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Sodom and Gomorrah and the Dead Sea

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Brianroy:
There are those who have offered an alternate theory which allows a Dead Sea to have always been in existence, but it goes back to a necessity of soil chemical analysis in the strata of the period said to be that of Sodom's destruction.  Here is an article that some geologists proposed in 1995,  which I thought was an interest to add here. 

New York Times, Sunday, 17 December 1995, p. 13
Geologists Zero In on Sodom and Lot's Wife

LONDON, Dec. 16 (Reuters) - Geologists say they have pinpointed the probable site of the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and worked out a theory of why Lot's wife was reported to have ended up as a pillar of salt.

The findings by two British geologists working in Canada were printed in the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology on Friday.

The geologists, Graham Harris and Anthony Beardow, analyzed local soil and rock to conclude that Sodom and Gomorrah were probably located on a Dead Sea peninsula.
While the rough location of the cities has long been suspected, the authors said they used the latest geological thinking to trace them to a specific peninsula and work out the reason they vanished around 1900 B.C.

"This is an attempt to use modern geological perspectives to look into a very racy story, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and solve a fascinating historical problem," said Peter Styles of the Journal staff.

According to the Tanach, the cities were destroyed by fire and brimstone in retribution for the sinfulness of their residents. Since Lot was considered a good man, he was warned of God's punishment. However, his wife disobeyed the sole condition of not looking back and was transformed into a pillar of salt.

The geologists said.that Lot's wife did not appear to turn into a pillar of salt because she dared to look back but because of the briny nature of the Dead Sea. But the research shows it was more likely a case of mistaken identity. Mr. Harris said by telephone from Canada that the Dead Sea was full of salt floes that might have been thrown up by surging water to resemble a female outline." Hence legend is created out of what can now be explained as a simple geological phenomenon," he said.

Saturated soil and highly flammable bitumen, rather than God's wrath, was apparently behind the demise of the cities, the report said.

"The area is made up of rock types which, when subjected to a large earthquake, will actually liquefy, like shaking up a bottle of sauce," Mr. Styles said. "Theirs is a great story but if, as they suggest, the whole city was destroyed and collapsed into the sea, I don't know how much would be left to dig up."

{{{Map used in the article:  http://people.virginia.edu/~pm9k/Writings/sodom4.gif }}}

 The Dead Sea is divided into two basins. El Lisan Peninsula, where the geologists believe Sodom was located, separates the basins at the sea's narrowest point.
Their analysis suggests it was used as a crossing point to ship salt to the Mediterranean and Egypt. Locals were also involved in risky bitumen mining, according to the Journal, meaning fire would have been a constant hazard in what was an earthquake zone. That would help explain the biblical references to the fiery destruction of the two cities.

Mr. Harris said it was impossible to tell if an earthquake set off the so-called liquefaction process he believes swallowed up the cities, but he said archeologists and engineers should join forces to put the 4,000-year mystery to rest.

"The enigma will never ever be resolved until artifacts can be rediscovered that can be positively identified to those cities," he said.

http://people.virginia.edu/~pm9k/Writings/sodom.html

Harzel:
I can't read all this material which I suspect amount to allot of junk science.

Lets just go by logic, and the known geography from the bible. We know the Jordan valley and the Jordan river had existed before Sodom and Gomora were destroyed. don't we ? The area where these cities existed is called "Kikar Hayarden" in the same chapter.
The southern part of the Jordan exits the Kineret, and flows south, it already exits way bellow sea level as the Kineret is -200m bellow sea level, so where do you think it flows into ? There has to be a lake somewhere to the south.

Brianroy:
Zelhar,
    I hope that you will at least acknowledge that the Dead Sea is part of a volcanic fault-line with the unique aspect of also being the location of the merging point of multiple tectonic plates. 

I have been trying to pull up the University of Haifa of late to get a hold of what Dr. Michael Lazar has written or updated on the deep core sample of the Dead Sea bottom that he participated in with representatives of 6 other nations in 2010.  For whatever reason, I can't establish a connection as my servers keep timing out.  Perhaps in Israel, those who read and participate in this English Forum could pull it up, or catch some references where that core sampling was published at? 

C-14 chronology, once you do the research you will see this also,  is seriously flawed.  Modern scholarship has gotten to a point, for the sake of pretended knowledge, that we can now create data into existence by cross-quotations of suppositions and hypotheses, so as to date most all Levant ceramic development some 4,000 years ago into 25 year increments. This is utterly preposterous and ridiculous, but this is how education mis-informs for the sake of a uniform message, even when such is gravely mistaken / erroneous.  This is not just in the study of Ceramic history and development, but most everywhere dealing with the ancient past.  It was a subject of manipulation that drove Immanuel Velikovsky to write a series of books challenging what we know, and if we truly know what we do.  He initially upset Einstein, who he corresponded with, but after a few years, Einstein gradually began accepting what he had previously rejected from Velikovsky, but not entirely (such as in Astro-physics where Einstein insisted planets must have more than inertia and gravity to move about, for example).

If the dating of the more ancient past (prior to the fall of Solomon's Temple, circa 587 or 586 B.C.E.) is flawed, so that certain events can be moved as many as 300 or 400 years because of inaccurate timelines, which I can reasonably prove that some of them can, then the uncertain past begins to make sense and finds a consistency that leads from one discovery to the next.

One of these, tied to Sodom, is the destruction of the Akkadian Empire through a raining down of volcanic ash.  At the dried up and drought southern end of the Dead Sea, the bed of ash in the dried Sea bed was as deep as 30 to 40 feet, and yellow taped off because tourists were falling into these ash sink-holes.

I contend that it was a massive volcanic explosion, like that of the island of Santorini during what I date as the 1551 B.C.E. Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, and like that of Krakatoa (or Mount St. Helens on a lesser scale) in modern times, that was the source of the ash that fell on the Akkadians, and wiped out whole forests that extended up from the Persian Gulf into Southern Iraq that thereafter never grew back. 

A paper done on the fall of the Akkadians by volcanic ash I will cite here:

DOI: 10.1130/0091-7613(2000)28<379:CCATCO>2.0.CO;2 © 2000 Geology; April 2000; v. 28; no. 4; p. 379-382; Geological Society of America
H. M. Cullen1, P. B. deMenocal1, S. Hemming1, G. Hemming1, F. H. Brown2, T. Guilderson3 and F. Sirocko4
1 Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, New York 10964, USA
2 University of Utah, Park City, Utah 84112, USA
3 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 94551, USA
4 Institut für Geowissenschaften, Johannes Gutenberg Universität, 55099 Mainz, Germany

Abstract:
The Akkadian empire ruled Mesopotamia from the headwaters of the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers to the Persian Gulf during the late third millennium B.C. Archeological evidence has shown that this highly developed civilization collapsed abruptly near 4170 ± 150 calendar yr B.P., perhaps related to a shift to more arid conditions. Detailed paleoclimate records to test this assertion from Mesopotamia are rare, but changes in regional aridity are preserved in adjacent ocean basins. We document Holocene changes in regional aridity using mineralogic and geochemical analyses of a marine sediment core from the Gulf of Oman, which is directly downwind of Mesopotamian dust source areas and archeological sites. Our results document a very abrupt increase in eolian dust and Mesopotamian aridity, accelerator mass spectrometer radiocarbon dated to 4025 ± 125 calendar yr B.P., which persisted for 300 yr. Radiogenic (Nd and Sr) isotope analyses confirm that the observed increase in mineral dust was derived from Mesopotamian source areas. Geochemical correlation of volcanic ash shards between the archeological site and marine sediment record establishes a direct temporal link between Mesopotamian aridification and social collapse, implicating a sudden shift to more arid conditions as a key factor contributing to the collapse of the Akkadian empire.

If the demise of the Akkadians with "volcanic ash shards" occur simultaneously with the destruction of Sodom, what then?   I believe the Torah really happened just as it says.  Science as science does not deny the Torah, people who have agendas to manipulate science and the scientific data do.  Millions of years of erosion, at least that dating given by flawed glass-jar environment thinking scientists, such as the break between the tip of the boot of Italy and the island of Sicily, happened in a matter of hours or days.  That literary history cataclysm information has been retained by ancients quoting then ancient texts themselves, but would Science today believe the historical eyewitness that at about the time of the Exodus the peninsula of Sicily became an island?  I doubt it.  It is with that degree of skepticism toward secular science that has as its agenda evolution and disbelief of and in the Creator, that we need to healthily have.  We can indeed trust the Torah as 100% historically true.  Therefore, we should use science to understand the testimony given us by the Torah, and make the quickest access to the Truth in the most easy and intelligent fashion, a path of trusting the Creator who has always been around to know what happened, because He was there, and He guided and instructed Moses in these things. 

At any rate, Shalom.

Harzel:
The dead sea is part of the Jordan rift valley on a tectonic fault line between the Arabian plate and Africa, I don't know that it is unique with that property.

Brianroy:
Perhaps I should elaborate a bit more.  I am of a mind that the Dead Sea area is both a volcanic fault line and the result of a cratering as is associated with volcanoes that explode in their entirety, such as Santorini  http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/santorini/minoan-eruption/size.html     (which I date as instead to the Exodus in 1551 B.C.E.)  and Krakatoa of  1883 C.E.  http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/Krakatau.html



Based on the Biblical and extra-biblical texts, I believe there was a combination effect of natural gases – oil/asphalt ignition – and volcanic pressures and resultant gases which combined to explode beneath the surface of the plain on which the Sodomic Alliance sat, collapsing it, and turning it into magma flows.  That is, an extremely rare and very violent lava eruption and series of sharp intense earthquakes at the volcanic fault-line that runs through the Dead Sea region blew up a chasm below the plain which collapsed the plain and made it into a depression we now know as the Dead Sea.  Because of the very high content of salt and salt caves and strata in the mountains / hills of the Dead Sea,   http://geography.huji.ac.il/.upload/Frumkin1/Hol.pdf
 hot globs of salt (as well as lava) weighing many hundreds of pounds were very conceivably and also cast through the air many miles, just as magma was, and that is what landed on Lot’s wife.  I believe that the entire plain of what is now the Dead Sea bottom, covered over since with great layers of ash and salt, was entirely molten when Lot left it and reached Zoar (in walking distance from  Bab edh-dhra).
 
 
Frederick G. Clapp
http://search.datapages.com/data/doi/10.1306/3D932DFC-16B1-11D7-8645000102C1865D
and Geo-tech G. M. Harris and Geologist A. P. Beardow
http://qjegh.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/28/4/349
concluded that the great Salt mountains, and the melting at the upper strata are the clues to where Sodom and Gomorrah were. There is a Volcanic Fault which extends from southern Turkey and onward through the Dead Sea and onward,
http://journals.tubitak.gov.tr/earth/issues/yer-98-7-2/yer-7-2-1-97012.pdf

It is my contention that the Dead Sea did not exist until AFTER the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  The pre-Dead sea Plain controlled by the Sodomic alliance was likely a fresh water paradise and Bread-basket region in heavy trade with Egypt, with Bronze Era copper and sulfur mines (in the eastern mountain hill range that runs south of the Lisan Peninsula almost to the gulf of Aqaba), and bitumen or asphalt pits would have been collected for boat (and other forms of) sealing.
 
Based on the reading of the text of Genesis 19, I have come to conclude based on the texts, that the Dead Sea’s bottom was called the Kikar – the encircling plain – the encircling disk.  The name of the Kikar was a biblical nomination based on its observation point, and the observation one has of the Dead Sea’s shape from the Lisan Peninsula to the East of the Dead Sea.  The Dead Sea, therefore, is the plain that sunk away, by both earthquakes and volcanic lava churnings of the earth.  Kikar in the Akkadian is equated with the word used for a "talent" of weight.  That is, ‘kikar” is equated to a  heavy weight of measuring prosperity that drives a scale "down".  This in turn is linked to a prison, and a form of separation from the rest of the world through the corresponding Hebrew word Kele.     
 
       The Dead Sea is itself called the lake of Sodom in the historical tradition left to the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 108b, 109a).

The Lisan settlement of Bab edh-dhra (often misdated to circa 2300 B.C. when it is more than 300 years newer at its demise) was covered with some 3 feet of ash and this led to its abandonment.  Modern excavations recorded that approximately 50% of the populations there perished prior to age 21 in those two settlements.  Syphillis as well as other diseases were at high percentages among the dead as the likely cause of death.  This would be consistent with a demise brought about because of the volcanic ash, which would be why Lot left Zoar and went to the mountains to live in a cave probably known to Lot for the storing of emergency food and wine supplies for the community of Sodom, hidden in case of defeat because of Hittite or other invasion.

I do not believe that Bab Edh-dhra is Sodom, as believed at Harvard University
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~semitic/wl/digsites/Transjordan/DeadSea_98/index.htm
and by others (e.g.) http://www.nd.edu/~mchesson/newedsphome.html

The location of Bab edh-dhra fails on its face because it is an elevated place, and not a sunken down place as the Hebrew of Genesis 19 informs us that it was.  Further, Bab edh-dhra was not immediately dis-inhabited and made into a place of salt and covered by salt marshes, as a location under the Dead Sea floor itself would so qualify.   Further, Sodom is a place never to be inhabited again…not even by excavators, according to the Biblical texts referring back to it by specificity and example. Isaiah 1:9, Devarim / Deuteronomy 29:23,  Jeremiah 49:18 and 50:40

When I look at the Hebrew of Genesis 19:13-14, and use my various resources to engage in a more enhanced word by word  word-picture translation (with reiterations or similar alternates)  for study, this is what I see as I translate it in fulness into the English.  We might discuss in a later post the relation between Korah's demise in Bamidbar / Numbers 26:10 with Rashi's comments on Bamidbar /Numbers 26:11 and this passage, perhaps?

13)  For we are about to sink it down [as a pit] and destroy
                        [and send to the after-life]
                        this place / this place of nothing,
                        for great (is) the outcry of them
                       [as though a sound of thunder]  before Y***,
                       and Y*** has sent us
                       to sink it down [as a pit] and destroy it. 

14)      And came forth – went out Lot to
       speak – converse (as a legal matter)   [cf. Akkadian “dababu”]
       to – with  his sons-in-law,
      those taking – receiving – espoused by marriage [contract]
       to taking  his daughters, and said commandingly,
 
                  ‘Arise up (from your sitting or lying down),
                    and go forth out from this place – from such a place as this,
                            for Y*** is about to sink down [as a pit] –
                            bow down and destroy the (protected) settlement.’
             
 And he [Lot] became as if – seemed as if
 as one laughing – joking – jesting in the eyes of his sons-in-law.

  To me, this leads me to conclude that the Dead Sea only came into existence with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, because if the Torah says it, it is enough. 

Any comments or insights?   Thanks in advance.  Shalom.

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