Evidence of Sodom? Meteor blast cause of biblical destruction, say
scientists
https://www.timesofisrael.com/evidence-of-sodom-meteor-blast-cause-of-biblical-destruction-say-scientists/
DEATH BY DEAD SEA
THEN THE LORD RAINED DOWN BURNING SULFUR OUT OF THE HEAVENS
Multi-disciplinary team of scientists uses
3,700-year-old archaeological evidence from Jordan’s Tall el-Hammam Excavation
Project to understand end to civilization near Dead Sea
By AMANDA
BORSCHEL-DAN 22 November 2018, 4:08 pm20
·
John Martin's 'Destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah,' 1852. (public domain, via Wikipedia)
·
A meteor streaks across the sky
of Russia’s Ural Mountains in February 2013, causing sharp explosions and
reportedly injuring hundreds of people, including many hurt by broken glass.
(AP Photo/Nasha gazeta, www.ng.kz)
·
Disaster shown in an undated
photo of the mile-wide meteor crater near Winslow, Arizona. The crater was made
500 centuries ago when a 10,000,000-ton meteor impact dislodged 300,000,000
tons of rock. The 600 foot deep crater is three miles in circumference. (AP
photo/ho)
·
A Perseid meteor streaking across
the California sky in 2010 (photo credit: CC-BY-SA Ian Alexander Norman,
Flickr)
A
multi-disciplinary team of scientists has a new theory for why all human
civilization abruptly ended on the banks of the Dead Sea some 3,700 years ago.
According to analyzed archaeological evidence, the disaster of biblical
proportions can be explained by a massive explosion, similar to one recorded
over 100 years ago in Russia.
In
1908, a massive blast near Siberia’s Stony Tunguska River flattened some 2,000
square kilometers of uninhabited taiga forestry. Curiously, no crater was
discovered and scientists explain the strange phenomena through a meteor
explosion some 5-10 km above land.
Now
an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and scientists are using the
Tunguska explosion as a model to explain the equally curious end to a thriving
civilization that lived for thousands of years in a plain near the Dead Sea.
As reported in Science News, at the
recently concluded Denver-based ASOR Annual Meeting, director of scientific
analysis at Jordan’s Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project Phillip J. Silvia presented a paper, “The 3.7kaBP
Middle Ghor Event: Catastrophic Termination of a Bronze Age Civilization”
during a session on Environmental Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.
Disaster
shown in an undated photo of the mile-wide meteor crater near Winslow, Arizona.
The crater was made 500 centuries ago when a 10,000,000-ton meteor impact
dislodged 300,000,000 tons of rock. The 600 foot deep crater is three miles in
circumference. (AP photo/ho)
According
to the paper’s abstract, the scientists discovered evidence of a “high-heat”
explosive event north of the Dead Sea that instantaneously “devastated
approximately 500 km2.” The explosion would have wiped out all civilization in
the affected area, including Middle Bronze Age cities and towns. Silvia told
Science News that the blast would have instantly killed the estimated 40,000 to
65,000 people who inhabited Middle Ghor, a 25-kilometer-wide circular plain in
Jordan.
Likewise,
the fertile soil would have been stripped of nutrients by the high heat, and
waves of the Dead Sea’s briny anhydride salts would have — tsunami-like —
washed over the surrounding area. At the same time, the explosion’s fallout
caused blisteringly hot, strong winds, which deposited a rain of mineral
grains, which have been found on pottery at Tall el-Hammam.
Five
large sites in the region which have also been excavated offered additional
evidence of an immediate end to settlement at the same time of the proposed
Tall el-Hammam disaster. According to Science News, radiocarbon dating of
organic archaeological evidence has shown that structures’ mud-brick walls
“suddenly disappeared around 3,700 years ago, leaving only stone foundations.”
Contemporary
potsherds’s glazes apparently experienced temperatures high enough to transform
them to glass, “perhaps as hot as the surface of the sun,” Silvia told the news
source.
Unraveling
a mystery
The study was born of a
historical riddle: “That the most productive agricultural land in the region,
which had supported flourishing civilizations continuously for at least 3,000
years, should suddenly relinquish, then resist, human habitation for such a
long period of time has begged investigation,” states the excavation’s website.
Archaeologist Philip Silvia (via
LinkedIn)
As listed in the published abstract, Trinity
Southwest University’s Silvia was joined by a roster of multi-disciplinary
scientists.
The
team of scientists from New Mexico Tech, Northern Arizona University, NC State
University, Elizabeth City (NC) State University, DePaul University, Trinity
Southwest University, the Comet Research Group, and Los Alamos National
Laboratories analyzed samples from 12 seasons of Tall el-Hammam excavations to
conclude that the most logical explanation for the settlement’s demise was a
meteor explosion.
“This
paper surveys the multiple lines of evidence that collectively suggest a
Tunguskalike, cosmic airburst event that obliterated civilization — including
the Middle Bronze Age city-state anchored by Tall el-Hammam — in the Middle
Ghor (the 25 km diameter circular plain immediately north of the Dead Sea) ca.
1700 BCE, or 3,700 years before present (3.7kaBP),” write the authors.
“Based
upon the archaeological evidence, it took at least 600 years to recover
sufficiently from the soil destruction and contamination before civilization
could again become established in the eastern Middle Ghor,” they write.
A
meteor streaked across the sky of Russia’s Ural Mountains in February 2013,
causing sharp explosions and reportedly injuring hundreds of people, including
many hurt by broken glass. (AP Photo/Nasha gazeta, www.ng.kz)
A
biblical explanation
Could
this massive disaster offer an explanation for the biblical story of Sodom?
According to a 2013 Biblical Archaeology Review article
by TeHEP co-director Dr. Steven Collins, the Tall el-Hammam site is a strong
candidate for the biblical city of Sodom due to a multitude of factors. The
discovered disaster, and its precise location, which he ties to biblical
references of “ha-kikkar” (or idiomatically, the
plain).
John
Martin’s ‘Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,’ 1852. (public domain, via
Wikipedia)
In
the article, among other biblical citations, Collins quotes from Genesis
19:24–25: “Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah —
from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus He overthrew those cities and the entire
plain, including all those living in the cities — and also the vegetation in
the land.”
On
the ground at the site, Collins witnessed such destruction first-hand. In a
vivid description he writes, “The violent conflagration that ended occupation
at Tall el-Hammam produced melted pottery, scorched foundation stones and
several feet of ash and destruction debris churned into a dark gray matrix as
if in a Cuisinart.”
Could
it really be that this destruction, hypothetically caused by the proposed
meteor explosion and its catastrophic fallout, are the natural causes of the
divine wholesale razing of the city recorded in the Bible?
In a jointly authored paper
between Silvia and Collins, “The Civilization-Ending
3.7KYrBP Event: Archaeological Data, Sample Analyses, and Biblical Implications,”
the authors write, “The physical evidence from Tall el-Hammam and neighboring
sites exhibit signs of a highly destructive concussive and thermal event that
one might expect from what is described in Genesis 19.”
Further
based on studies by atomic energy researcher Samuel Gladstone, the authors
write that, “an airburst yield of 10 megatons over the northeast corner of the
Dead Sea would be sufficient to produce the physical damage observed 10 km away
at Tall el-Hammam. Note that this is only one-half the yield of the Tunguska
airburst event (in Siberia), well within ‘recent’ human experience for
meteoritic airbursts!” they write.
“The
destruction not only of Tall el-Hammam (Sodom), but also its neighbors
(Gomorrah and the other cities of the plain) was most likely caused by a
meteoritic airburst event,” the authors conclude.
In
his Biblical Archaeology Review article, Collins writes that the massive
disaster was seared ito collective cultural memory and preserved in the
biblical tradition.
“The
memory of the destruction of ha-kikkar, with its large population and extensive
agricultural lands, was preserved in the Book of Genesis and ultimately
incorporated into a traditional tale that, drawing on the layer of ash that
covered the destruction of one of its major cities, remembered a place consumed
by a fiery catastrophe from ‘out of the heavens’ (Genesis 19:24),” he writes.
“The Bible gives the city’s name: Sodom.”
DENVER — A superheated blast from the skies obliterated cities and farming settlements north of the Dead Sea around 3,700 years ago, preliminary findings suggest.
Radiocarbon dating and unearthed
minerals that instantly crystallized at high temperatures indicate that a
massive airburst caused by a meteor that exploded in the atmosphere
instantaneously destroyed civilization in a 25-kilometer-wide circular plain called
Middle Ghor, said archaeologist Phillip Silvia. The event also pushed a
bubbling brine of Dead Sea salts over once-fertile farm land, Silvia and his
colleagues suspect.
People did not return to the region
for 600 to 700 years, said Silvia, of Trinity Southwest University in
Albuquerque. He reported these findings at the annual meeting of the
American Schools of Oriental Research on November 17.
Excavations at five large Middle
Ghor sites, in what’s now Jordan, indicate that all were continuously occupied
for at least 2,500 years until a sudden, collective collapse toward the end of
the Bronze Age. Ground surveys have located 120 additional, smaller settlements
in the region that the researchers suspect were also exposed to extreme,
collapse-inducing heat and wind. An estimated 40,000 to 65,000 people inhabited
Middle Ghor when the cosmic calamity hit, Silvia said.
The most comprehensive evidence of
destruction caused by a low-altitude meteor explosion comes from the Bronze Age
city of Tall el-Hammam, where a team that includes Silvia has been excavating for
the last 13 years. Radiocarbon dating indicates that the mud-brick walls of
nearly all structures suddenly disappeared around 3,700 years ago, leaving only
stone foundations.
What’s more, the outer layers of
many pieces of pottery from same time period show signs of having melted into
glass. Zircon crystals in those glassy coats formed within one second at
extremely high temperatures, perhaps as hot as the surface of the sun, Silvia
said.
High-force winds created tiny,
spherical mineral grains that apparently rained down on Tall el-Hammam, he
said. The research team has identified these minuscule bits of rock on pottery
fragments at the site.
Examples exist of exploding space
rocks that have wreaked
havoc on Earth (SN: 5/13/17, p. 12). An apparent
meteor blast over a sparsely populated Siberian region in 1908, known as the
Tunguska event, killed no one but flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest.
And a meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 injured more than
1,600 people, mainly due to broken glass from windows that were blown out.
Posts
