The Cities of the Plain
Chapter 13 of the Book of Genesis reported that Abraham has separated from his nephew. The cause of the separation was that both had herds and herdsmen, and the area around them was too small for their combined herds. The scarcity of resources brought on a strife between their herdsmen. In order to avoid further friction, Abraham proposed that Lot should choose where he wishes to stay, and he, Abraham, will honor Lot's choice.
Lot looked around, and where he was standing, on the heights of Beth-El, he could see the valley of the Jordan and the northern corner of the Dead Sea. The full body of the Dead Sea was obscured by the hills of Ein-Gedi. He has chosen to go down to the valley. Abraham remained on the highlands, and from then on, he moved with his herds in the triangle Beth-El, Beer-Sheba and Gerar. What attracted Lot to the valley of the Jordan, was the scene as he saw from above. The Old Testament says that it was like the Garden of the Lord in the valley of Tabriz, or like the valley of the Nile, a green oasis between two extents of deserts.
So, Lot went down the valley, settled in the town of Sodom, was captured in due course by the raid of the 4 Eastern Kings and rescued by Abraham. Since then, there was no mention of Lot, apart of one final episode, and after that Lot leaves the story completely. Now about the final episode.
In Chapter 19 of the Book of Genesis, three messengers appeared in Abrahams' camp, announcing to him and Sarah, that they would have a son. Abraham and Sarah were already old, and as the chapter said:
".it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women."
Still, the message was accepted and the messenger continued their journey toward Sodom. The Lord, who was among the messengers, informed Abraham that He decided to destroy Sodom and the other Cities of the Plain for their sins, and now are on their way to warn Lot to leave the place, together with his family. It is really the story of Noah retold again. Abraham attempted to intercede for the condemned towns and received an assurance that if at least 10 righteous people will be found, the cities will be saved.
The rest of the story is well known, There were no 10 righteous people, so the towns were destroyed. Lot tried to warn his sons-in-law, but they did not heed his warning and remained in Sodom, his wife turned back, against instructions and turned into a pillar of salt. At the end, Lot and his daughters remained alone in a cave. Two tribes, Moab and Ammon, future inveterate enemies of Israel, were the outcome of their stay in the cave. Apart of this, there was no more mention of Lot.
Chapter 18 and 19 describe a natural catastrophe that destroyed a number of towns because of their sins. There are a number of questions, which are to be answered:
Where were the Cities of the Plain?
What were the sins of the cities?
Is there any historical base to the story?
The list of the cities is given in Chapter 14, where the story of the 4 eastern kings is told. Accordingly, the cities are:
Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim and Zoar (also known as Bela).
The cities are named here not in any order. There is another quotation from the Old Testament, Gen. 10:19, where the borders of Canaan are described:
"And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza, as thou goest unto Sodom and Gomorrah, and Admah and Zeboim, even unto Lasha."
After translating it into modern English, it is:
Go south from Sidon through Gerar to Gazah, from there east to Sodom, from there north to Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim until Lasha (which is north of the Hule. From there west to Sidon). The order of the towns from south to north is :
Sodom
Gomorrah
Admah
Zeboim
Zoar (also known as Bela) is south of Sodom, near the southern corner of the Dead Sea. As far as Admah goes, there is no doubt. It does exist today too. There is a bridge between Israel and Jordan, north of Jericho; it is called the bridge of Damiyah, which is an Arabic transliteration of Admah. The location of Zeboim is also known.
In I Samuel, 13:16-18 the story of a war between Saul and the Philistines is told. Saul was in Gibeah in Benjamin and the Philistines in Mishmash. The Philistines sent three companies out of their camp. One of the companies turned to the way of the border that looked to the valley of Zeboim, toward the wilderness. That valley and the road exist today, and so the location of Zeboim is known.
About the locations of Sodom and Gomorrah there are controversies. There are scholars who think that they were located on the eastern side of the Sea. Others claim that there are many reasons to disqualify that choice. First, the Old Testament says that they were cities on the Plain, while the eastern side of the Sea is about 500 feet high. Second, the sites are much too small. The largest is about 10 acres and the smallest is 2 acres. The third and the most important reason is, that the largest of the sites, Bab ed-Dra, which was just 10 acres, has a cemetery with about 20,000 graves, which holds over 500,000 bodies. It is possible that Bab ed-Dra served as a cemetery for all the towns in the area, mainly those of the southern part of the Sea, Sodom, Gomorrah and Zoar.
It is possible that the missing towns are covered by the southern part of the Dead Sea, which is much shallower than the northern part. Searching for the Cities of the Plain is second only to the search for Noah's Ark, on and around Mount Ararat and the Ark of the Covenant, from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. Only recently it was reported that the remains of the two towns, Sodom and Gomorrah, were located on the northern, deeper part of the Sea.1 There is an evidence, much earlier than the article. That evidence was given by Josephus Flavius, who wrote that in his time, the traces of the towns were still to be seen. The Roman historian, Tacitus, probably copied it from Josephus Flavius.2
There is contemporary evidence to the existence of the cities, and of their importance. It is in the archives of Ebla. It is true that a translation of a tablet that reported the existence of the cities, in the same order as in the Bible, was reported in 1976, but it is also true that the original report was later withdrawn.
Without going into the political difficulties of the claims and counterclaims about the archives of Ebla, it would be very curious if a commercial center, like Ebla, would not record the producers of probably the most important product of their time, which was bitumen.
This brings the quest to the case of the sins of the cities. The Bible talks about sexual depravities, which might have been the truth, but not the whole truth. There is a verse of the Prophet Ezekiel that describes the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah. (16, 49-50):
"Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom,
pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness
was in her and in her daughter, neither did she
strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were
haughty and committed abominations before me:
therefore I took them away as I saw good."
The sins become a bit clearer. They might have been haughty and committed abominations, but first they had pride and fullness of bread; they were idle and rich. In one of the tablets of Ebla, luckily uncensored by the Syrian government, there is a list of purchases and the price of each item in silver. The most expensive item on the list was bitumen. Bitumen was the most common product of the Dead Sea at that time. When telling the story of the war with the alliance of 4 eastern kings, it was told that the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah have fallen into the 'slime pits' – the pits where the bitumen was mined.
Bitumen in nature results when an underground petroleum reserve oozes to the surface. It exists only where there are petroleum reserves and suitable geological conditions. In the modern world it is very common. Each petroleum refinery produces more bitumen than can be sold, therefore it is cheap. In the old world, it was very rare, therefore very expensive. They used it to cover their clay bricks, and generally for waterproofing. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah were sitting next door to an open goldmine. Indeed, without that goldmine, it is doubtful that anybody would sit in that unfriendly part of the world. It is no wonder that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah had 'pride and fullness of bread.' Moreover, they had plenty of idle time to commit 'abominations'.
Their wealth did not make them popular. Already in Chapter 14, the king of Sodom was described in an unfriendly way, demanding the prisoners and willing to renounce the booty to Abraham. This gesture was mentioned in the Old Testament to emphasize their wealth. So the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were basically that of idle wealth and all that ensuing from it.
There is no way of knowing about the time of the catastrophe, or even if it happened at all. The complex of the Dead Sea goes back millions of years, when the Syrian-African rift was created, that rift which starts in the valley of the Hule in the north of Israel, and ends in the Lake of Malawi. It certainly was not created at the time of the Patriarchs.
If one accepts the story of the Old Testament, then either Lot must have been an extremely illogical person, or that he changed profession from husbandry to trade in bitumen. He decided to descend to the valley of the Jordan, because he saw the greenery around the river, and decided that he will have plenty of pasture and water for his cattle. His decision was certainly correct. But, then he descended to the valley and ended up at Sodom, which is probably the most unfriendly piece of real-estate on this earth, then and now. Its average rainfall is around 15 millimeters a year. So, either he left his herds around Admah and Zeboim, and settled in Sodom, or he changed profession.
There is no overwhelming direct evidence for a catastrophe in that area at the time of the Patriarchs, but there is plenty of indirect evidence. There are signs of breaks of civilizations in that area around 2000 BC. In Bab ed-Dra, which was probably the central cemetery of the area, and in Transjordan in general there are clear signs for such a break.3 Still, one cannot pinpoint the break in civilizations to a specific catastrophe.
There is a new evidence which is worth while to investigate. It does not point directly to the area of the five cities but to other area with similar geological conditions. The book4 describes the destruction of a Mesopotamian city, named Mashkan-Sapir, and attempts to connect it with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. However, there is a considerable distance between the two; one is in the valley of the Dead Sea, and the second is hundreds of miles east, on the border of Iraq and Kuwait, sitting atop a large oilfield, which was one of the causes of Gulf war of 1991. The conditions and the period of the destruction did certainly fit the description of the Book of Genesis.
The excavations proved that the city was destroyed by a firestorm, which was caused by mixing salt, free sulphur and oil, the ingredients of incendiary bombs. The mixture was probably lit by lightning. The combustion of such a mixture can continue until there is pressure on the petroleum to continue flowing upwards to feed the combustion. The length and intensity of the fire depend on the quantities of the oil underneath the combustion.
The quantities of Mashkan-Sapir were much greater, it is one of the largest oilfield on earth, so the town was completely burnt out. The conditions of the Dead Sea were similar, but the quantities of the oil were much smaller, so the whole region today is a burnt-out area of oil and asphalt.5
Judging from the nearness of the two sites, the probable period of the destruction and the fact that both sites were on the fault line of the joint of the plate of the Arab Peninsula and the main tectonic plate of Western Asia , it is entirely possible that there was indeed a single catastrophe, which started with an earthquake along the fault line. The earthquake mixed the ingredients of the firebombs, where there were ingredients. Large quantity at Mashkan-Sapir and less at Sodom. Finally, there might have been some electrical storm, usually following earthquakes, which lit the fuse. It is possible that there were other catastrophes along the same fault line, but between the Dead Sea and Mashkan-Sapir there was only empty desert, as it is so today too, so no possible witnesses and artificial residues.
Such a catastrophe was eminently possible and realistic. The wealth of the area was in the slime-pits, where they extracted the bitumen, and that wealth has caused their undoing. The Book of Genesis wrote that Abraham got up early in the morning, looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah and saw smoke going up as the smoke from a furnace. He could see the smoke but from where he was standing he could not see that other signs of the catastrophe, the brimstones. They are burnt out pieces of pure sulphur, which are strewn all over the landscape, even today. They are not only in the valley of the Dead Sea, but also in the valley of the Jordan, towards Admah and Zeboim. The center of the catastrophe must have been where the slime-pits were, where the petroleum reserves oozed to the surface, but the following blow-up was strong enough to cover the whole area too6.
So, what is the answer to the historicity to the destruction of the Cities of the Plain. Thanks to the excavations of Mashkan-Sapir, the answer is emphatically yes for the historicity. Two identical catastrophes, based on similar geological conditions, with similar outcomes, are too rare to be coincidental. So, either the story of one is the retelling of the second, which is always a possibility, or there were indeed two catastrophes, which probably were two sites of the same catastrophe. Luckily, the remains of Mashkan-Sapir are covered with sand, so they could be excavated. The remains of Sodom and Gomorrah are covered by brime with 30 % salt contents. So, the search is still continuing, but the local conditions are not very friendly to the archaeologists. Still, there are sufficient evidences in the valley of the Dead Sea in the form of occasional blobs of asphalt floating in the brime, and in the form of burnt out brimstones. These evidences help to decide that the story of the Old Testament is the description of a real catastrophe and not a second-hand retelling of the catastrophe of Mashkan-Sapir.
Notes
| 1. |
Jonathan Petre, Sodom and Gomorrah are found at bottom of Dead Sea, Daily Telegraph, London, Issue 1755, 26 March þ2000
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| 2. |
Josephus Flavius, Wars of the Jews, IV. 4 – 8; Tacitus, History V.7
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| 3. |
Joseph P. Free, op.cit. p.56, Merril F. Unger, op.cit. pp. 114 – 117, W.G. Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine, op.cit. pp.133ff
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| 4. |
Charles Pellegrino, Return to Sodom and Gomorrah, Avon Books, New York, 1994, pp.139-182.
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| 5. |
Merrill F. Unger, op.cit. p.115
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| 6. |
Dr. Melvin Kyle, Explorations at Sodom, New York, 1928, pp.52 - 53
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