National Geographic Lost Cities of the Bible

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some of the most chilling stories in the Bible are tales of legendary cities destroyed by the hand of God Sodom and Gomorrah were incinerated in a hail of fire and brimstone and Jericho's walls came tumbling down to the sound of trumpets but are these stories fiction or fact archeologists have recently begun to uncover some clues there's undeniable evidence of catastrophic events but does it support the biblical accounts or points to a more earthly explanation one of the oldest stories in the world is a dramatic tale of two cities whose names are synonymous with sin and debauchery Sodom and Gomorrah the story of what happened to these cities is a powerful parable of sex and pleasure a moral fable about wickedness and corruption and the price tag that comes with sin 4,000 or so years ago the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah had an infamous reputation although the Bible doesn't specify exactly what they did to deserve it Genesis simply says the men of Sodom were evil and great sinners before the Lord letter on it also mentions abominations but doesn't elaborate as to what they were we have very little information actually about exactly what was going on there I think that's why Hollywood among others is so fascinated by Sodom and Gomorrah it's open to whatever you want to think what was going on there I don't know but it must have been bad but if the Bible is vague about the sins that were committed it's clear about the punishment the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire out of heaven the Bible later goes on to suggest that after Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed their people fled leaving the cities abandoned if this biblical story really did happen it probably happened here in these empty desolate lands next to a lifeless sea but this is far from certain like many things in the Hebrew Bible it's hard to actually pin down a location for places the the Hebrew Bible talks about the five cities of the plain the nearest we can get today is thinking that they're somewhere around the shores of the Dead Sea say in modern-day Jordan but even that is a best guess according to the book of Genesis the story took place in the time of Abraham centuries before Moses fled from Egypt Abraham was apparently the patriarch of a tribe of nomads who avoided towns and cities which may be why we know so little about them city dwellers were usually the people who wrote the history nomads usually are archaeologically invisible what we have in the Old Testament in the writings of these very literate tribal people who eventually became city dwellers themselves is we had the nomads side of the story the Bible tells us that Abraham's tribesmen were constantly fighting with each other over pasture land to settle the dispute Abraham and his nephew lot agreed to part ways and lot settled on the plain near the city of Sodom lots lifted up his eyes and saw all the plain of the Jordan and lot moved his tent as far as Sodom so Sodom was already an established city when not moved there if it was a typical Bronze Age settlement about a thousand people would have lived inside its walls no one had ever looked for or found any evidence that this biblical city actually existed then in 1924 an archeologist named William Albright made a trip to the Dead Sea well some of the people with him were certainly looking for sodom and gomorrah generally the cities of the plains so they came down here following the biblical text and they circled around the southeast and shore of the Dead Sea and just at the end of their survey down here they came across the site of babba DRA Baba DRA was a Bronze Age site but there was no evidence that it was a town in fact it seemed to be a cemetery Albright didn't have the resources to excavate it at the time and nearly 50 years passed before anyone went back to the site and began to dig archaeologist Paul lab led that 1967 excavation and Thomas Schaub was one of the people digging he's been back to the site many times since then and over the years he's uncovered a cemetery that was vast even by Bronze Age standards this is the largest burial house that we've excavated at babara it is some 15 meters long and seven meters across we found hundreds and hundreds of pots here and skeletons and bones we found a burial with gold jewelry we excavated over 700 pieces of pottery that were funerary gifts here including many small perfume jug lots and many other objects including cloth and one unusual the remnants of wooden poles that were used as a pallet to bring in the bring in the bodies to the burial house it was an exciting discovery a graveyard that had been in use for about a thousand years around the time of Abraham and the destruction of Sodom but there was nothing to link the cemetery to Sodom except this in about 20 350 BC the burials stopped suddenly the reason why was unclear there are any number of reasons why a site might not be reoccupied some we can put a finger on some we can't perhaps the water supply dried up perhaps the environment change perhaps the climate change perhaps the people were annihilated and completely killed over the next few seasons the archaeologists expanded their search looking for signs of a lost city it wasn't long before they found something traces of human habitation on a hillside overlooking the cemetery they uncovered stones and some pottery shards but in their search for the biblical city of Sodom the archaeologists of Babar are dealt mostly with vast quantities of dirt there is a fascination with what has once been lost and yet now is found this is what drives some archaeologists and to a larger extent the general public this idea that something could have been built and then completely lost and yet is there under the earth waiting to be found unfortunately for archeologists lost cities are usually buried underground and that's where Tom shall but his team found traces of a Bronze Age wall it was on a hill overlooking the cemetery at Babbitt rawr and it was the first sign that they might have come across a town of some kind the inescapable question was had they found Sodom or Gomorrah the archaeologists began to dig and gradually the outlines of a settlement emerged you see the face of the western wall of the site that's the foundation of the wall and you had a mud bridge superstructure above that which would the wall was much taller than that as far as we can tell with the mud brick that collapsed one discovery led to another this is a good view of the one wall of the sanctuary and the other wall with a entranceway it wasn't quite a city yet but gradually the hard work began to pay off right here is a open plaza area and very likely the place where most of the town business was carried on inside of the gates as the data trickled in archeologists realized that they come across something unique the foundations of a town from the time of Abraham or even earlier just where the Bible suggests Sodom was located like the cemetery the town had been deserted suddenly and at about the same time but what exactly had been going on behind those mud brick walls was it the usual monotony of bronze-age life or was it something else something sinful and corrupt had the ancient residents of baba dra engaged in behavior so depraved that it had to be punished from above were babbit rar and Sodom one of the same not surprisingly opinions continue to differ work done in the 1960s and 70s and subsequent years have revealed several sites from the time of Abraham the early Bronze Age the largest of them being Baba drop it would seem that that should be identified as the site of Sodom the sites of Baba throg and the other sites on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea are fabulous sites but their sites mostly of the third millennium gradually abandoned around 2,000 BCE and I think we would all agree that the population of these sites was Canaanite - the writers of the Bible Canaanite wasn't a term of endearment Abraham's tribe of nomads probably saw the city-dwelling Canaanites as corrupt and promiscuous perfect examples of the bad things that can happen when you stop living in a tent this fits nicely with Sodom's reputation as a place with walls rooms and secrets and lot one of their own had evident be forsaken his tent and moved into town had he too been corrupted we have an account of Abraham living near Hebron down in the southern part of Canaan and angels coming to visit him with the message that they were going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah Abraham asked God to spare the town if some of its citizens could be shown to be good men but how many good men were needed to avoid God's wrath Abraham knew his nephew lot was living there with his family and so Abraham begins this dialogue for 30 righteous people will you still destroy the city God says well find me 20 righteous men in the city of Sodom and Gomorrah for just find me 20 and Abraham says we'll have their tent it's interesting that you have in the Bible you know you have a God who can bargain whose mind can be changed by a good dealer - like Abraham to count the good men of Sodom God sent two angels to visit the town the Angels walked through the city and prepared to spend the night on the streets but when they came to Lots house Sodom's only good man took them in that evening they shared a meal with Lotte his wife and their two teenage daughters but Lots hospitable nature wasn't shared by the rest of the sodomites indeed they had something very different in mind for the angels they wanted lot to hand them over apparently so they could be used by the townspeople for sex but Lotte refused to a degree but at some point he's trying to bargain with the Tam's people what if I give you my two daughters instead of these angels and the townspeople no I want the angels and that that really becomes in that cautionary tale the final straw for God and is like okay what you and your family get out of ten this place is toast the debate about whether the Bible is an accurate historical record has been going on for centuries and the story of sodom and gomorrah is no exception yeah the story of sodom and gomorrah happened sure how we know it we hear it from our forefathers we need to remember that the biblical stories about the Israelites were probably not written down before the eighth or seventh century centuries after the period in question I think the story of Sodom and Gomorrah the cities of the plain these multiple destructions of cities might be a telescoping of several cities that were destroyed at around the same time there's no question that the destruction of a city would have been a memorable event a story that would have been passed down from generation to generation throughout history several cities have been destroyed for one reason or another and their names have lived on Troy and Carthage were demolished in a war so were Hiroshima and Nagasaki the wrath of nature buried Pompeii under six meters of hot ash when Vesuvius erupted San Francisco was leveled by an earthquake Hurricane Katrina battered and then submerged New Orleans insurance companies call events like these acts of God the people living in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't have argued with that assessment when you read the Bible you see their observations of a natural phenomenon as this mysticism as this fantastic power of God natural disasters have always destroyed cities we're seeing that very well in today's world whether it's a tsunami or it's an earthquake or it's an overflowing river and the torrent of mud yes natural disasters destroys cities and of course that could have crept into the biblical narrative but of all the different kinds of natural disaster one seems especially suited to the destruction caused at Sodom and Gomorrah when we think about a rain of fire the first thing that springs to mind is a volcano over and over again we see the power of volcanoes being associated with the power of God Sodom Gomorrah is a perfect example volcanic eruption in the Bible many of the phenomena associated with volcanic eruptions seem to appear in the biblical account we have the earth shaking we have the same the pillars of fire ash falling stones falling pyroclastic flows consuming bodies and of course sinners being punished by God for their sins unfortunately there's not much evidence for erupting volcanoes near the Dead Sea in biblical times but there's plenty of proof that another kind of geological upheaval was wreaking havoc in the area a force that may have accounted for the famous destruction of another city not too far from the Dead Sea that city was Jericho according to the Bible an Israelite leader named Joshua conquered Jericho after its walls mysteriously crumbled but there might have been a plausible natural reason for this event it turns out that Jericho was built on an earthquake fault line there are actually quite a number of faults on either side of Jericho and virtually every century he had one or two earthquakes in some centuries even as many as six but it's an exceedingly unhealthy place to build a city or a little bit like San Francisco if there are world records for cities Jericho certainly deserves one Jericho is the oldest known continuously inhabited city in the world it's been inhabited for ten thousand years it's still inhabited these days the sprawling Mound where all of Jericho's previous incarnations are buried lies under a cable car a prime attraction for tourists visiting the Holy Land it's you know going to be ruined upon ruin inexplicable ruin up on top of another inexplicable ruin for the population living there so of course you're going to get stories growing up as to why that Wallace tumbled out why that Ward has fallen hidden within the mound of the ruins of city for which may date from Joshua's time give or take an important few hundred years many of the walls here show signs of having been struck by an earthquake which may or may not support the biblical account of how the city fell the Bible story begins with Joshua's army gathered on the far side of the Jordan River another group of herdsmen mistrustful of city dwellers here is Joshua on the east side with his nomadic tribes and he is waiting for a way in which he could bring his animals across the Jordan River this is not that easy well lo and behold suddenly there's an earthquake what happens next is eerily reminiscent of the story of Moses escape from Egypt and inexplicable parting of the waters that allows Joshua and his army to cross on a dry riverbed but there may have been a natural explanation for this miracle in the region called damia we get or when we get these earthquakes we get huge avalanches that flow across and actually block the flow of the river for a day or two the downstream the river actually runs dry in fact Daniel that province is the province after which we derive the word Dan did a military opportunity simply present itself to Joshua and his men this is entirely possible because the Bible places the attack just after the spring harvest an ill-advised time for anyone to plan a siege if you're going to attack a city you want to surround it and starve the people off you don't attack a city when it's at the crops have just been harvested and the city is full of food and there's no crops in the field for you to office for your army what happens to Jericho next sounds miraculous we read in Joshua chapter 6 that the Israelites walked around the city for six days and on the seventh day blew the trumpets the people shout in the Bible says the walls fell down and the Israelites stormed the city even the sound of trumpets can be explained the earthquake almost always just before it hits is characterized by a roar very many people describe it from small earthquakes for instance like the fireplace roaring others say no it was more like a jet plane that came by or thunder it is heard at a distance Jericho was leveled and the Bible says that one of the walls fell down flat so the invaders could go up into the city that description may support some of the archaeological finds like the collapsed city walls at the base of the tell these were very large thick mud brick walls but one of the walls actually did at the time of the destruction of Jericho's city for full outward and this is exactly what we see archaeologically it formed a natural ramp up into the city where people could have walked up and there rather smooth incline right into the city with almost no resistance the Bible tells us of the Israelites sacked and burnt the city but it wasn't looted this seems to fit with the discovery of wheat and barley buried in city falls ashes jars full of grain not half full or quarter full full of grain clearly the harvest had just been taken in in agreement with the Bible well why was it left there at Jericho to the burn in the fire again the Bible offers an explanation the grain was not to be taken by the people seizing the city that it was to be left there or burned or sacrificed to God by burning but it was not to be taken most archaeologists agree that Jericho was destroyed at least once in biblical times but the dates don't seem to correspond with Joshua's conquest now there is a big destruction a violent destruction by fire of the city of Jericho which most archaeologists would date between around 1500 and 1475 and they would eater Butte it to the Egyptians if we're trying to put Jericho into the context of the biblical story and we're looking for Jericho but after that was built in about 1200 years BC plus - it didn't have walls so they didn't come tumbling down whether it was a trumpet being blown at them or something else or an earthquake the weren't walls here is the real problem in the 13th century BC when a Jericho might have been there to have been destroyed by a Joshua there is nothing the Mount is abandoned I always say to believers if they need something like a miracle Joshua destroyed a city that wasn't even there stupendous miracle whether or not Jericho was destroyed as the Bible says it was there's no doubt that the city was repeatedly shaken by earthquakes and the same seismic fault line that runs under Jericho continues on to the South where it would have passed beneath Sodom Gomorrah and the other cities of the plain 5,000 years ago humans had no rational way to explain the sometimes violent forces that swept over their world storms tornadoes floods and earthquakes seem to happen for no apparent reason in the biblical lands the earth underfoot constantly shifted sometimes transforming the landscape almost overnight the entire course of a river could change dramatically and you would end up having to rebuild your roads and your homes in the lifetime of an ordinary house cat there was no common sense to the way things operated in their universe of very very chaotic universe one example of that chaos can be found in the remains of an ancient city called mash Concha pier located in present-day Iraq some historians have even speculated that what happened to mash Concha pier inspired the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and it's not hard to see why something unusual happened in mash can chef hear something so unusual that the city was never rebuilt inhabited again like Sodom and Gomorrah mash Concha pier seems to have been destroyed in a rain of fire mash can chef here was a city that was built mostly out of mud brick which really is not very flammable and yet we find a tremendous conflagration that consumed at least one third of the city burned animals to the bone but today we know something about mash Concha pair that the ancients couldn't have known and it may explain what really happened mash can chef here like almost any other city built in the tigris-euphrates region four thousand years ago was over pools of natural gas and oil and it's the natural gas that's a problem if you get the right kind of earthquake it's going to expand and it's going to come jetting out of the ground just like a volcanic eruption just like literally a gusher of natural gas gas followed by oil under pressure is a lethal combination all it needs is a spark from a cooking heart the effect will be like a giant fuel air bomb detonating over and around and in the city and no from just looking at the Kuwait fires have frightening that can be I mean the smoke is black it blots at the Sun it blots at the stars it's raining soot everywhere you just see these huge bright flames shooting into the sky out of the ground in the middle of the city a tremendous waterfall of fire lighting up the night the city was destroyed by something no one could explain except with words like fire and brimstone could something similar have happened to Sodom and Gomorrah it's certainly possible not only does the area around the Dead Sea have oil and gas deposits deep underground but tar and sulfur exist closer to the surface and sulfur was what the ancients called brimstone oil gas tar and sulfur in an area prone to earthquakes the people of Sodom and Gomorrah or Babbitt rar might have been sitting on a time bomb if what happened to mash Kancha pier happened here it probably started with a tremor well the first thing usually is a movement which is more sort of up and down and then everything start swinging and it can sway for a minute maybe sometimes at very heavy earthquakes as much as one and a half minutes or so on for most people involved in it it feels like an eternity the earthquake would have opened up pockets of natural gas while tar and sulfur deposits bubbled to the surface if the people at that time were preparing food or anything like that you only need one fireplace and SKS coming across it and you would have very significant effect it would have been a spectacular Bronze Age disaster when the gas ignited oil tar and sulfur deposits would have been set ablaze fire would have cascaded over the town anyone in the area would have been incinerated but those at a safe distance would have witnessed something astonishing people like lot and his family according to the Bible they were headed towards the city of Zoar when a hail of fire and brimstone took place the Angels had warned them not to look back at Sodom as they fled but Lot's wife ignored the warning she turned and whatever she saw transfixed her to the spot transforming her into a pillar of salt but at Babbo DRA proposed by some as the site of sodom there's little evidence of such a dramatic destruction by fire instead the town seems to have fallen victim to an invading army that tried to enter through the western gate right in the center of the gateway we found a blocking wall where they had used everything but the kitchen sink to throw in there which was our first clue that the end of the site may have been associated with some sort of military encounter because they were blocking the entrance to the city to get through the massive wooden gate the invaders built a roaring hot fire next to it what we find from the superstructure of the wall the collapse of the mud brick which was vitrified almost reddish showing the high they and flame that was up against the the town wall on the outside as they as they attacked it doesn't indicate that they actually entered into the city but a certainty that there was some sort of an attack on the city there's no way to know when the attack happened or what became of the people who lived there all we know is that by about 2350 BC no one was living in the town or using the cemetery like los and his two daughters any survivors from Babar are were now on their own in the Bible the story of sodom and gomorrah doesn't have a happy ending even for lot and his family who managed to escape we're told that not went to the city of Zoar following the destruction but he was afraid to live there so los and his two daughters took refuge in a cave cut off from other men and perhaps still under the corrupting influence of the city lot daughters decided to seduce their own father they plied lot with wine and then had sex with him both girls became pregnant and the sons they bore went on to father two more tribes of Canaanites who the Israelites later conquered the Bible locates or near the modern city of Safie about 50 kilometers south of Baba DRA and in 1989 a Greek archaeologists discovered something there that was lost for a thousand years a byzantine monastery built in front of a cave dedicated to --scent lot they thought that this particular cave where they built their church was the cave where lot and his daughters live well there's no way to prove that for certain but it is interesting that inside the cave they did find evidence for occupation back in that time period this puts the occupation of lots cave in the early Bronze Age the same time as babba DRA and it was just south of Babur draw the Tom shall but his partner practically stumbled upon a second lost city it started when they noticed an odd rock formation on top of a hill it turned out to be a town wall this is the same wall that Walter rest and I spied from the road as we drove up during our 1973 survey we almost ran up the steep hills of numeira came along and walked along the southern wall line began to see possible wall lines of structures within the within the town side an examination of pottery shards convinced them that they'd found another early Bronze Age town just a few miles from Babbitt Roth they called the new site numeira like Babur dry it was walled but it was much smaller home to a few hundred people at most we began to realize that this site was contemporary with Babbitt Ron and eventually during our excavations we began to realize it was almost like a sister city I think it was a fairly prosperous town but a kind of a suburb of the larger city to the north by the draw but unlike Babbitt draw new Mira had been abandoned not long after it was built número was occupied for a relatively brief period perhaps no more than a century and fortunately for archeologists never settled against and nobody actually lived on top of it dug into the remains reused the stones two settlements one large and one small just a few hours walk from each other had they discovered Sodom sister city Gomorrah if Abraham goes way back in early history the only sites from that period down to the Iron Age that are walled towns that are sizable are these two sites of Bama draw and numeira so they are they have become in the minds of many prime candidates for the ancient traditions of sodom and gomorrah like baba DRA numeira showed signs that its inhabitants had fled and never returned but not because of a war there's no signs of breaching of walls that would have occurred by warfare there no remains of weapons there are no dead soldiers as you find for example a number of sites where there have been battles but they did find the skeletons of two men crushed to death well this is the tower it's in front of that tower of course that we've found the most striking evidence of the last days of the town because they were two skeletons underneath the collapse of the tower and these were the skeletons of adult males who had obviously died suddenly this wasn't a burial this wasn't a tomb these were people who died in an open public area and we think that they had died because the tower where they were either squatting or perhaps they'd been left behind his guards when everybody else left the city simply collapsed on top of them the suspected culprit was another earthquake my hypothesis is that the inhabitants perhaps experienced a preliminary tremor and left the city for the open country because they knew they'd be safer there and a few stayed behind maybe as guards and they were the ones who died in the city the ruins of numeira also revealed something with a biblical echo unlike her sister city new Meera was consumed by fire everything that we've excavated has indicated a very heavy destruction level we find up to 30 to 40 centimeters of ashy debris including the remains of charred wooden beams and of the occupational debris so what whatever happened here and it's pretty pretty widespread over the site there was a major fire that took place there was a thick layer of ashes below the topsoil all over the site thatched roofs and that sort of stuff wooden roof beams would have burned very quickly if the fire had been accompanied by exploding gas tar and sulfur deposits the results would have been unforgettable it doesn't take much to imagine that if you had a conflagration the effects of bitumen and asphalt in that would be spectacular and again enough I think to earn these cities an enduring place in folk memory for for their destruction afterwards the skeletons of both towns would have sat bleaching in the Sun while a thousand years of travellers passed them by and heard stories about how they died so you're talking about people handing down by word of mouth a story about the destruction of these two cities for more than a thousand years and who knows what got changed in the telling you might also have in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities that were destroyed and either this one great disaster and several disasters over time that are telescoped again possibly the nomads side of the story you're picking up different strands from different periods of history blending them together creating a coherent narrative about an event which actually didn't happen there's no doubt that something happened here a little over 4,000 years ago but whether it was invasion earthquake fire or some combination of all three we'll probably never know but here's something to consider Sodom was derived from the Hebrew words dome which means burnt while Gomorrah was derived from the Hebrew word amaura meaning buried or submerged there could hardly be better words to describe numeira and Baba dry the centuries had followed their destruction so perhaps the Bible was on to something after all I think it's very important not to make the writers and the editors of the Hebrew Bible look like charlatans or fools they were telling the truth as they understood it the truth as they understood it involve sex and destruction sin and the punishing wrath of God it's a story that has already entered for thousands of years perhaps the greatest morality tale ever told a powerful lesson and the dangers of debauchery that will continue to intrigue us for centuries to come

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Channel: DannyR21 Studio

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Keywords: National Geographic, Riddles, Bible, Lost Cities

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Length: 47min 2sec (2822 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2013

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