Open Veils · Answer
Sodom location found
Two rival archaeological candidates — Tall el-Hammam in the northern Jordan Valley and Bab edh-Dhra on the Dead Sea's southeast shore — have accumulated physical evidence consistent with catastrophic destruction. Neither has yielded a dedicatory inscription, so identification remains contested but materially grounded. The cosmic airburst hypothesis at Tall el-Hammam, advanced by a multi-disciplinary team, represents the most forensically detailed destruction narrative yet proposed for any Bronze Age Levantine site.
Evidence
- Steven Collins of Trinity Southwest University has led excavations at Tall el-Hammam since 2005, arguing the site's location northeast of the Dead Sea matches the Genesis geography precisely — the 'well-watered plain' visible from the hills of Bethel and Ai.
- The most provocative data from Tall el-Hammam comes from a multi-author scientific paper examining a destruction layer dated to roughly 1650 BCE.
- The older candidate, Bab edh-Dhra, discovered in 1924 by William F. Albright, sits on the Dead Sea's southern shore and shows an Early Bronze Age destruction horizon, but carbon dating places its collapse centuries before the Middle Bronze Age window Collins prefers.
- As the Biblical Archaeology Society noted in 2026, no inscription reading 'Sodom' or 'Gomorrah' has emerged at any candidate site, and the airburst claim itself has cycled through publication, challenge, and partial rebuttal.
- Collins also relocated the city of Zoar to the northeast basin of the Dead Sea using the Byzantine Madaba Map, which strengthens the northern placement of the entire 'Cities of the Plain' complex.