Buried Secrets of the Bible with Albert Lin: Sodom & Gomorrah (Full Episode) | National Geographic

the stories of the Bible are some of the most incredible tales in human history Tales right and wrong good versus evil but how did these stories originate I'm curious to know where these cultural ripples began cuz regardless of your belief they're important cuz they've shaped the lives of billions over thousands of [Music] years my name is Albert Lynn and I look at the world in a unique way it's amazing I explore the ancient world from space using 21st century technology to strip away the Earth as never before to expose Secrets buried for centuries and reveal lost cities and ancient cataclysms this time it's the old testament's most fearsome disaster movie The Story Of Two Cities obliterated in a hail of Fire by the wrath of God [Applause] [Music] woo hello I've come to Jordan in the Middle East one of the most epic Landscapes on [Music] Earth this is the holy lands beneath my feet just Rocky desert this is incredible then out to the West you've got Israel and then Egypt South is Saudi Arabia East is Iran Iraq and to the north it's Syria where I am smack dab in the [Music] middle I'm here to investigate one of the most terrifying stories in the Bible Sodom and Gomorrah Two Cities supposedly wiped off the face of the Earth by the wrath of God so the Story begins with a man named Abraham he goes with his nephew a guy named lot you know looking for what they believe they're God and promised them as a home problem was they split up and lot makes a bad call when he decides to settle on the fertile Plains near a city called Sodom at war with its neighbor [Applause] and condemned from [Music] above that is when things get hot lot is warned that God is going to destroy the town and they have to flee without looking back and he does just in the nick of time with his family as fire and brimstone be been raining down destroying everything alive even the vegetation Lot's wife just can't help but look back one last time and because of it she's instantaneously turned into a pillar of salt as for the cities they were utterly destroyed this is like the mother of all disaster movies and it plays into our most basic fears an apocalypse that could wipe us all out hurricanes floods earthquakes I mean these are fears that still exist today but was it just a story you know a tale of morality or could it actually have been based on events that really took place so my first mission can I find any trace of an ancient city somewhere this could have happened but look where I am and now again from space the whole region is a scorching desert there's very little here except sand and Ro fck you know with so few traces it's hard to understand how cities even existed here how could they exist in such a vast arid desert so where should I start to look well there is a hint the ancient word for Sodom the biggest clue comes from from the word sidam which in Hebrew means a Salt Lake so naturally most scholars believe it's somewhere in the plains near the Dead Sea it's a rugged drive across the desert but eventually I come to this vast Inland Lake the Dead [Music] Sea one of the most spectacular bodies of water in the world but it doesn't look like the fertile Oasis described in the [Applause] story it's not sand lining this beach it's salt this is the Dead Sea you know it's almost 10 times saltier than the ocean and I'm actually standing on the lowest point on Earth it's one of the hottest too seems impossible to survive here why would anybody settle in the driest and saltiest place on Earth well according to archaeologists there may be a clue 80 Mi [Music] South look at that I've never seen anything anything in my life like this this is Petra an ancient city carved into Solid Rock in the middle of the desert somebody somebody thousands of years ago just dreamed this up in their head and then chipped away at the stone until it emerged look at these towering columns here and the perfect [Music] lines I've seen pictures of since I was a kid I've seen in in books in movies standing at the steps of the great treasury of Petra [Music] it's magical by night but by day it's something else the scale of the place takes your breath away Petra's buildings are a show of wealth and while they're built around the time of Christ they're the Pinnacle of a success that started thousands of years earlier at around the same time that Sodom and Gomorrah may have existed but the most amazing thing about this place is not its Splendor it's this just look at this channel this is a huge vertical irrigation system taking water that's landing on the plateau above from rain falling down through these grooves and then channeling down towards the city below essentially creating an engineered Oasis unbelievable the people here were Experts of C capturing water from the plateaus above diverting it into a network of channels that fed into underground systems man look at this and this is the kind of thing that would allow entire city to survive this is basically the bank for life they figured out how to do the plaster walls and keep the water in even today there's water in here it's incredible it's a technology that's worked so simply and so well for so long and it's got great Acoustics it's like a big Music Box in here you know actually this is what they would have heard working down here thousands of years ago you could imagine it's like Hey Joe have me the scraper saving every precious drop spelled survival but the question remains why go to all this trouble why did people want to live here in the first [Music] place I'm in Petra meeting archaeologist Katrina harmane who's showing me why this vast City thrived in a harsh desert turns out they had a strangle hold on Priceless goods from across the region the most extraordinary one is asphalt asphalt the stuff that I see you know on the roads today the the same black tar stuff is yes indeed this is how we visualize asphalt now this dark you know material that you see in here but at that time it was absolutely something different asphalt or tar is a semi-solid form of petroleum which in ancient times meant one thing money what would they use asphalt for first medicine and the second they used to sell it you know for the Egyptians who used it in their mumification selling asphalt meant the people of Petra could Rak in big bucks fast but there was one source of asphalt that everyone wanted to control they had an asphal Lake there was a large lumps of asphalt just floating on top of what we know is the Dead Sea so we had different nations fighting for it for its importance the biblical story is quite interesting because it actually mentions several Kings fought for the Asel which could have been the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah do you think that Sodom and gamorra could have existed at the Dead Sea trading the same asphalt indeed I think that is quite possible all very promising but can I find any physical evidence for this back at the Dead Sea with the biblical texts locate Sodom and [Music] Gomorrah I'm setting up my tech to scour the area can I find a link here between the asphalt and the cities okay check this out in these scans taken from space you see something really weird just in this area right around the south of the Dead Sea and the whole area is just Pock marked with these mysterious holes heading down there I find a strange landscape it looks like another planet where the the Earth is cracked and collapsed to form hundreds of giant holes in the ground look at these sink holes just destruction the biblical Stories the Genesis stories they describe battles between the city of Sodom and the other cities the men of Sodom when running away fell into tarpits not these ones but maybe ones just like this so the biblical story of tarpits could have been kicked off by sink holes filled with asphalt Clear Connection to the trade I heard about in [Music] Petra that's not all my satellites have seen above the tarpits there's a local water supply F check this out on this side of the Dead Sea You' got this plateau and there's these Canyons that look like they're cut right through [Music] it and where there's Canyons there's [Music] water the season rains carve through the plateau creating these Canyons you know they're called Wades you get these channels of fresh water so just like Petra the area seems to have had all the ingredients needed for cities to flourish now can I scan for any traces of of the ruined cities themselves to the naked eye it's just a desert but when you look from space with really high resolution satellite imagery it turns out these Shores are speckled with ancient ruins I mean check out this one and this one right here and fact there's at least five southeast of the Dead Sea and couldn't two of them be the SES that inspired the story of Sadam and gamorra I'm on the shores of the Dead Sea on a mission to find the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah my tech has revealed a whole cluster of ancient ruins can I narrow it down I'm basically looking for a Bronze Age settlement roughly 4,000 years [Music] old typically they were built on a hill fortified by walls with the main gate entering into some kind of Public Square and these were features that were described in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah some of them here seem to match the description and one in particular a settlement called [Music] numor it's a steep hike onto a strategic position above the Dead Sea and I'm meeting archaeologist Dr Muhammad naar yeah so this is n P rocks it's ancient I mean it's 5,000 years of History Muhammad tells me the site was abandoned suddenly around 2350 BC and it has the same key City features that make it a classic Bronze Age City dates GES are important to show that your site is fortified and just keep away from us and Beyond them a square and fortification walls fitting for a city supposedly at war with its neighbors at the far end of the ruins something intriguing so this is what we think is a tower so this was once a massive Tower yes what is interesting about this tower that that it collapsed in this spot here there were three skeletons under the collapse we think that was caused by an earthquake that's so creepy I mean this is where three people lost their lives thousands and thousands of years ago yes they were standing here at the wrong [Music] time compelling evidence but that's not all you will notice Ash here and the charcoal a this is incredible the whole site is covered with with Ash something burnt this whole place down yes and this earthquake may have been the same thing that started the fire absolutely usually with earthquakes you have fires massive fires so interesting interesting fire it certainly adds to the clues of the [Music] story it's a tantalizing idea an earthquake that Sparks an all consuming fire but what could cause them to combine together so catastrophically so I'm heading west to a place that might help me find the answer up above the Western shores of the Dead Sea is an ancient Fortress called Mada it's really uh inaccessible up here I mean it really makes sense that this was a key strategic site in Jewish history but I don't know like 74 ad there was a battle where the Romans were coming here and this community of about a thousand people ended up on the top of this mountain holding up for almost 2 years the Romans built a ramp up the back side of this entire mountain and by the time they brought all their battering rams all the way up to the top of this Cliff instead of subjecting themselves being captured and enslaved by the Romans they all killed themselves but I have not come here for the Fortress but for this WOW beneath me the whole landscape that would have surrounded Sodom and gamor and it's only from up here that I can see that I am on the brink of one of the biggest geological features on the [Music] planet feel like I'm standing on this island in the sky with Cliffs just towering up from up here you can see it all you can see it's a giant giant rift valley where the Earth's crust is just pulling itself apart and you can see it even better from space a 300M long tear in the Earth's crust called the Jordan Rift Valley turns out there are huge fault lines running all the way along the Dead Sea and where there are fault lines there are [Music] earthquakes so that means that any City out here around the Dead Sea it's essentially lying on earthquake zone I mean it's like they're on a taking time bong so the next piece of the puzzle is essentially were there ever any earthquakes at the time in which numero was abandoned challenging question but there may be a way to find out for thousands of years water in the Dead Sea has risen and then Fallen meaning in places ancient sediments laid down by flash floods onto the lake floor are now high and dry and in these layers there are clues about ancient earthquakes geologist revital Bookman can read these layers like the rings of a tree this is weird what is a swirly pattern shape up here how does that happen there is a slope here and doing an earthquake event at the sediment shape you get the sliding of the sediments toward the deeper part of the lake that's an earthquake yeah this is essentially an ancient siiz monometer dating back tens of thousands of years exactly if we date the sediment just on top of it we will get the age of this event so the cities that we've been looking at date sometime to around 2600 to about 2350 BC do you find anything like this around that time when you look at the younger sediments um you can find evidence for historical earthquakes from that time yeah from that time that is crazy I mean I feel like when I'm looking at this thing I'm literally touching the vibrations of an earthquake you can feel it shake that's the coolest thing I've ever seen thank [Music] you impressive evidence but it's only part of the story you know an earthquake may have been involved but the biblical text describes something far more terrifying a blaze of fire falling from the sky I'm on my way to see a strange geological spectacle that could help track down the events by behind the story of Sodom and Gomorrah on the east coast of the Dead Sea is this incredible pillar of rock the source of imagination and Intrigue for centuries it's known as Lot's wife The Story Goes that Angels warned lot and his family run away flee Don't Look Back well wife couldn't help but look back one last time and in that moment was turned into a pillar of salt now obviously that's just a metaphor that doesn't happen but there might be something in that metaphor that could tell us more about the catastrophe itself could the pillar of salt in the story help unlock the secret of fire and brimstone 10 Mi away on the opposite shore of the lake is Mount Sodom it takes its name from the same Hebrew word for the Dead Sea sidom which means Salt Lake I'm meeting geologist amatz Agnon Professor agnan that's Albert right yeah thanks for meeting me thank you shall we yes like we're on a different planet almost yeah aots wants to show me an intriguing link between salt and fire this place is incredible but what we're looking for it's not on the mountain it's inside [Music] it okay going in I'm about to step into the ledge once I go over this I'm just on [Music] air wow it's so beautiful it's like nothing about I've ever seen before I'm dangling hundreds of feet off the ground it's nuts it looks so different up here yeah the rock is completely different it's just all this glassy kind of Crystal stuff see if you can taste it it's salty yeah it's a mass of salt this whole thing is salt yeah the whole Mountain 10 km long 2 km wide 5 km high it's incredible good job that was unbelievable AZ believes mountains of salt like this one could unlock the mystery of catastrophic fires salt and hydrocarbons go well together it's typically hidden or trapped under Sal under salt there's gas under here there is gas there is oil there's tar and sulfur that's incredible and we're sitting right on top of it yeah and uh it sips up during earthquakes so then an earthquake could actually release these gases and they could catch fire yes earthquakes discharge electricity this could ignite the gas this could form fire I mean that sounds biblical to me yeah you didn't have the science to explain it and all of a sudden something like that happened it sounds a lot like the stories that we're reading about in the Old Testament if you ask me if it's possible yeah it's an incredible idea I'm beginning to see how an earthquake could cause something truly cataclysmic like at num miror a super blaze of explosions inflamed by a lethal fuel mix from underground explosions yes but I've got images in my head of fire raining down from the sky and something the story refers to as Brimstone what could that be just down the road from Mount Sodom I'm meeting geologist Addy torfstein I'm trying to find anything that might relate to the story of Sodom Gomorrah we actually also find here suur have you heard of sufur yeah of course the smelly stuff have you heard of Brimstone the fire Brimstone destruction that thing exactly so Brimstone is actually sulur and one of the few places we find brimstone suur is actually here want to see something cool yeah I'll show you come what we're looking for is all around us on these Cliffs what is it look like small round yellow nodules suful here I can see one grab that ah smells like a stink bomb this is brimstone huh found all around us here so let's collect more of these and I'll show you something cool okay you see this sulfur we collected this Brimstone you can actually light it up and burn it okay you can burn a rock can see what look at that blue and purple is bubbling and the rock is literally melting away that is unreal you can imagine that you saw this happening you'd think it was something Supernatural and actually quite nasty if we breathe too much of it let's get out oh gross so with this final piece of evidence could it have played out like this a city trading inflammable asshol is struck by an earthquake everything collapses even the tower and those that survive face something even worse a raging fire as hidden gas reserves erupt from from underground while the inhabitants flee explosions hurl down burning sulfur it would have been hell on Earth possibly but possibly not you know I've seen evidence of ancient abandoned cities burning sulfur exploding gases earthquakes asphalt I can buy into the idea that a series of events with these elements could have been combined to a single Collective memory into an epic story but what I haven't seen is evidence of them all happening at once in one place at one time you know an apocalyptic moment should be a lot more evidence right more than a Fallen Tower and fragments of charcoal so could there be something much bigger out there to explain all this so I found some evidence in Sodom and gomorra could have been sitting on a pile of geological Dynamite set off by an earthquake but now I've heard a completely new theory in a totally different area so I'm relocating 50 m away this time to the north of the Dead Sea to see something that I've been told is going to completely blow me away this is T Al hamam some archaeologists believe that this could be the ancient city of Sodom you're going to come straight this way way you're going to make a right hand turn Steve Collins and his team have been Excavating here for nearly 20 years and what they found is astonishing this is in fact the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age City in the southern Levant this gate complex is is pretty impressive probably one of the biggest gate complexes in the Bronze Age massive Tower massive Tower Killing Zone right in the middle what makes you think that this could have been the city of Sodom so the reason is simply because uh the size of the city the largest in the whole region for the Bronze Age so it was a big city then huh it's a very big city this is way bigger than anything I've seen so far at almost 90 Acres it could have housed over 40,000 people it's close to streams and and springs of water and surrounded by flat fertile plains as described in the biblical texts and it lies on two trade routes one running north to south and the other east to west it's a pivotal position for a strategic trading City on the hilltop there's the remains of a palace and inside it tantalizing evidence in this area we found many many storage jars it's carbonized of course burned and the entire city everywhere we've excavated we have this massive destruction debris so whatever destroyed the city also burned everything inside of it something destroyed the city things were burned inside it and then you don't find any pieces of pottery afterwards no there's a 700-year occupational Gap so we have no pottery from the period starting from about 1700 BC afterwards all the way down to about 1,000 BC there's no occupation at this site so something happened at a massive scale turning everything into this pile of rubble in one moment right around 1700 and that's a good way to describe it it's a pile of rubble is sort of a mixture a tumbling of everything this site the destruction is absolutely the most violent kind of thing I've ever seen this smack suspiciously of catastrophe whatever it was it was way more powerful than a fire what could explain it melted mud Steve's colleague Phil Sylvia has an intriguing new Theory this is a piece of mud brick this is mud brick this is mud brick and it feels kind of like pmus doesn't it you can see all those little bubbles in it and this was exposed to heat and it was so hot the pottery itself has actually been melted into glass glass probably at an angle like this so that the melted material started to drip off there's a drip edge right here something flash burn this material exactly to a temperature somewhere in the range hotter than the sun hotter than the Sun by more than a factor of four there are only two sources that can generate that kind of temperature profile that we know of one of course would be an atomic bomb what's the other one the other one is either a meteoritic impact event or a an air burst event you think this was a meteor blast I'm personally convinced of that but could Phil be right could this place really have been destroyed by a meteor well just a few years ago there was a meteor air burst CAU on tape right over Russia it's incredible literally it's fire raining down from above the big question is is there some evidence some clue to help me determine whether or not a meteor could have exploded over this region some 4,000 years ago I'm investigating a new theory that Sodom and gomorah were destroyed by a meteor I've brought in my Tech Team to scan the site for Clues using highresolution drones we're photographing the site from multiple different angles so we can build a 3D computer model perfect meanwhile Phil Sylvia wants to show me something else that supports his theory this is about 400 lb worth of Rock it was sitting on a dirt pedestal and when the blast hit it got rolled off of that pedestal and dumped on its side you're saying that something moved this massive Stone that's right doesn't move [Music] itself Phil believes the meteor exploded Somewhere Over The Dead Sea creating a blast powerful enough to move Solid Rock the debris field was all pushed in this direction and banked up against this wall so your theory is that there was a big explosion over there creating a flash of fire hotter than the sun blasting everything against these walls and vaporizing everybody in the city all at once yes not only that but Phil's theory has one final component that resonates with the biblical story when you have an air burst over water it creates a tsunami effect and that pushed a tremendous volume of water across the full width of the valley floor this whole area was taken offline by this event and it became uninhabitable because of the salt poisoning of the ground the theory explains every element of the biblical texts burning question is have the tech team found anything to back it up so Steve for the afternoon Patricia has been flying a drone around collecting photographs to create this photogrametry model of the site show us what you found yeah with photogrametry what we can do is we can take loads and loads of different pictures and then we stitch all of those photographs together and we can make a 3D model which I think gives us a completely different perspective so let's fly through that this is your site I was very interested in this area the big circular area mhm to the left we think this is a very large water feature like a sstn and you can see the size of it the feature doesn't really show very well on here but when we actually look at the 3D model that's interesting we've got lots of different colors it's much much more pronounced yeah wow look at that we've been looking at the site for for over a decade but looking at this image and it's the first time I thought of this but it it looks like an impact Creator this the first time you thought that that might be yeah I mean the way I look at it I was thinking as you were as you were moving in on it it looks like you're on Moon well which side is the actual side where they this is the southwest side it would have come from this direction the Southwest good job Patricia yeah who knows what it is but it's a clue we need to excavate that Steve's team will need to prove this really is a meteor but it does fit with their other evidence here and offers a plausible terrifying explanation for the story a meteor blasts in from space at Hypersonic speed exploding over the Dead Sea it blasts salt across Landscaping rendering it infertile for Generations a fragment lands right by the city vaporizing it to Oblivion you know the fear of Apocalypse it's in all of us but very few stories deliver it on this scale one thing's for sure when I started this journey I thought it was just a tale of projected morality and what I actually found was a Showcase of some of the most incredible geological phenomenon in a place where the Earth crust is literally ripping itself apart where the powers of Destruction are so terrible that they may have gone down as being the hand of [Music] [Music] God

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 2,940,857

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, full episode, The Buried Secrets of the Bible, Albert Lin, Bible with Albert Lin, The Bible, real events, epic biblical story, Sodom and Gomorrah, Buried Secrets of the Bible with Albert Lin, new episode, epic biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah

Id: hInAmmQSfI4

Length: 44min 24sec (2664 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2023