A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea | Scientific Reports (nature.com)
"We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. 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. A city-wide ~ 1.5-m-thick carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contains peak concentrations of shocked quartz (~ 5–10 GPa); melted pottery and mudbricks; diamond-like carbon; soot; Fe- and Si-rich spherules; CaCO3 spherules from melted plaster; and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 °C. Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+ m of the 4-to-5-story palace complex and the massive 4-m-thick mudbrick rampart, while causing extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans. An airburst-related influx of salt (~ 4 wt.%) produced hypersalinity, inhibited agriculture, and caused a ~ 300–600-year-long abandonment of ~ 120 regional settlements within a > 25-km radius. Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest city/town destroyed by a cosmic airburst/impact, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, and possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis). Tunguska-scale airbursts can devastate entire cities/regions and thus, pose a severe modern-day hazard…
…It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down through many generations, became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed."
A brief overview of the event:
Sodom and Gomorrah: Biblical Archaeology - YouTube
The sun had risen on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot's wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.
And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord. And he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley, and he looked and, behold, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.
So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the valley, God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had lived.
- Genesis 19:23-29
A couple points:
#1. A common argument of atheists and professing Christians alike is that the book of Genesis (and the OT generally) is essentially mythological, or an attempt to communicate spiritual lessons through barely historical myths and legends. Yet here in the earliest chapters of the Bible we have an entirely accurate historical account of the cosmic destruction of a major city beside the Dead Sea.
#2. The discovery of the existence and destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah will likely do nothing to convince people that the Old Testament may actually be true, even those people who previously insisted that the account of Sodom and Gomorrah was mythological, people who used such examples to argue for the unreliability of scriptural accounts.
This is because the commitment to denying the historicity of the Old Testament is philosophical and not actually based on science or evidence. We don’t want these OT accounts to be true because it makes God’s judgment over the earth too real and tangible, and humans are rebellious to this truth. We much prefer to reduce the Bible to spiritual metaphors and moral myths. It lets us maintain some sense of authority over our world and our lives. When we finally accept that the God of the Bible rules over the history of the earth just as he rules the present and the future forevermore, we increase our faith and trust in Him as the ultimate truth.
For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”
- John 5:46-47
