Science | Sodom destroyed by a meteorite?

A meteorite that exploded over Sodom 3,600 years ago explains the destruction of this city, according to a new American study. The blast would have caused the water in the Dead Sea to evaporate. This would then have rained very salty water on the surrounding plains, rendering them sterile and covering the famous “Lot’s wife” with a layer of salt. This thesis is controversial.

Mathieu Perreault
Press

An extraordinary event

“In Genesis, we read that the sins of Sodom provoked the wrath of God, who destroyed the city and made its fields infertile,” said Phillip Silvia, an archaeologist at Trinity Southwest University in New Mexico. “People far enough away from the explosion were covered with a thin layer of salt, which explains Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt because she wanted to watch the tragedy. ”

1713 ℃: this is the temperature at which the glaze of some of the pottery found at Tall el-Hammam, a Jordanian site northeast of the Dead Sea, turns into glass. “To have this kind of temperature, you need an extraordinary event like a meteorite a few tens of meters away that explodes before hitting the ground,” explains Phillip Silvia. He is the lead author of a study published this fall in the journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature.

“The aerial explosion of the meteorite explains why we did not find a crater,” he said. Tall el-Hammam is located in a plausible place, on Abraham’s path between Mesopotamia and Israel, so that it is Sodom. Its destruction is compatible with the possible chronologies of the Bible. And the meteorite would have likely vaporized part of the water in the Dead Sea, making the surrounding fields very salty. We found a layer of very salty soil, experts from the US Department of Agriculture confirmed to me that nothing can grow in it. ”

According to Silvia, the Sodom meteorite was larger than 17m in size, which injured 1,000 people when it exploded near the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013.

Sodom in Genesis

“Then the Lord caused a rain of brimstone and fire to fall on Sodom and on Gomorrah; It was the Lord himself who sent this plague from heaven. He destroyed those cities and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of those cities. Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. ”

Fort

Archaeological excavations at Tall el-Hammam are relatively recent. “During the First World War, it was a fort [petit fort] Ottoman, says Mr. Silvia. Then, during the war in 1967, the Jordanians mined the approach to the hill where the ancient city was located, to protect from the artillery that was installed there. So the searches were risky. When my thesis supervisor started working there 15 years ago, he lost a worker to a mine. We have found several archaeological layers corresponding to several cities that have existed in this place for 4000 years. ”

Mr. Silvia, a 71-year-old electronics engineer who is also a pastor, received his doctorate in biblical archeology in 2015 after his retirement. Note, her maternal grandparents are Francophones who emigrated from the Magdalen Islands to Massachusetts in the 1920s.

Controversial

The study, the results of which had been partially presented in biblical archeology conferences in recent years, was attacked on two points after its publication in Scientific Reports. This is firstly the degree to which the photos have been edited to include arrows and squares identifying points of interest, and secondly, the widespread opinion among biblical archeologists that Abraham was rather from the southeast. from the Dead Sea, before heading to Israel.

“When we talk about the story of Abraham, we are talking more about sites located south-east of the Dead Sea,” says Sébastien Doane, a theologian specializing in the “biblical interpretation” of the Old and New Testaments to Laval University. “So locating Sodom, which is on Abraham’s route, further north, goes against what is accepted. That said, there is nothing in what we currently know about the Genesis sites that formally excludes the authors of the study of Scientific Report are right. ”

Press also asked for his opinion the head of Italian archaeological excavations in Jordan, Francesco Benedettucci, who described Mr. Silvia’s thesis as “interesting”. As for the photos, the editor-in-chief of Scientific Reports told scientific integrity blogs in early October that he would look into the matter, but he did not follow up on the criticism.

Oral history

Genesis was written at the end of VI^e century BC, when the Jews returned from their captivity in Babylon. They had been exiled there by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II during his conquest of Israel at the beginning of the VI^e century, and freed by the Persians who conquered Babylon in 538.

This poses a problem for the historicity of the events described there, according to Israel Finkelstein, a famous archaeologist from Tel Aviv University. “Any attempt to tie this biblical story to some historical event ignores four centuries of biblical exegesis,” says Finkelstein. The people who wrote Genesis saw these Bronze Age ruins and tried to explain them. ”

Is it not possible that an account of the destruction of Sodom has been transmitted orally for a millennium, much like the oral history of the indigenous peoples of Canada? “It’s definitely a possibility,” Doane says. But the incorporation of oral history into archeology and written evidence is quite recent, so you have to be careful. We take into account, for example, the modalities of oral transmission, to see the risk of modification of the stories. ”

To better understand Mr. Finkelstein’s point of view, Press asked him if theIliad by Homer, written several centuries after the destruction of the ancient city of Troy, can be associated with the archaeological site of Troy. ” L’Iliad retains elements of memory from the Heroic Age, but there is no element of Canaanite Bronze Age memory in Genesis, ”Mr. Finkelstein replied. The “heroic age” corresponds to the border between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, 1200 years ago. The Iron Age is so named because humans then began to work this metal.

Maximalists and minimalists

The Sodom debate reflects the tussle between “maximalist” and “minimalist” archaeological interpretations of the Bible, according to David Graves, a retired New Brunswick archaeologist who worked on Tall el-Hammam. “The maximalists think that everything that is written in the Bible happened as it is, with obviously natural explanations for the divine interventions,” says Mr. Graves. Minimalists like Finkelstein believe that the writers of the Bible described what they saw around them, without any oral history input. We are in the middle. ”

What about Jericho?

Does the meteorite that destroyed Sodom also explain the destruction of the walls of Jericho by the Israeli army’s trumpets? “No, because this event happened a few centuries later,” says Silvia. That said, at the site of Jericho, west of the Dead Sea opposite Tall el-Hammam, there seems to be traces of destruction compatible with the meteorite, at the right time. ”

Sodom in numbers