The biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah looks like fantasy. In fact, the story of two cities that were destroyed by "fire and brimstone" for the sinful behavior of their inhabitants looks far-fetched. However, archaeological finds confirm the existence of these cities and their terrible death.
The account of Sodom and Gomorrah shows us the early period of Jewish history, long before the people of Israel settled in the Promised Land. The ancestors of the Jews had a semi-nomadic lifestyle, trading with their neighbors, moving from one region of the Middle East to another in search of new pastures for livestock. Their leader during the times of Sodom and Gomorrah was the patriarch Abraham, revered as a founding father through his son Isaac by all Jews, and through the other son of Ishmael by all Arabs. Abraham plays a prominent role in both the Old Testament and the Qur'an, where his life story is essentially the same. If we literally interpret the biblical chronology, the events described took place around 2100 BC. e.
Abraham was born in "Ur of the Chaldees", which is generally considered the Sumerian city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia (today's Iraq). His family moved from there to Harran (northern Mesopotamia), where his father died. It was at that time, as it is said in the Book of Genesis (12: 1–5), that God revealed to Abraham his fate Abraham had to leave Mesopotamia and settle in Canaan (modern Palestine): “And I will make a great nation from you, and I will bless you, and I will magnify your name. " Taking his spouse and kinsman Lot, along with their household, Abraham went to Canaan. After a short stay in Egypt (while there was famine in Canaan), Abraham and Lot settled in the south of Canaan and began to engage in cattle breeding.
There was a conflict between the shepherds of Abraham and Lot over the right to use the pastures, so Abraham proposed to split. Lot and his family traveled further east, to the plain on the other side of the Dead Sea (present-day Jordan), and pitched their tents near the city of Sodom. The plain "was watered with water like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt." Today, the area is a barren wasteland with an oppressively hot climate and extremely scarce water resources. But at the time of Lot, 5 thriving cities were located on the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Sevoim, Adma and Sigor. They were ruled by 5 kings and were powerful and wealthy enough to attack and defeat a coalition of Mesopotamian rulers.
According to the Book of Genesis, it all had to change in one day. The Bible constantly refers to the "depravity" of the inhabitants of five cities, especially Sodom and Gomorrah. The nature of this depravity, which is usually mistaken for a penchant for sexual perversion, remains unclear. But among the sins of the sodomites, inhospitableness was one of the first places, and their fall was only accelerated by the rough treatment of the two angels whom Lot invited to his house as guests of honor. The inhabitants of Sodom began to demand that Lot lead them out into the street, and began to break down the door, but were blinded by the angels, who announced to Lot that God had sent them to punish the city; he must immediately gather his family and seek refuge in the mountains, and when leaving in no case looked back.
Lot took his wife and daughters and left the city, which soon turned into smoking ruins. His wife, as you know, broke the ban, turned to look at the city and turned into a pillar of salt. Lot's daughters and their father took refuge in a mountain cave; they were afraid that they were the only living people in the world.
Then comes one of the colorful, but not quite decent passages that are often found in the texts of the Old Testament. Lot's daughters got their father drunk and took turns sleeping with him; as a result, both conceived sons from him. These sons became the ancestors of the Moabites and the Ammonites, the Jordanian tribes, which over time became the sworn enemies of the Israelites.
After that, we no longer hear about Lot. As for Abraham, he watched the disaster from a safe distance from southern Palestine. When he looked in the direction of Sodom and Gomorrah, then "… he saw: behold, smoke rises from the ground like smoke from a furnace." All cities on the plain were destroyed by an angry God.
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No matter how you relate to this story, it is replete with colorful details. The episode about Lot and his daughters is clearly an ancient Hebrew "moral story" invented with an almost comical purpose: to explain what "wicked" in the literal and figurative sense were the enemies of the Israelites from the tribe of Moabites and Ammonites. It is not difficult to guess the origin of the idea of transforming Lot's wife into a pillar of salt.
The Dead Sea is so rich in salt that fish cannot live in it, and its coastline is dotted with columns of crystalline salt of various shapes. An accidental resemblance between one of these columns and a human figure may well have given rise to the story of a man turned into a pillar of salt. These places are also very rich in native sulfur, which is sometimes found in the form of small balls. Could this circumstance give rise to the legend that God once brought down sulfur (fire) rain on the earth?
Analogies with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah can be found in the myths of other peoples. For example, in the Greek myth of Orpheus, he managed to save his wife Eurydice from Hades only on the condition that she would not look back when she left the Lower World; she looked back, and Orpheus lost her forever.
The story of the visit of two angels is very similar to another story from ancient myth as retelled by the poet Ovid. It tells how the gods Mercury and Jupiter, who took the form of mortals, came to a city in Phrygia (now central Turkey) and were unpleasantly surprised by the unfriendliness of the local population. In retaliation for the bad treatment of the gods, the whole city was destroyed, sparing only a couple of elderly poor people who took them into their house and offered them food.
In fact, the story of a city destroyed to the ground for the sins of its inhabitants was quite popular. There is no need to look far for examples, so it is tempting to interpret the history of Sodom and Gomorrah in a purely folklore sense.
The best description of the vicinity of the Dead Sea in the 1st century. n. e. belongs to the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, who retold the history of his people for Greco-Roman readers. As you can see, Joseph was a witness of what he wrote: “The region of Sodom adjoins it (the Dead Sea), once rich in its fertility and prosperity of cities, now completely burnt out. It is said to have been destroyed by lightning due to the sinfulness of its inhabitants. Even now there are traces of the fire sent down by God and even now you can see the shadows of five cities. Each time, ashes appear again in the form of unknown fruits, which seem edible in color, but as soon as they feel them with the hand, they turn into dust and ashes. Thus, the ancient legends about the Sodom country are clearly confirmed."
Bible scholars themselves had little to say to support the hypothesis of the reality of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Rev. T. Chain, professor of Oriental Studies and Scripture Interpretation at Oxford University, in an article published in the Bible Encyclopedia in 1903, interpreted the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as a variant of the familiar myth of the catastrophic flood, where the sins of the people are punished by the Flood.
In 1924, a team of archaeologists led by William Foxwell Albright found the remains of a Bronze Age settlement in a place called Bab al-Dahra. After collecting a few pottery shards, the name "Bab al-Dakhra" was put on the archaeological maps of the Jordan.
But only in the 70s. XX century archaeologists began to realize the true meaning of the discovery. Beneath the sands and dust of the desert was a large settlement dating back to the early Bronze Age (c. 3100–2300 BC).
Bab al-Dahra is now known as one of the oldest Palestinian cities. Archaeologists have unearthed a temple, other cultural centers and the remains of a powerful protective wall about 7 meters thick, built of stone and clay bricks. However, the most unexpected discovery was the nearby cemetery, one of the largest in the Middle East. According to various estimates, about half a million people are buried there (about three million pots with funeral gifts were also found there).
Even before the excavations, it became clear that Bab al-Dakhru was destroyed by fire - pieces of spongy charcoal were scattered everywhere in the vicinity of the settlement. Subsequently, Bab al-Dahra remained abandoned for 2000 years, until the beginning of the Hellenistic era.
This is not the only Palestinian settlement to suffer such a fate. Shortly after excavations began in 1975, archaeologists Walter Rast and Thomas Schaub found Numeria, another Early Bronze Age settlement 11 km south, also dotted with spongy charcoal that could be collected in handfuls from the surface of the earth. Destroyed by fire around the same time as Bab al-Dahra, Numeira also remained abandoned for 2,000 years.
So, a certain pattern appeared in the excavations. By 1980, Rest and Schaub presented preliminary findings: the settlements they found were the five "cities on the plain" referred to in Genesis (Sodom, Gomorrah, Sevoim, Adma and Sigor).
There was a murmur in scientific circles. One academician immediately threatened to deprive the Rest and Schaub expedition of financial support if they really intended to identify their excavation sites with the biblical "cities on the plain." Fortunately, this hysteria did not affect the continuation of the work, and after about 20 years, experts stopped breaking spears in the discussion about Sodom and Gomorrah.
What caused the destruction of five prosperous cities around 2300 BC? e.? Are there points of contact between archeology and religion?
The Bible says that God rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and the surrounding cities. Lightning strikes are often accompanied by a sulphurous smell, and some of the ancient authors, including Tacitus, believed that lightning was the cause of the death of cities. Josephus Flavius mentions "arrows of thunder", or simply "lightning".
As the geologist Dorothy Vitaliano noted, "it is unlikely that a lightning strike by itself could cause a fire, in which 4 cities could die." (It is said about 4 cities, because some argued that the city of Sigor survived a catastrophe.)
However, let's take one more factor into account. It has been known since antiquity that the Dead Sea region is rich in oil. Genesis speaks of "pitch pits" in the Siddim Valley near Sodom, and in the time of Josephus, the Dead Sea was generally called the Asphalt Lake because of the lumps of bitumen floating in it. Their number increased sharply after the earthquakes; some reports report house-sized boulders.
Sodom and Gomorrah were actually on a powder keg. Moreover, they were erected on a large fault in the earth's crust - the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea is a continuation of the Great Rift in Africa, one of the main zones of seismic activity on Earth. An earthquake, of course, can lead to a fire.
Dorothy Vitaliano agrees with the assumptions of his predecessors: “A powerful earthquake occurred in the Siddim Valley around 2000 BC. e. It was accompanied by emissions of natural combustible gases and bitumen, ignited by fires in home fires. If some rocks with a high bitumen content were used during the construction of external walls or buildings, they became additional fuel for the fire."
It is interesting to note that she wrote this in 1973, before the publication of the Rest and Schaub discovery. And recent research has confirmed that earthquakes played a key role in the destruction of cities.
Two prominent experts, D. Negev from the Geological Survey of Israel and K. Amery from the Woodshall Oceanographic Laboratory in Massachusetts, have dedicated an entire book to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. According to them, from a geological point of view, it is quite possible that the history of the dead cities retained echoes of the popular memory of a powerful seismic cataclysm at the end of the early Bronze Age. The Negev and Aymery believe that the main fuel for the fire was the hydrocarbons poured out of the fractures in the soil. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that the bitumen in this area is very rich in sulfur. The streams of hot salt water from earthquakes could produce a deadly mixture of combustible gases rich in sulfur and hydrogen sulfide.
So can the riddle of Sodom and Gomorrah be considered solved? But let's not rush to send the topic to the archive.
It turned out that simultaneously with the earthquakes in the area located southeast of the Dead Sea, there were sharp climatic changes. Lands that were once abundantly wet and fertile are suddenly drier and hotter. That is why, after the death of the cities, these places were not inhabited for so long. A severe drought lasted for about 300 years, and during this time barren wastelands formed.
It is now becoming increasingly clear that the deaths of Sodom and Gomorrah are just one small piece of a larger puzzle. At the same time as the dramatic deterioration of climatic conditions, virtually all of the great urban centers of the Levant were destroyed, many by earthquakes. Throughout Turkey, at least 300 cities were burned or abandoned; among them was Troy, which Schliemann considered Homeric Troy. At the same time, the Greek civilization of the early Bronze Age fell into decay. In Egypt, the era of the Old Kingdom and the great builders of the pyramids came to an end: the country slipped into the abyss of anarchy. The level of the Nile plummeted, and in the west, the Sahara Desert recaptured vast areas that were once fertile and well-irrigated.
Today, many facts show that a natural disaster in the Middle East at the end of the III millennium BC. e. was part of a global cataclysm. Moreover, some evidence is forcing scientists to seek an explanation outside of Earth. There is one reason that can explain the sharp increase in seismic activity and climate change due to the release of huge amounts of dust into the atmosphere: the collision of our planet with large meteorites and fragments of comets. Thus, a relatively small piece of cometary matter that exploded over the Podkamennaya Tunguska in Siberia in 1908 caused tremors, noted by seismographs around the globe, and devastated vast areas of the taiga. A larger celestial body that fell in the area of a fault in the earth's crust could lead to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
This consideration brings us back to the biblical account of events. What was the nature of the "heavenly fire" that, according to Genesis, destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah? The "lightning" in the chronicles of Josephus Flavius is not an ordinary lightning, as it might seem at first glance. Of the two Greek words he used to describe this event, keraunos ("lightning") and bolos ("projectile"), neither is used in the context of a common thunderstorm, with thunder and lightning. In particular, the word keraunos was used to describe the sacred, most deadly weapon of the god Zeus, which he used only on special occasions. In the Hellenistic world, Zeus as the god of thunder was associated with a number of meteorite cults, and the "heavenly stones" were preserved and revered for centuries after their fall.
It may seem like a big stretch that Sodom and Gomorrah, located on the fault line of the earth's crust, and even above the deposits of combustible hydrocarbons, were also hit by a meteorite. But if the catastrophe, according to the testimony of contemporaries, occurred during an abundant meteor shower, the causes and consequences could well have changed places in the minds of people. A meteorite or a fragment of cometary matter that fell elsewhere could cause seismic shocks, while smaller debris that burned up in the atmosphere lit up the night sky …
Thus, the many times ridiculed story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which were destroyed by "heavenly fire", may be a curious example of human reaction in one small corner of the world to a catastrophe on a global scale.
N. Nepomniachtchi
