The Evidence For Ancient Atomic Warfare-D.H. Childress
Bianca:
Sodom and Gomorrah meet Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Probably the most famous of all ancient "nuke 'em" stories is the well-known biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah:
And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah, brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But his [Lot's] wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt. And lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. (Genesis 18:20; 19:24-26,28)
This biblical passage has come to epitomise the destructive power of God's wrath visited on those places which sin. The Bible is very specific about the site of Sodom and Gomorrah plus several other towns; they were in the Vale of Siddim, which was located at the southern end of the Salt Sea (now called the Dead Sea). Other towns in the area, according to the Bible, were Zoar, Admah and Zeboiim (Genesis 14:2). As late as the Middle Ages, a town called Zoar existed in the area.
The Dead Sea is 1,293 feet [394 metres] below sea level and at least 1,200 feet [365 m] deep. The bottom of the sea is therefore about 2,500 feet [762 m] below the level of the Mediterranean. Approximately 25 per cent of the water of the Dead Sea consists of solid ingredients, mostly sodium chloride. Normal ocean water is around 4.6 per cent salt.
The Jordan and many smaller rivers empty themselves into this basin, which has no solitary outlet. What its tributaries bring to it in the way of chemical substances remain deposited in the Dead Sea's 500 square miles. Evaporation under the broiling sun takes place on the surface of the sea at a rate of over 230 million cubic feet per day. Arab tradition has it that so many poisonous gases come out of the lake that birds could not fly across it, as they would die before reaching the other side.
Bianca:
The Dead Sea was first explored in modern times in 1848 when W. F. Lynch, an American geologist, led an expedition. He brought ashore from his government research ship two metal boats which he fastened onto large-wheeled carts. Pulled by a long team of horses, his expedition reached the Dead Sea some months later.
Lynch and his team discovered that the traditions were correct in that a man could not sink in the sea. They also surveyed the lake, noting its unusual depth and the shallow area or "tongue" at the southern end of the lake. This area is thought to be where the Vale of Siddim was located and the five cities existed. It is possible to see entire forests of trees encrusted with salt beneath the water in this southern part of the lake.
Standard historical theory on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, such as in The Bible As History by Werner Keller,18 holds that the cities of the Vale of Siddim were destroyed when a plate movement caused the Great Rift Valley--of which the Dead Sea is a part--to shift, and the area at the southern end of the Dead Sea to subside. In the great earthquake there were probably explosions, natural gases issuing forth and brimstone falling like rain. This is likely to have happened about 2000 BC, the time of Abraham and Lot, thinks Keller, though geologists place the event many thousands of years before this.
Says Keller:
Bianca:
The Jordan Valley is only part of a huge fracture in the Earth's crust. The path of this crack has meantime been accurately traced. It begins far north, several hundred miles beyond the borders of Palestine, at the foot of the Taurus mountains in Asia Minor. In the south it runs from the south shore of the Dead Sea through the Wadi el-Arabah to the Gulf of Aqabah and only comes to an end beyond the Red Sea in Africa.
At many points in this vast depression, signs of intense volcanic activity are obvious. In the Galilean mountains, in the highlands of Transjordan, on the banks of the Jabbok, a tributary of the Jordan, and on the Gulf of Aqabah are black basalt and lava...
The subsidence released volcanic forces that had been lying dormant, deep down along the whole length of the fracture. In the upper valley of the Jordan near Bashan there are still the towering craters of extinct volcanoes; great stretches of lava and deep layers of basalt have been deposited on the limestone surface.
From time immemorial the area around this depression has been subject to earthquakes. There is repeated evidence of them and the Bible itself records them...
Bianca:
Did Sodom and Gomorrah sink when perhaps a part of the base of this huge fissure collapsed still further to the accompaniment of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions?
As for the pillars of salt, Keller says:
To the west of the southern shore and in the direction of the Biblical "Land of the South", the Negeb, stretches a ridge of hills about 150 feet high and 10 miles from north to south. Their slopes sparkle and glitter in the sunshine like diamonds. It is an odd phenomenon of nature. For the most part this little range of hills consists of pure rock salt.
The Arabs call it Jebel Usdum, an ancient name, which preserves in it the word "Sodom". Many blocks of salt have been worn away by the rain and have crashed downhill. They have odd shapes and some of them stand on end, looking like statues. It is easy to imagine them suddenly seeming to come to life.
These strange statues in salt remind us vividly of the Biblical description of Lot's wife who was turned into a pillar of salt... And everything in the neighbourhood of the Salt Sea is even to this day quickly covered with a crust of salt.
However, Keller himself admits that there is a very serious problem with this theory of a cataclysm sending the Vale of Siddim to the bottom of the Dead Sea: it must have happened many hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years ago--at least according to most geologists. Says Keller:
In particular, we must remember there can be no question that the Jordan fissure was formed before about 4000 BC. Indeed, according to the most recent presentation of the facts, the origin of the fissure dates back to the Oligocene, the third oldest stage of the Tertiary period.
We thus have to think in terms not of thousands, but of millions of years. Violent volcanic activity connected with the Jordan fissure has been shown to have occurred since then, but even so we do not get any further than the Pleistocene which came to an end approximately ten thousand years ago.
Certainly we do not come anywhere near to the third, still less the second millennium before Christ--the period, that is to say, in which the patriarchs are traditionally placed.
Bianca:
In short, Keller is saying that any geological catastrophe that would have destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah would have had to have happened a million years ago, or so geologists have told him. Keller says that geologists have not found any evidence of a recent catastrophe at the southern end of the Dead Sea, at least not for about 10,000 years. Says Keller:
In addition, it is precisely to the south of the Lisan peninsula, where Sodom and Gomorrah are reported to have been annihilated, that the traces of former volcanic activity cease. In short, the proof in this area of a quite recent catastrophe which wiped out towns and was accompanied by violent volcanic activity is not provided by the findings of the geologists.
So here is the problem: the Dead Sea area may have had a cataclysm that could be the origin of the Old Testament story; however, conservative uniformitarian geologists have said that any such Earth changes must have occurred long before any sort of collective memory of the event.
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