foundation and the structure of the foundation, again, maybe a couple of feet at the bottom and the rest of it totally gone. Totally gone. The city I mentioned earlier, the defensive walls. The defensive walls around this city were 13 feet thick. 13 feet thick. So, and same thing there. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of mud bricks forming this defensive wall that probably stood 20, 30 feet high, higher than this building. And all the bricks are gone.

Just amazing. Nobody had seen anything quite like that before. I haven't seen or heard anything like that before. Something had demolished the upper 40 feet of this palace and these huge defensive walls, and it's all just totally gone. They found very few human remains there. Maybe parts of 10 individuals. Out of a city that probably had a population 40 to 60,000, they found remains of about 10. This is the most complete skeleton that they found, and it's there down. The upper part of the skeleton was sheared off. And the upper few inches of these femur bones were charred and burned. Notice how it's partially protected by this large stone. The unprotected part of the body is gone. Something else that's unusual about this skeleton, if you notice the toes of the right foot down here, see how they're curled under the feet. They have found that at places like Pompeii and Herculaneum, where the bodies were exposed to extreme heat as the people died. That's the only place you find skeletons like this.

So the toes are contracted from extreme heat, the legs are sheared off, and the ends of the bones burnt and charred.

Some other skeletal remains. Here's part of a skull. This is both showing the skull. Here it's more buried. Here it's been dug out. It's basically from the eyebrows to the top of the skull. A little bit of the eye sockets and the rest of the skull is gone.

Notice the color of the skull. It's kind of a reddish-orange color. What that means in scientific terms is it had been exposed to temperatures of around 600 degrees. In the layer around it, you see these yellow circles. Those are all circling little pieces of burned wood. You can see it sprinkled all over in here. The orange arrows are pointing to other bone fragments. The reason I show you these bone fragments is because the skull part and the legs are basically the only identifiable human bone fragments that they found there. The average human bone fragment that they found is less than a half inch long. That means the bodies... well, let's see. There was a particular term in the report they used. Let me find it here.

The skeletal remains recovered showed, quote, fragmentation and, quote, extreme disarticulation. What that means is the bodies had literally been shattered and ripped apart so that the average bone fragment left was less than half an inch long. What does that? What does that? Something that literally ripped the bodies into tiny pieces. If you notice the description on the slides here, it says in both these cases, pulverized mud brick. They think that's what happened to the millions of missing mud bricks. It was pulverized into dirt. It's no longer hardened bricks, but dirt. Something had pulverized it. And this pulverized mud brick is mixed into this four and a half foot deep layer with charcoal, burned fragments, and shattered, ripped apart human bodies. In addition to the ash, the bone remains, the burned wood, this destruction material contained something called shocked quartz. Quartz, some of your rockhounds, you know what quartz is, the most common form of quartz that we're familiar with is sand. Shocked quartz is basically sand grains that have been subjected to such high heat and pressure. Sand grains are basically crystalline in their structure, but they've been subjected to such heat and pressure that they, to you put it in layman's terms, they kind of melt and reshape themselves. They recrystallize into a different form. It's called shocked quartz. On Earth, the only places you find shocked quartz are generally at places of massive volcanoes, maybe at earthquakes, I don't remember about earthquakes, but places where there have been meteorite strikes or comet blasts from outer space. It's the only things that generate that kind of heat and pressure to transform sand quartz in that way. They also found melted pottery, melted mud bricks, carbon that had been subjected to such heat and pressure that it essentially formed miniature diamonds. Diamonds are made out of carbon, if you don't know that. These are miniature diamonds from the heat and the pressure. They're called dibonoids, is the term that's used. They found little tiny spherules, bubbles, you might say, of melted plaster, different minerals. They also found traces of melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz.

I'll talk about that in just a minute here. Here are some of the melted building materials. These have been melted mud bricks, plaster from the walls, clay roofing materials, and so on. You can see it's been melted and deformed. There are some very high resolution photographs of that below. Here are some pieces of pottery that were found there. The left photos show the inside of the pot. The right photos show the outside of the pot. What this shows is that the outside of the pot was subjected to such high temperatures that the clay literally started to melt and bubble.

Here it's not as obvious, but here it's very obvious. You can see the bubbles, where the air and the clay bubbled from such intense heat.

They determined, trying to reproduce these effects, that temperatures to produce had to have exceeded 3600 degrees Fahrenheit. How hot is 3600 degrees? If your car out in the parking lot was subjected to 3600 degree temperature, it would be a pool of bubbling metal.

3600 degrees can melt steel and iron. That's how hot it was. One of the scientists in the paper said, and here's a quote, Among more technical evidence we discovered human bones that had been splattered by molten glass from the event. The glass is indistinguishable from that found at ground zero after atomic explosions. These people were killed by the heat and pressure of an atomic-like explosion, but without the radiation. Now, what's he saying here in layman's terms? Well, if you've ever studied the early A-bomb experiments in World War II, the Manhattan Project, and the Trinity detonation in New Mexico, this is a photograph of that. The scientists were surprised when they examined where the bomb had gone off afterwards, because the desert sand there in New Mexico had turned to glass from the heat. Not the radiation, but just the heat and the pressure of the atomic explosion. And what this scientist is saying is, on the human bone fragments, they were splattered with microscopic melted glass, melted sand and dirt, that had been subject to such heat and such pressure, it turned to glass and then sprayed out in every direction, including on human bones.

Which tells us the flesh had already been stripped away from the bones, and the melted glass hit and stuck to the bones. Again, an indication of the destructive effect here.

So again, this is pretty sobering stuff. I mentioned earlier they found traces of melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, and chromite. And if these sound unusual, not your everyday minerals you think of, it's because they are unusual and they are rare. It's because they are typically found in meteorites and comets, not here on Earth. The scientists looked at ten different ways of how this damage might occur, how the city could have been destroyed.

They looked at warfare, they looked at earthquakes, they looked at volcanic eruptions, they looked at accidental fires, they looked at fires caused by lightning. And some of the evidence fitted some of the scenarios, but all of the evidence fit only two scenarios. And those two scenarios were an airburst of a comet or meteorite a few miles away, or a comet or meteorite that actually struck the surface of the Earth a few miles away.

Same source, a comet or meteor from outer space, but just whether it exploded in the air, whether it exploded on the ground. And that is the only thing that could account for this evidence that they have found there. So they concluded that this must have struck near the northern end of the Dead Sea, within a couple of miles of Tell Al-Hammam.

And this shows the extent of the blast based on the other villages, town, cities that were wiped out at the same time in this particular area. And it's rather interesting, too, the reason they think it detonated above the northern end of the Dead Sea, or very close to it, is because they have studied salt deposits in this area. Here's the Kakar again. Here's the Jordan Valley.

And notice these different colors that show the salinity level of the soil there. And if any of you have done gardening or farming, you know that if soil has too much salt in it, nothing will grow there. And that's what this is showing. Basically, all of these colored areas are areas where the soil is too salty to grow anything. You can't grow wheat or barley there.

And it's quite widespread, quite extensive, going up the Jordan River Valley. But particularly down in here, that's where some of the highest concentrations are. So what happened? Well, what they think happened is this burst took place over the northern end of the Dead Sea, and it vaporized hundreds of thousands of tons of salt water in the Dead Sea, vaporized, went up into the atmosphere, and then over some period of time settled back down over that area. And the Dead Sea, if you've ever been there, you know how mineral-rich and salty it is, much saltier than the ocean.

And that's where the salt came from that poisoned the land there for centuries. And the archaeological evidence shows that nobody lived in that area for 300 to 600 years later. That's how long it took for the salt to wash out of the soil there. And again, as I mentioned, when the Israelites are coming into the Promised Land from right over here, how is it described? As a wasteland centuries after the destruction of Sodom.

There's nobody living there because they can't grow food there, because the soil is filled with salt from the Dead Sea, and nothing will grow there. The archaeologists noticed something else really highly unusual that led them to this conclusion, that this had to have come from a massive explosion several miles away. And that is that the topographical map, here's the tail, the big long, oblong, half-mile-long tail, and the lower city spread out around it as well. They noticed something unusual, and that is that all of the debris that had fallen over fell in a particular direction, from the southwest pointing toward the northeast.

All the remains. I'll show you a couple of them here to illustrate what I'm talking about. This is totally unusual because if you have an earthquake again, if this building were subjected to an earthquake, it would rattle and shake, and everything would basically fall down in place, maybe skew it a little bit in one direction to the other.

It wouldn't all fall in one direction there. But here, and this is a little bit... it looks like a pile of dirt, and it is, but it's a very significant pile of dirt. What you have here, and I hope you can see that fairly clearly, here's a wall from the palace. Here it goes up into this pile of dirt. This is about 18 inches to 24 inches high and wide. You see the wall is sheared off here. There's dirt that goes over the top of it.

Over here, on the left side of the wall, you've got this rubble piled up against the wall. It's just totally mixed up rubble. But on the right-hand side of the wall, you've got very clear layers of the debris. I've never seen anything like this at any site I've been to. Again, you have the wall sheared off and the rubble coming over the top of the wall, and then settling in this angled pattern here. So what in the world is going on here?

This is where it takes people from a number of different scientific specialties to analyze what's going on. Here's what's happening. Here's what they figured out is going on. Here's a sequence of the destruction that accounts for this. You've got the wall, the original wall, right here in this dark red color. That's what we're looking at here.

Something happens that's to smash debris up against this wall, and that's what we're looking at right here. It's just all mixed up rubble, dirt, from shattered mud brick walls. It's piled up against this wall. That's what we see in the second illustration. The top of the wall is then sheared off, which you see very clearly right here, above about 18 inches here.

It's sheared off, and the top part of the wall falls down on this right side. It falls down at an angle, so that's why you've got these angle layers here. Then the other debris keeps coming and flows over the wall, as you see very clearly right here, and continues this rubble, this massed mix of shattered pottery and clay, and building materials and bones and charcoal and all this kind of thing.

Now this did not take place over several hours or several minutes. It probably took place over two seconds or something like that when this explosion took place and the blast wave hit. That's what created this destruction here. Something else... Here's another powerful example of the directionality of that destruction. This big stone here is a big stone for grinding grain into flour. Imagine you're countertop, except it's made out of stone and weighs 800 pounds. You grind your grain on that for your meals every day. That's what we're looking at. It was originally over here.

Something hit it with such force that it blew it about four feet away and turned it on its side. An 800-pound stone. Here's a bunch of shattered burn pottery and destruction in the same layer here. It was blown in the same direction as that destruction we just looked at a minute ago. One final photograph of this. These are three different clay pottery vessels. They were originally standing side by side. Something happened to shatter them and blow them all in the same direction. They're all going in that direction from right to left.

They're color-coded so you can tell the different vessels here. Now, you know from experience, if you drop a plate or a dish or something on the floor and it shatters, the pieces go out in every direction. If you have a spouse who's particularly irritated you and throws something at you and they miss and it hits the floor, the debris goes out in that direction.

That's what we're looking at here. The debris all went in one direction. Why are you smiling, Brian? Why are you smiling, Connie? That's what we're looking at. This is something that I've never seen at any archaeological site or read at any archaeological site anywhere. This directionality of the destruction. What that indicates, what that is telling us, is there was some massive explosion that blew everything in one particular direction. Let me catch up to my notes here.

There are other items of evidence, too. I didn't have time to go into all of them here. All leads to one and only one conclusion. That is that this city was destroyed by a meteor or a comet from outside this world exploding in the sky one to several miles away, generating a fireball that produced enough heat to melt brick, to melt pottery, to melt sand into glass droplets, and to instantly ignite and burn anything flammable. The explosion that accompanied this, it was so powerful, is to simultaneously produce a shockwave with hurricane-force winds well over 100 miles an hour that obliterated 13-foot-thick brick walls and basically destroyed everything in the city that was taller than a couple of feet and ripped human bodies apart to where the average bone fragments, less than the size of half your thumb.

If you would like a copy of the report that documents all of this, drop me an email, I'll send it to you, or you can search online for it. I'm sharing all of this with you because we're doing several articles on this in the January-February Beyond Today.

We will be talking about this. I'm giving you a lot more detail than we have space to include all of that. So with all that has been discovered here at this site, with all that has been documented about the evidence for its destruction, what are the implications of that for you and for me and for the world? What is our mission as we see it in the United Church of God?

It's to preach the gospel and prepare a people, taken directly from Matthew 24 and Matthew 18. We are to warn, we are to give a message of the gospel of the kingdom. And how did Jesus Christ summarize that message in Matthew 1, verses 14 and 15? Jesus came to Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God and saying, The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe in the gospel. We cannot separate those two elements of the message of the kingdom that Jesus Christ brought. He is the king of that kingdom. It is a kingdom he will establish when he returns to earth. But for us to be a part of that kingdom, we must repent and believe that gospel and let that life-transforming message transform our lives in everything we do, everything we think, everything that we are. That belief and hope in that kingdom must guide everything that we do.

And the ruins of Sodom stand as a stark warning to us and to the world. At large today, they are a sobering reminder of the consequences of sin. Do you think God is pleased with our world and with our nation today? What must he think about the English-speaking nations that had the Bible, that translated the Bible, that spread the Bible around the world? And how we are today compared to what we used to be?

What must he think about the millions of babies that have been murdered in the womb? About our sexual revolution, about our broken marriages, about our crime rates, broken-down cities, murder rates, about our dying respect for laws and authority, the value of life, the value of God's Word? Some people wonder, are we returning to Sodom? I'd say, no, we're not. We're already there. We're already there because our courts have banned God from public life through the Supreme Court.

They've banned the Bible from public life, too. We've legalized murder of the unborn. We've legalized homosexual marriage, sodomy, crime for which Sodom was destroyed. God created a male and female, but we've done God much better. We've created hundreds of genders now, not just male and female anymore. We make Sodom look like a bunch of slackers. Notice what Jesus Christ said to the people of His day who heard His message, but refused to repent and to allow that message to change their lives. He says, Does Jesus Christ think the story of Sodom was a myth or a fable?

He held it out as a warning, a warning to the world, a warning to all of us. Jude's half-brother, Jude, similarly warns us, Don't forget Sodom and Gomorrah and their neighboring towns, which were filled with immorality and every kind of sexual perversion. Those cities were destroyed by fire and serve as a warning of the eternal fire of God's judgment. That's Jude 7 from the New Living Translation. So God's word is very clear about the coming destruction on our world.

I've spoken before on the Feast of Trumpets and talked about the heavenly signs and went through different passages in Matthew 24 in the Book of Revelation about burning mountains thrown into the sea, about stars falling from heaven, which are first-century descriptions of the same kind of thing we've talked about here. Asteroid strikes, meteor storms, comets striking the earth in the end time, killing millions and millions of people, destroying a third of the earth at a time.

Today we've seen the kind of destruction that can bring cities wiped out in an instant. Human bodies ripped to tiny pieces. It will happen again. And some of the plagues that are described in the Bible are like the destruction of Sodom multiplied many, many times over. And God's pattern, which we see repeated often in the Bible, is to give words of warning before coming destruction. And I think it would be just like our God to give powerful witnesses to the truth and the accuracy of His word as a final witness before His coming judgment takes place.

And I think that is exactly what He is doing with this major discovery, giving the world a final witness before His coming judgment.