Pages

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Was Sodom destroyed by a "cosmic airburst?"

I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM. AND I GOT ONE: Did the destruction of this Middle Bronze Age city inspire the story of Sodom? Archaeologists investigated the destruction of Tel el-Hammam and discovered an event similar to the description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (ARIELLA MARSDEN, Jerusalem Post).

This story has been around since 2018. I noted it here. But now the technical article is published in Nature.

A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea

Ted E. Bunch, Malcolm A. LeCompte, A. Victor Adedeji, James H. Wittke, T. David Burleigh, Robert E. Hermes, Charles Mooney, Dale Batchelor, Wendy S. Wolbach, Joel Kathan, Gunther Kletetschka, Mark C. L. Patterson, Edward C. Swindel, Timothy Witwer, George A. Howard, Siddhartha Mitra, Christopher R. Moore, Kurt Langworthy, James P. Kennett, Allen West & Phillip J. Silvia Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 18632 (2021)

A Tunguska-sized airburst is a significant event: "The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb."

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.