Archaeologist says Jordan sites match biblical account of Sodom’s fall

Dr. Titus Kennedy says new findings in Jordan align with the biblical story of fire raining from heaven.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

New findings in excavations in Jordan near the Dead Sea show evidence of destruction from above that matches the Bible’s description of the erasure of Sodom and Gomorrah, according to archaeologist Dr. Titus Kennedy.

In a podcast called “Digging for Truth,” Kennedy, a field archaeologist with the Discovery Institute, said that of the five cities mentioned in Genesis as located in the Jordan Valley in a single grouping, including the two infamous sinful cities, one called Zoar was never lost to history.

It is named in many ancient documents, and its location is known, said Kennedy, who headed the excavations in the area of ancient Zoar, located on the eastern side of the Dead Sea. It is therefore a “geographic anchor” point for the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, he added.

According to the biblical story, when angels came to save Lot, Abraham’s nephew, from Sodom, he escaped to Zoar that same day. Archaeologists searching for Sodom would have a limited amount of ground to cover in search of it.

For years, the leading candidate for Sodom has been Bab edh-Dhra, an Early Bronze Age city on the southeastern shore of the Dead Sea, which is within a day’s walk of Zoar.

Kennedy said that mass charnel houses, where the dead were buried above ground instead of being interred in caves, have recently been found there, showing evidence of fires that started from their roofs and spread downward.

“This hints that the destruction came from above and was not deliberately set from within the tombs,” he said. This would accord with the biblical account of fire and brimstone raining down from heaven.

There is also a cave nearby that, according to ancient Christian Byzantine tradition, was the hiding place to which Lot and his two daughters chose to flee arriving in Zoar because he was afraid the city would also be destroyed, although the angels had promised he would be safe there.

The cave contained pottery from the Early Bronze Age period, so “it fits the correct time as a cave in use during the life of Lot…. We can’t say for sure that it’s the place, but it certainly fits things as far as the geography and the chronology and the tradition,” he said.

About 20 kilometers south of Bab edh-Dhra is the site of Numeira, which has tentatively been identified as Gomorrah. There, Kennedy said, human skeletons were discovered beneath a collapsed tower.

“We don’t usually find complete skeletons just lying around in excavation sites from this period,” Kennedy said, because it was customary to bury the dead in sealed tombs.

This could indicate that a sudden catastrophe occurred, with people dying where they stood, much as famously happened in Pompeii with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Two other nearby sites, Pipa and Hanazir, which could be the last of the five-city grouping, also showed signs of sudden destruction and fire, Kennedy said.

Another possible candidate for Sodom is Tall el-Hammam, a Middle Bronze Age city northeast of the Dead Sea, which researchers believe was annihilated by the impact of a meteor, based on the composition of the site’s 1.5-meter-thick carbon- and-ash-rich destruction layer.

Biblical archaeologydead seaJordanSodom