An archaeologist who claims to have located the city of Sodom says the location matches the biblical description and that the on-site physical evidence – includeing “glazed” pottery – supports his case.
Steven Collins, Dean of the College of Archaeology at Trinity Southwest University, told Joel. C Rosenberg in a new episode of the Rosenberg Report that his team uncovered pottery from the mid-Bronze Age at a site in Jordan that appeared it was melted by “flash heat,” thus matching the biblical account that says God destroyed Sodom with sulfur and fire.
Digging in the soil, Collins said, “as soon as we get a few centimeters into that [Bronze Age] matrix, this piece of pottery, the shoulder of a storage jar, is facing up at us. And it looks like it's glazed.”
A member of his team who worked on the World War II-era Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb looked at the melted shard and remarked, “Wow, that looks like Trinity,” Collins said. “Trinity” was the code name for the first nuclear test site in New Mexico in 1945.
The archaeological site, known as Tall el-Hammam, is located in modern-day Jordan.
Collins referenced a 2022 paper in the journal Nature in which 21 scholars and researchers said they had uncovered evidence of a “highly unusual catastrophic event” – potentially a meteor – that left a “charcoal-rich destruction layer” and melted object roughly 4,000 years ago in Tall el-Hammam.
The paper posited that Tall el-Hammam was “wiped out in the blink of an eye,” Collins said.
Meanwhile, Collins said, the Tall el-Hammam site matches the biblical evidence. In the book of Genesis, he said, “there are at least 25 known pieces of geography [in Scripture] that you can triangulate between to take you to the city of Sodom,” he said.
“When you do the science of Sodom, you go to the text first. Why? Because the Bible is the only place, the only ancient text, that has survived with the name Sodom in it.”
One biblical piece of evidence, Collins said, is Genesis 13:10.
“Where was Lot standing when he lifted up his eyes and said the whole plane of the Jordan was well-watered? He was at Bethel and Ai,” Collins said. “And then it says he traveled eastward.”
Tall el-Hammam is east of Bethel and Ai, Collins said. Other locations in the region that have been posited as sites for Sodom don’t fit the biblical narrative, he added.
“It was actually the biblical text that put us at this site,” he said. “We just simply navigated around the geography.”
Related:
Has Sodom Been Found? Scientists Say Meteor and Fire from Sky ‘Melted’ Ancient City
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/ZU_09
Video courtesy: ©Joel Rosenberg on TBN
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
