When I was in high school, my father gave me Werner Keller’s The Bible As History. Keller, an engineer, scholar, humanist, and anti-Nazi fighter who barely escaped execution, wasn’t interested in the Bible as a religious book, at least not for the purposes of The Bible As History. Instead, he showed that objective history corroborates the Bible’s historical narratives. I was hooked and have enjoyed Biblical history ever since. I just stumbled across a new entrant into the truth behind the Bible stories. This time, archeology shows that, at the time of Sodom and Gomorrah, there really was fire raining down from the skies.

Genesis 19:24-25 describes the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah when the people, rather than welcoming strangers (who happened to be angels in disguise), instead tried to subject them to homosexual gang rape. “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.”

Current estimates are that those two cities, assuming they existed, were destroyed between 2100 and 1900 B.C., during the Bronze Age. One of the theories is that an earthquake occurred but, Wikipedia explains, there’s no contemporary evidence from other cultures that there was such a major earthquake at the time. Of course, the timeline could be wrong, so that may explain the absence of an earthquake.

Image: AI-generated image of the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

However, maybe the destruction happened a few hundred years later and wasn’t an earthquake at all. Maybe it really was fire and brimstone raining down from the heavens. That’s because we now know that, roughly 3,600 years ago (around 1600 B.C.), a giant space rock traveling at about 38,000 MPH exploded above a site now called Tall el-Hamman, which was once a city in the ancient Middle East, near the Dead Sea.

Although the article about this discovery (published in The Conversation) is about two years old, this is the first I’ve seen of it, so I wanted to share it with you. The article opens by describing the effect this explosion in the sky would have had on the community beneath it:

Flashing through the atmosphere, the rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blinded instantly. Air temperatures rapidly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Clothing and wood immediately burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks and pottery began to melt. Almost immediately, the entire city was on fire.

Some seconds later, a massive shockwave smashed into the city. Moving at about 740 mph (1,200 kph), it was more powerful than the worst tornado ever recorded. The deadly winds ripped through the city, demolishing every building. They sheared off the top 40 feet (12 m) 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.

About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.

Nor is this just a scene from someone’s imagination. Christopher Moore, who wrote the essay, is an “Archaeologist and Special Projects Director at the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program and South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina.” He explains that this scenario results from almost 15 years of careful analysis conducted by two dozen scientists. The contributors to this space rock theory included “archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic-impact experts and medical doctors.”

The whole article is fascinating, so I strongly suggest you check it out. And if you like this kind of thing, I highly recommend a video called Patterns of Evidence: Exodus. In it, Timothy Mahoney suggests that the reason (usually leftist) archeologists insist that the whole Exodus story is fictional is because they’ve misdated it. If you shift the narrative by 400 years, there’s a great deal of corroborative evidence for the Exodus story.

One of the things I constantly fight is the Islamist and leftist narrative that the Jews’ ties to Israel go back only to the late 19th century, while the “Palestinian” Arabs have been there for thousands of years. In fact, the opposite is true. To the extent archeological finds corroborate the Biblical narrative, it’s clear that the Jews’ continuous ties to Israel go back to the Bronze Age, when there were neither Arabs nor Muslims around.