Dr. Steven Collins is an archeologist who has been digging at Tall el-Hammam since 2001. He’s convinced that this site is the biblical Sodom, a massive city destroyed by a fiery cataclysm. After digging down below the Roman and Iron-age layers, he encountered a destruction layer with ash and ceramic fragments. After having the pottery analyzed by electron microscope, he concluded that an event must have occurred that suddenly heated it to a temperature vastly hotter than molten lava. Hmm….sounds familiar. Here’s the text from Genesis:
Genesis 19.24–25
24 Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven, 25 and he overthrew those cities and all the plain and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on the ground.
Collins theorizes that a comet entered the atmosphere at a low angle causing it to transition from solid to liquid to gas to plasma, resulting in a super heated fiery air burst. How would anyone prove such a historical event? Check out his interview to find out.
To access Collins’s full case for the identification of Tall el-Hammam as the biblical Sodom, see his book, Discovering the City of Sodom. Also, see the journal article, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea” in Nature for more evidence. Some have sought to discredit Steven Collins, but their case appears weak to me. You can read the criticisms on Wikipedia, here and here. If what Collins says is true, it wouldn’t definitively prove the bible is true, but it would bolster confidence in the text through archeological evidence.
Interesting, never really looked into this subject but I’ll check this out. Just a few days ago I watched an episode of “buried secrets of the Bible” where about halfway through this same man was interviewed to explain his theory. It’s on Disney+ if anyone should be interested (Nat Geo). Although this interview probably goes more in depth.