I think I have found Sodom! I can already see the raised eyebrows: The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is not history; it’s just a traditional tale …
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In the Bible, Sodom is the essence of evil: “The men of Sodom were wicked” (Genesis 13:13). According to the story, Abraham’s nephew Lot was living in Sodom at the time. Two angels appearing as men were staying with Lot when the men of Sodom surrounded Lot’s house and demanded that Lot surrender the angels in the guise of men: “Bring them out so that we can have sex with them” (Genesis 19:5). Lot offered instead to give the mob his two virgin daughters, but the men of Sodom refused. They went to break down the door of Lot’s house, but the angels struck them with blindness so that they could not find the door.
The next morning the angels rushed Lot and his family out of town to avoid disaster; the Lord was going to take action. The angels agreed that the family could go to Zoar, where they would be safe (Genesis 19:22–23).
“Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land” (Genesis 19:24–25).
There are at least three ways to look at this story:
1. It is true: God rained down fiery destruction on these cities.
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2. It preserves elements of historical memory from a long-past catastrophic event.
3. The story was composed by the Biblical author and is simply a traditional tale, a legend without any historical basis.
If number 1 is the case, there was a place called Sodom. But even if number 2 is the case, the author of the Biblical tale must have been inspired by some place that had been destroyed in some terrible conflagration. If so, where is that place?
Geographically, the Bible is remarkably accurate. The sheer richness of the geographical and topographical information contained within Biblical stories—including those of Sodom and Gomorrah—demonstrates that the writers themselves knew firsthand the physical stage upon which their characters, real or imagined, lived and moved. The literary landscape—the Biblical landscape—consisted of the cities, districts, mountains, rivers, lakes, gorges, cliffs and caves with which the writers had an intimate relationship. When it came to geography, their mind’s eye was a literal recollection of what they’d seen with their physical eyes. That is, even if the story is not historical, the geographical setting is very likely to be accurate.
And the Bible gives us some remarkable indications of the location of Sodom.
According to Genesis, Abram (later Abraham) placed his tent at “Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier” (Genesis 13:3). His brother’s son Lot was with him, and when they quarreled, Lot moved. Here is how the Bible describes where Lot went:
Lot looked up and saw that the whole plain (kikkar) of the Jordan was well watered, like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, toward Zoar. This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. So Lot chose for himself the whole plain (kikkar) of the Jordan and set out toward the east. The two men parted company. Abram lived in Canaan, while Lot lived among the cities of the plain (ha-kikkar) and pitched his tents near Sodom (Genesis 13:10–12).
Thus we are given a description of the site before its destruction. And what it was called was the “kikkar of the Jordan” or simply “the kikkar,” suggesting a well-known geographical area in the same way that the area of southern Israel is referred to as the Negev.
The place from which Lot set out is clear: between Bethel and Ai. Bethel is located, according to most scholars, at or near Beitin, about 12 miles north of Jerusalem. The location of Ai, the second city mentioned in the Biblical passage, is disputed, but both candidates are in the same area, not far from Beitin.a Travel east, cross the Jordan River and see if there is a well-watered area—like Egypt or the Garden of Eden, according to the Bible—and see if we can find the kikkar of the Jordan.
But before we do, let’s look more closely at the Hebrew word kikkar. What is the kikkar (or ha-kikkar) of the Jordan? Almost all English Bible translations (including the Tanakh of the New Jewish Publication Society Translation, the New Revised Standard Version and the New International Version, the last of which I use in this article) translate it “plain.” Literally, however, kikkar means round or oval-shaped.1 In Hebrew it is also used to refer to a circular, flat piece of bread. At other times it is used to refer to a talent, a flat, circular weight of metal.2 In more than 50 instances in the Hebrew 036 Bible, kikkar refers to bread or to a talent, both disk-shaped. But these meanings never use the definite Hebrew article ha (or “the”), as in ha-kikkar.3
In 11 of the 13 instances in which kikkar is used as a geographical term (the possible exceptions being Nehemiah 3:22, 12:28), it refers to a disk-shaped plain in the southern Jordan Valley. Of these 13 instances, four refer to kikkar ha-yarden (“Disk of the Jordan”), while the remaining nine use ha-kikkar (“the Disk”), suggesting a well-known geographical construct. Both of these terms, kikkar ha-yarden (“Disk of the Jordan”) and ha-kikkar (“the Disk”), appear in the quotation above from Genesis 13, referring to Sodom, where Lot settled.
As it happens, there is a disk-shaped alluvial plain just north of the Dead Sea across from, and east of, Bethel and Ai.
The Biblical text provides other geographical keys: The kikkar ha-yarden is well watered, like Egypt and the Garden of Eden (Genesis 13:10). It is also a very fertile place. When Sodom and Gomorrah and their populations were annihilated, the area’s vegetation was also destroyed (Genesis 19:25).
And indeed the disk (or flat plain) of the Jordan, east of Bethel and Ai, was well watered and fertile and contained a lot of vegetation when it was destroyed toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age.
Even today, this disk supports as much agriculture as human investment will allow. Most of the water used for agricultural purposes is pumped from the local aquifer, into which most of Transjordan’s subterranean water flows due to the geology of the region. The growing number of large hotels and resorts along the Dead Sea’s northeast shoreline get their water from local vendors who pump water from ha-kikkar and truck it to each resort. In antiquity this water flowed to the surface as springs, many of them providing flows abundant enough to support the rise of large, populous settlements—such as those at Tall el-Hammam and Tuleilat Ghassul. In Hellenistic and Roman times, some of these springs were tapped and delivered to various locations via aqueducts; remains of such water systems have survived at and around Tall el-Hammam.
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Several large wadis also flow into the area from the Transjordanian highlands. Most of them, such as Wadi Kafrayn and Wadi Rawda (a tributary of Wadi Hisban), wrap around Tall el-Hammam as perennial streams or rivers. They would still do so today but for the dams impeding the flow. Each of the ancient cities, towns and villages on the eastern kikkar sits adjacent to one of these streams or rivers.
In ancient times, the Jordan River worked much like the Nile in miniature; annual inundations supported a rich annual agricultural cycle. The dynamics of this feature were not lost on the writer of Genesis 13:10: “[T]he kikkar of the Jordan was well watered … like the land of Egypt.” Today, we have little appreciation of this phenomenon because the Jordan River has been reduced to a trickle.
Even during the rest of the year in antiquity, the kikkar was well watered. Local inhabitants routinely planted crops behind the Jordan’s receding waters, just as the Egyptians had harnessed the Nile’s inundations. The verdant nature of the Bronze Age kikkar and its agricultural enterprise supported a number of cities, towns, villages and hamlets, as well as a wide variety of crops—wheat (emmer and aestivum), barley, dates, olives, grapes, field peas, vetch, lentils, chickpeas, several varieties of beans, figs, pistachios, almonds and flax. The area also supported a wide range of trees including oak, willow, tamarisk, acacia and cypress. Further, remains of domesticated sheep, goats, cattle, horses, 038 donkeys, camels and cats—along with wild species such as deer, gazelle, pigs, rodents, numerous birds, carp and armored catfish—all point to what has been called “a relatively lush environment.”4
Standing in the middle of ha-kikkar, if you look northward, you see the hills closing at the “top” of the Disk. Southward those hills then widen out in dramatic fashion to their maximum circumference with Jericho and Tall el-Hammam at the extreme west and east edges, respectively. From that point, the circle of the surrounding hills closes once again at the “bottom” of ha-kikkar at the northern end of the Dead Sea.
In short, the place where Lot settled can be identified as a disk of well-watered plain 18 miles (30 km) in diameter in the Jordan Valley immediately north of the Dead Sea, with the cities of ha-kikkar on the eastern side. (Incidentally, I had an extensive correspondence with the dean of Biblical geographers, Anson Rainey, who unfortunately passed away 040 recently,b in which he agreed with me regarding the geographical identification of the kikkar.5)
For eight years I have been directing excavations at the largest site in the kikkar, Tall el-Hammam. (I use the Arabic tall, rather than tell, because the name is Arabic and the site is in Jordan.) Habitation goes all the way back to the Chalcolithic period (4600–3600 B.C.E.), when the site became a large, open settlement (similar to nearby Tuleilat Ghassul). During succeeding periods in the Early Bronze Age (c. 3000–2350 B.C.E.), Tall el-Hammam was protected by enormous defenses, indicating a strong centralized government exercising hegemony over satellite settlements associated with its agricultural economy. Stratum upon stratum reveals the long, continuous occupation of the impressive Bronze Age city.
After three seasons of excavation, we moved “downstairs”—to the lower tall. There an immense defensive wall from the Early and Intermediate Bronze Age (c. 3000–2000 B.C.E.) was incorporated into the later Middle Bronze Age fortification system (c. 2000–1600 B.C.E.). The aggregate thickness of the Tall el-Hammam lower/outer-city defenses—including wall and exterior rampart—ranges from 100 feet (30 m) to 150 feet (45 m). Like the upper-city rampart, the lower-city rampart is constructed entirely of mudbricks—in staggering numbers. We estimate there were originally between 150 and 200 million bricks.
In the Middle Bronze Age, a monumental gateway complex was constructed with four tower entrances through the city wall and a main passageway. The gatehouse, flanked by two large external towers through which the central axis passed, led directly to a large temple complex measuring 328 feet (100 m) by 328 feet (100 m).
Each of the flanking gateway towers had a footprint of approximately 33 feet (10 m) by 60 feet (18 m) and likely stood to an impressive height of 50 feet (15 m) or more. The spacious exterior gateway plaza was accessed from three directions (east, west and south) by avenues defined by blocking walls more than 6 feet thick. These blocking walls probably stood to a height that limited ground-level views of the city’s entrance. Thus, the only advantageous view of the entire gateway area 041 was held by defenders atop the towers. Today the expanse of this exterior plaza is fully in view; virtually nothing was built over it after its destruction.
The central axis of the main gateway leads directly to the raised (terraced) temple precinct located in the center of the lower city. Layer upon layer of buildings suggests the importance of the area over a long period of time. One wall that we think was part of the main temple is nearly 10 feet (3 m) thick and almost 70 feet (21 m) long.
The central temple building is surrounded by courtyards and administrative buildings, some featuring circular, open-air altars.
If one draws a line from the temple platform through the central axis of the main gateway, it leads directly to the principal menhir (large standing stone) of a discrete megalithic field (one of many in the area) a kilometer southeast of the city gate, which is aligned symmetrically and astronomically with an assemblage of dolmens, menhirs and stone circles. Thus, the temple is connected to a larger sacred landscape 070 (or sacrescape) that spreads outward from the city center into the surrounding terrain for a considerable distance.
Then, toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age, about 1600 B.C.E., life on the eastern kikkar, including Tall el-Hammam and its satellites, suddenly came to an end—while the rest of the southern Levant continued into and through the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 B.C.E.) at surrounding sites like Jerusalem, Deir ‘Alla, Pella and Amman. At Tall el-Hammam the Middle Bronze Age was followed by a six- or seven-century occupational hiatus!
This was true for the other sites in ha-kikkar as well. Not a single kikkar site shows occupation during the Late Bronze Age. (After a 200-year hiatus, Jericho did spring up again briefly but rather insignificantly during Late Bronze II.) Of the larger sites that have been excavated and for which reports are available—Tall Iktanu, Tall Nimrin, Tall Kafrayn, Tall el-Hammam—Late Bronze Age occupation is missing.6
Despite the fact that sites unoccupied for centuries often experience erosion that can remove vast amounts of organic material like ash, Tall el-Hammam nevertheless has vast quantities of ash associated with its terminal Middle Bronze Age stratum.
Other nearby sites have not been excavated extensively enough to say, but what they all have in common is the time frame. The date of the terminal phase is unequivocal—the end of the Middle Bronze Age.
The violent conflagration that ended occupation at Tall el-Hammam produced melted pottery, scorched foundation stones and several feet of ash and destruction debris churned into a dark gray matrix as if in a Cuisinart.
The latest Middle Bronze Age layer at Tall el-Hammam consists of 1.5 to 3 feet of heavy ash and destruction debris. A fortified town was then built atop the upper tall in the tenth century B.C.E. All of Tall el-Hammam and associated eastern kikkar sites also lay in ruins for this same period of time—approximately seven centuries. The terminal destruction layer at Tall el-Hammam lies across both the upper and lower tall and consists of a matrix of heavy, dark ash mixed with fragments of pottery, mudbricks, a wide range of object fragments and human bone scatter.7 Numerous pottery fragments of this matrix lie across the site and have outside surfaces melted into glass, with some bubbled up like “frothy” magma, indicating they were burned in a flash heat event far exceeding 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.8 The conflagration must have yielded extremely high heat and effected catastrophic damage.9
Occupation did not resume at Tall el-Hammam until Iron Age II, about 1000 B.C.E., the beginning of the Israelite monarchy. The Iron Age town was built directly upon the Middle Bronze Age upper city that had been lying in ruins since its destruction.
The memory of the destruction of ha-kikkar, with its large population and extensive agricultural lands, was preserved in the Book of Genesis and ultimately incorporated into a traditional tale that, drawing on the layer of ash that covered the destruction of one of its major cities, remembered a place consumed by a fiery catastrophe from “out of the heavens” (Genesis 19:24). The Bible gives the city’s name: Sodom.
Follow the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project at www.tallelhammam.com.
I think I have found Sodom! I can already see the raised eyebrows: The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is not history; it’s just a traditional tale … 034 In the Bible, Sodom is the essence of evil: “The men of Sodom were wicked” (Genesis 13:13). According to the story, Abraham’s nephew Lot was living in Sodom at the time. Two angels appearing as men were staying with Lot when the men of Sodom surrounded Lot’s house and demanded that Lot surrender the angels in the guise of men: “Bring them out so that we can have sex with […]
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See E.A. Speiser, Genesis, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 96–97.
3.
For definitions and usages of kikkar and other Hebrew terms identified in this article, see L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, eds., Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti Libros: A Dictionary of the Hebrew Old Testament in English and German (Leiden: Brill, 1985); W. Holladay, ed., A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988); F. Brown, S.R. Driver and C.A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975); and W.A. VanGemeren, ed., New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, 5 vols. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997).
4.
K. Yassine, ed., Tell Nimrin: An Archaeological Exploration (Amman: University of Jordan, 2011), p. 30. Middle Bronze Age paleobotanical and faunal analysis is principally from Tall Nimrin and Tall el-Hammam with consideration of data from Tall Kafrayn and Tall Iktanu.
5.
In a series of 2006 email correspondences with me, Rainey wrote, “Your arguments about the kikkar are the most cogent … Gen[esis] 13 has to do with the high ground east of Bethel … The references to the kikkar fit better with the area N. [North] of the Dead Sea.”
6.
T.J. Papadopoulos and L. Kantorli-Papadopoulos, “Preliminary Report of the Seasons 2005–2008 of Excavations by the University of Ioannina at Tall al-Kafrayn in the Jordan Valley,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan (ADAJ) 54 (2010), pp. 283–310; S. Collins, K. Hamdan and G. Byers, “Tall al-Ḥammām: Preliminary Report on Four Seasons of Excavation (2006–2009),” ADAJ 53 (2009), pp. 385–414; S. Collins and H. Aljarrah, “Tall al-Ḥammām Season Six, 2011: Excavation, Survey, Interpretations and Insights,” ADAJ 55 (2011), pp. 581–608; Yassine, ed., Tell Nimrin. Virtually no Late Bronze Age pottery has been found at Tall el-Hammam or Tall Nimrin. “Rare” Late Bronze Age sherds from Tall Kafrayn may actually belong to the Middle Bronze II corpus, as some Middle Bronze II forms did carry into Late Bronze I. No Late Bronze Age architecture exists at any of these or other eastern kikkar sites.
7.
Collins and Aljarrah, “Tall al-Ḥammām Season Six, 2011.”
8.
Although microprobe analysis reveals that the glass formed under magma-like temperatures, volcanism as a cause is not an option. There is no geological evidence within the past 10,000 years at least for volcanic activity in the middle or southern Ghor of the Dead Sea region.
9.
Scattered pottery fragments from excavated Middle Bronze II contexts at Tall el-Hammam have surfaces melted into glass. Analysis reveals that the surface glass was formed when the kaolin of the clay body became heated by temperatures minimally in the range of volcanic magmas. Before the viscous glass could “run” barely 1 or 2 mm over the edges of the sherd-break, the heat dissipated, signaled by a molecular structure identical to the “quench texture” of volcanic glass. The temperature index was likely much higher than that associated with magmas because zircon crystals in the center of the kaolin-body (3-5mm below the glass) formed spheroids (“bubbles”), which typically occurs at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. (Analysis of sherd/object HO.5–6.UB.21W.7.367 by Cameca SX-100 Microbrobe; performed by USGS geophysicists at New Mexico Technical University.)
