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“There’s evidence of a large cosmic airburst, close to this city called Tall el-Hammam,” Kennett said of an explosion similar to the Tunguska Event, a roughly 12-megaton airburst that occurred in 1908, when a 56-60-meter meteor pierced the Earth’s atmosphere over the Eastern Siberian Taiga. Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand years.Ī favorite site for archaeologists and biblical scholars, the mound hosts evidence of culture all the way from the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, all compacted into layers as the highly strategic settlement was built, destroyed and rebuilt over millennia. In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3,600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. It’s titled Evidence that a cosmic impact destroyed ancient city in the Jordan Valley, and it says:
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Members, read more in the BAS Library: Not a BAS Library or All-Access Member yet? Join today.A couple of weeks ago we noticed a story at PhysOrg that had some creationist potential. “This is an example of evidence being marshaled to support the identification of the site as Sodom, as opposed to letting the site speak for itself,” Mullins said.
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While the destruction of Tall el-Hammam dates to around 1650 B.C.E., the Bible places the destruction of Sodom during the days of Abraham, a figure most scholars would date hundreds of years earlier. Robert Mullins, Chair of the Department of Biblical Studies at Azusa Pacific University, told Christianity Today that the biblical timeline does not support the identification.
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Other scholars contest the site’s identification with Sodom. The new study draws similar conclusions, suggesting that “oral traditions about the destruction of this urban city by a cosmic object might be the source of the written version of Sodom in Genesis.” Tall el-Hammam excavator Steven Collins has long contended the site is the infamous biblical city of Sodom, based especially on geographical clues in the biblical text. Such destructions, Ortiz and Maeir argue, should be attributed to warfare, not cosmic events. destruction of Gath looks much like what was found at Tall el-Hammam. Similarly, Aren Maier, an archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University and long-time excavator of Tell es-Safi (biblical Gath), said that evidence for King Hazael’s ninth-century B.C.E. Archaeologist Steven Ortiz, director of Lipscomb University’s Lanier Center for Archaeology and co-director of the recent Tel Gezer excavations, rejected the meteor hypothesis, noting that similar destruction layers-attributed to Egyptian and Assyrian armies-have been found at Bronze and Iron Age Gezer. Other scholars, however, have been quick to question the study and its conclusions. The 24th Annual Bible and Archaeology Fest Having explored these and other signs of destruction, the study concludes that the only possible explanation for the destruction evidenced at Tall el-Hammam is a cosmic event similar to the 1908 Tunguska airburst in Russia. This shockwave, they argue, ripped through the city’s buildings and inhabitants in a matter of seconds. In addition, the city’s buildings were leveled in a manner consistent with the devastation caused by a shockwave event. The researchers argue the destroyed city was exposed to such high temperatures that even the site’s pottery and mudbricks show signs of having melted. A number of biblical scholars and archaeologists, however, are skeptical.Īccording to the study, Tall el-Hammam, located north of the Dead Sea in Jordan, contains an unusual, site-wide destruction layer dating to the mid-17th century B.C.E. The study further suggests that this explosion could be the basis for the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). destruction of Tall el‑Hammam in Jordan can only be explained by a cosmic phenomenon. Photo Credit: Deg777, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsĬould a meteorite explosion 3,600 years ago explain the destruction of a major Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley? A recent study argues that the mid-17th-century B.C.E. The site of Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley.