A very strange thing happened to 16 cities and towns in the Levant, including Jericho and Tall el-Hammam (possibly “Sodom”), in about 1650 BCE. They were all simultaneously and suddenly destroyed, then immediately abandoned for centuries. The reason has been a mystery for a long time, but explanatory evidence has accumulated to the point at which Dave Wasserman, if he were an archaeologist, might say, “I’ve seen enough.”
Tall el-Hammam has been under excavation since 2006, and during that time, it has become clear that a highly unusual event took place there in the Middle Bronze Age. Of course the ruins of ancient cities generally have lots of debris, but Tall el-Hammam looked like it had literally melted.
Odd things started to surface: shards of pottery with thin outer surfaces melted into glass, and fragments of melted mudbrick, roofing clay, and plaster. So maybe the city was destroyed by fire, then. Happens all the time, right?
No, not like this. A building fire will typically burn at about 1100°F (590°C). But mudbrick and pottery such as that found at Tall el-Hammam doesn’t melt until you get to about 2700°F (1500°C). And yet it did melt. This was a very atypical, extremely hot fire. Compelling evidence of something strange.
But the smoking gun — the evidence that got this developing story published in Nature Scientific Reports on September 20 — was that the 5-foot-thick destruction layer, dating to about 1650 BCE, and no other layer at the site, contains shocked quartz. This is quartz with internal fractures that can only occur under very high pressures. The shocked quartz found in the destruction layer at Tall el-Hammam matches 17 out of 17 properties of shocked quartz found after a cosmic impact, but it matches very few properties of that found after tectonic stresses or lightning strikes.
One of these 17 properties, just to give you a good visual illustration, is “feather fractures”. Here we see a quartz grain stressed by such high and sudden pressure that parts of its crystal planes were forced past one another, leaving small internal cracks. The featherlike quality of the fractures is characteristic of a cosmic impact:
In fact, similar shocked quartz has been found in the vicinity of known above-ground airbursts, such as the 1908 Tunguska Event (Siberia), the 1945 Trinity (New Mexico) atomic bomb detonation, and the 1949/1953 Joe-1/Joe-4 (Kazakhstan) atomic bomb detonations.
How much pressure does it take to generate these kinds of fractures? Let’s consider that the pressure at the deepest portion of the sea is about 16,000 pounds per square inch, or psi. That’d crush you instantly. It’s also about the pressure a 5-pound mallet would exert striking a peg at 50 feet per second. Ouch.
So now multiply that pressure by 50 to 100, and that’s the pressure you’d need to do this to quartz grains. What Earthly force could have done that to a whole town? If you said “none”, you are probably correct!
Another odd finding at Tall el-Hammam has been that debris tends to be oriented in the same direction: southwest-to-northeast. Pottery shards line up that way. Intact objects tend to be at the northeast corners of structures. Even charred barley grains are strewn about oriented southwest-to-northeast.
It’s one thing for a city to be destroyed — by warfare, earthquakes, fire, whatever — and typically cities like that get rebuilt in relatively short order. But Tal el-Hammam, Jericho, and all the other towns in the area were simply abandoned and not repopulated for about 600 years. Why?
This multi-century abandonment is particularly puzzling, given that this area contains the most fertile agricultural land within a radius of hundreds of kilometers across Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. The destruction was so remarkable and so pervasive that the ensuing name of the area became Abel, the ‘mourning grounds' (specifically, to mourn because of a calamity).
The destruction layer is abnormally and obviously high in salt, and again the layers above it and below it are not. Excavators noticed consistent white salt crusts coating much of the destruction layer. They plainly formed on pottery shards and even bones from that layer.
The area north of the Dead Sea is quite fertile, but the Dead Sea itself, of course, is very salty, and an airburst near it could have kicked up enough salt to render nearby arable land unusable for hundreds of years. That would explain the abandonment of the most fertile land in the region.
Given all this evidence (and much more, actually), the authors conclude that around 1650 BCE, an impact similar in scale to the 1908 Tunguska Event occurred, but instead of in an almost-uninhabited region like Siberia, it was right in the thick of cultural and economic significance. If the extent of the Tunguska airburst is superimposed over the area north of the Dead Sea in a way that is consistent with the SW-NE orientation of debris, we can guesstimate that it looked something like this:
If you’re anywhere near an airburst of this scale, it proceeds something like this simulation of the Tunguska Event:
The meteor is ripped apart in the atmosphere and explodes, here at an altitude of 18 km, and within about six and a half seconds the ground at the epicenter for about a 1-km radius reaches temperatures in excess of 2000°F. It stays that hot at the epicenter for maybe 25 or 30 seconds, but in the meantime searing-hot winds blast outward along the ground at about the speed of sound (about 760 mph). It’s very difficult to see how anyone within several miles survives this unless they happen to be well underground at the time. Indeed, the authors point out in a companion piece at The Conversation that:
[The winds] sheared off the top 40 feet of the 4-story palace and blew the jumbled debris into the next valley. None of the 8,000 people or any animals within the city survived – their bodies were torn apart and their bones blasted into small fragments.
It is very tempting, of course, to believe that any surviving witnesses, even from far away, would have attributed a shocking event like this to the wrath of an angry god. Literally a ball of fire hurled at the Earth — at the “cities of the plain” — by a very powerful being.
Genesis 19:24
Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven
Genesis 19:28
And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.
If any event could leave such an indelible memory that it spawned an oral tradition lasting a millennium, until it was finally written into Genesis, this one would certainly qualify.