[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to Calvary Albuquerque. We pursue the God
who is passionately pursuing a lost world. We do this with one another
through worship, by the Word, to the world. Well, Sodom. How many are-- just I'm
interested in this-- how many of you have been
following the Sodom updates that we've been doing
here at Calvary Chapel? Now, wait a minute,
don't jump the gun. Since season 1 in 2005 and 2006,
how many of you have seen-- started with this way back then? OK. Now how many have we
picked up since then? OK. Good. Well, we always
have a good group of folks who have seen the
updates on Sodom before, a huge number. How many of you have
never seen an update on the excavation of
Sodom that we've done? See? Look at that. That's maybe more
than the other. So that's good. So I'm excited about that, new
folks who've never seen it. And as a result, I'm going
to include some of everything from day one. We just finished season 12. Can you believe that? [APPLAUSE] I was, well, a whole lot younger
when we started this thing, and it just keeps
getting worse every year. The time keeps marching on. Boy, I tell you what, wish
we could slow it down, but it is what it is. And we have a younger
generation, thankfully, of archaeologists
coming up behind us who can continue this
thing forward, continue the discoveries that demonstrate
the historical authenticity of the Bible. Really, the bottom line is that. That's what it's
all about for us. It's not just
digging in the dirt. That's a lot of fun. It's not just discovering
buildings and artifacts from the ancient biblical world. That's a lot of fun. But ultimately, the bottom
line is the Bible is real. It's real. If it were not real, if
these stories were not true, then we couldn't be doing
what we're doing in the dirt, because we wouldn't be
finding what we're finding, everything that we're finding
at Tall el-Hammam, at Sodom-- it has some-- it has
some other names, too, and we're going to go over
all of those tonight-- all of the places and
people who have been there. And by the way, that's
virtually every Bible character. We have fun trying to think of
Bible characters who were not in or around this location. So everybody passed by very
close to our dig site or right on the dig site at some
time in their life. So it's very exciting
from that point of view. But it was the Bible
itself that brought us to the site of Sodom. Now, I'm going to cover
that so you can just get a feel for what
that looks like. But without the Bible, this
magnificent civilization, and it really is a
tremendous civilization, would never have been
discovered to this day. Now, I'm going to show you some
very recent Bible atlas, well, really not Bible atlas, but
scholarly atlases that still don't show anything on
the piece of real estate that we're excavating. It's kind of shocking. But they're learning,
slowly but surely, that they can trust
the biblical text, at least for the geography. And That's a good place to
start, so let's start there. By the way, I am
going to be signing some books over at Parchments. Couple of things
you need to know. One is keep up with
us on the web site. It is being rebuilt right now. We're real excited about that. It's not quite done. But when it is-- I think there's a
some version of it up. But digsodom.com-- it
is tallelhammam.com, but nobody can remember that. So digsodom's easier,
digsodom.com, and that's the way to remember that. And then the other
thing is, if you want to get on the
email update lists-- we send those out every couple
of weeks during the year. But during the dig, we send
it out every single day, and we show photos of what's
being excavated that day, talk about it, and sort of
follow the excavation day by day. You can text digsodom,
one word, to 22828. Follow the instructions,
put in your email address, and you'll get on that
list to follow what we do. I'll be signing some of these
books over in Parchments afterward. If you'd like to purchase
one, we'll sign it. By the way, they give you a
great discount over there. And we'll be glad
to sign that to you. I also want you to visit the
TSU Museum of Archeology. I had the-- this is a little
advertising time here. How many of you-- and it's going to
be a lot of you, I know-- have never yet been to
the TSU Museum of Archeology? Put them up. Why? You need to come. Why do you need to come? Because it is
absolutely the coolest place to be for
studying the Bible. It's the best Bible teaching
place that I know of. And here are a few
little pictures of it. You can see our timeline. It's 4 feet high
and 76 feet long. It incorporates all of biblical
and ancient Near Eastern history, and it wraps
around the museum. There are three video screens
in the museum spooling dig footage from the dig, from
the excavation of Sodom, which is a lot of fun. Cases-- these are
artifacts, a case full of artifacts from the
time of Moses and Joshua. And by the way, every
artifact in the museum is tied to the biblical text. So you can see what's happening
with a particular artifact. You can better
understand a verse in the Bible, a passage in the
Bible, because of the object that it mentions. You can actually physically
see the actual ancient object. And so they're like-- it's like a little time
machine, take you back in time. People love to come
and look at artifacts going back thousands of years. The kids love it. You can see that these folks
don't have their gloves on, but that's OK. We glove everybody up
that comes in the museum if we can catch them
because it keeps their fingerprints off the
glass and their nose prints. Yeah. And even the New Testament era. These are lamps from
the time of Jesus. And of course, when
Jesus says, "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet"--
no, David said that. When Jesus said,
don't take your lamp and hide it under a bushel,
don't take it and put it under a basket, take it out,
put it up on the lampstand, this is what he
was talking about. In fact, the ones in
the bottom right corner, these are Jewish lamps. The ones in the upper
left are Roman lamps. The Jewish lamps are very plain,
very unadorned, undecorated. And this is what Jesus
was talking about. So by the way, we have
our hands-on artifacts. These are real
thousands-of-years-old artifacts that you can
actually hold in your hand, look at up close like
this, feel it, touch it, take you back to
the time of Jesus. That's what it's all about. So that when you read
that passage, when Jesus talks about
a lamp you know exactly what he was looking at. You can see with
your physical eyes what he saw with
his physical eyes exactly when he
made that statement. See? It puts the past and
the present together. So I love the museum. We have docents in the museum. There's Ruben with
a-- what is that? It's an ancient softball, right? No, it's a slingstone. It's a slingstone like
David took out Goliath with. So we have slingstones. We have lamps. We have weapons. Yeah. All the young men, the
boys, love the weapons. They love the story
of the judge Ehud plunging his 1-cubit sword
into the belly of fat Eglon and losing his sword inside
the belly fat of King Eglon. It's great stuff. The girls don't
like that so much. But they're great stories. This is a sickle sword
from the time of-- Joshua. Joshua-- oh, it says that. [LAUGHTER] Cheaters. This is what a sword looked
like in the time of Joshua. They weren't
straight and pointed. They were curved and
looked like sickles, only they're sharp
on the outside. That's why the Bible
says, very authentically, "They smote them
with the edge"-- singular, edge, "of the sword." Say, well, so what? That shows the historical
authenticity and accuracy of scripture. Well, how so? Because if you go
to the Iron Age, the sword becomes straight,
two-edged, double-edged, and pointed. So you could-- a thrusting
sword, so you could literally thrust that into a body. But not this sword. Swords prior to the time of
King Solomon, King David, look like this. You aren't going to
poke this into anybody. Give him a-- give him a
bruise, but you're not going to puncture
flesh with this sword. This sword is for
this, like that, that, to take big swathes out of
arms and necks and legs. OK? And it's a single edge. It's a single edge. "To smite with the edge"-- singular, "of the sword" is
an idiom describing battle with this weapon, this one. So how does it
authenticate the accuracy of the biblical record? Simply like this. This sword became
extinct in favor of the straight, two-edged
sword after the time of Joshua. In fact, sometime during
the time of the Judges, the Book of Judges, this
sword became extinct. It's gone, replaced by the
one that we always think of when we think of a sword. Guess what also disappears
from the biblical record midway through the
Book of Judges? The phrase-- when this sword
becomes extinct, this phrase-- "to smite with the
edge of the sword"-- is never used
again in the Bible. It became extinct. The idiom tied to the sword
became extinct authentically exactly when the
sword became extinct. The Bible does not
have anachronisms. It was written by eyewitnesses
or near eyewitnesses of the events. And this is just
one little thing. Come to the museum,
over 500 artifacts tied to the biblical record. And not only that,
but bring a group. Bring your Bible study
group, your Connect Group. Come get a presentation
on the biblical world with ancient artifacts. And anyway, that's
the advertisement. Now, settling down on Sodom. We titled tonight's presentation
Postcards From the Kikkar. Now, some of you know, who
are familiar with the Sodom excavation, know
what the Kikkar is. Some of you do not. You will know before we get
finished tonight what that is. Now, the Kikkar is
important because it's the key to locating Sodom. But let's start
from the beginning. I'm going to do a quick run
through, and I do mean run. Because once I start
pressing the buttons we're going to go really
fast through this, and you won't catch a lot of it. But some of it you'll
lock into, and we'll try to make it as
clear as possible. Why is the Sodom
excavation so important? It's important for
a number of reasons, for at least three reasons. Reason one, most scholars,
historically and in the 20th and certainly in
the 21st century, do not believe that
Sodom and Gomorrah and the Cities of the
Plain ever existed at all. They do not believe that
they existed, period. Mythical cities, they
say, never existed, only in the imagination
of the Bible writer. Second, scholars who do believe
that the Cities of the Plain may have been real always put
them in the southern Dead Sea area, at the south end of the
Dead Sea, which, by the way, there is nothing in the
south end of the Dead Sea to connect with
the time of Abraham at all, which reinforces
the doubts of the skeptics. So the speculation, the
erroneous speculation, about the location of
Sodom by Bible scholars in the 20th century reinforced
the doubts of the skeptics, because there's nothing in the
Dead Sea area south of the Dead Sea, or in the area of the
southern end of the Dead Sea, that would connect
with the time of Abraham. So skeptics say, see, see? There's nothing there. All right, third thing. If a legitimate--
very important, that word "legitimate"-- a legitimate, scientifically
rigorous investigation into the location of the Cities
of the Plain could be launched, completed, an
excavation could be done to confirm the
existence of these cities, this would be a
huge confirmation of the Bible's authenticity. And we've done it. We've done it. Now, the big help there
was the Bible itself. As you'll see, it's
sort of a no-brainer. You read the Bible. You follow the map, and you
go where you want to go. That's pretty much how it was-- 1, 2, 3, A, B, C, simple. And we found it. But there are still today,
even with all the publication, with all of the presentations
and the scholarly publications, and all of that that we've
done over the last 12 years, there are still "minimalists,"
like my friend Dr. William Dever from University
of Arizona, emeritus professor
of archeology, who says to me every
time I see him, are you still looking for
those mythical cities? And I always say,
excavating them, I am. But he's famous for
the statement, which he aimed against me,
"No responsible scholar goes out with a
trowel in one hand and the Bible in the other." I'm just cantankerous, and this
makes me kind of angry, right? Here's my response. "No responsible scholar goes
out in that part of the world without a Bible in one hand
and a trowel in the other." Because if you
don't, you will not know where you are, because
the Bible is still the best historical geography we have
of the ancient world, period, with no peer. OK? All right. [APPLAUSE] So if people want to go blindly
digging around the ancient Near East, be my guest. But you won't know what
you have when you think you find it without the Bible. That's the book that
tells us where we are. How do you find an ancient city? This is for any ancient city. You got to be in the right
place that the text tells you, where the text tells you it is. The right place, the right
time, the right stuff. Some of you have heard this
presentation so many times you have it memorized. The right place is just
simply the geography. Let's go over it really quick. Genesis chapter 13 verses 1
through 12, very important. Why? Because it's the only
passage in the Bible that gives us the map to Sodom. This is the map. It's verbal. It's written down,
but it's the map. The directions are very, very
clear, and here they are. "Abram went up from
Egypt to the Negev. Lot went with him. From the Negev,
he went from place to place till he came to Bethel,
to the place between Bethel and Ai. Lot looked up, saw the
whole plain of the Jordan was well-watered, like
the garden of Yahweh, like the land of
Egypt, toward Zoar. So Lot chose for himself the
whole plain of the Jordan, set out toward the east. Abram lived in the
land of Canaan, while Lot lived among
the cities of the plain and pitched his
tents near Sodom." There it is. Now, what's in the map? Well, one word is
very important. This is the word that's
translated "plain." it's translated that way 10
times in the Book of Genesis, and it's the word "kikkar." I mentioned it earlier. Here it is, kikkar. What it means is a circle,
a disk, a ring, all right? Very important. It's used 68 times in the Bible. 55 of those, it simply
means a talent of metal, a circular, flat ingot of metal,
gold, silver, whatever it is. Remember, Solomon collected
666 talents of gold a year and so on. That's a lot. A talent weighs
about 119 pounds. That's a lot of gold. Or a circular flat
loaf of bread. Don't have to explain
that in New Mexico. [LAUGHTER] So New Jersey, Florida, you're
going to have to explain it, but not here. We know that. So it basically means
a talent or a tortilla. And here's the tortilla, the
Kikkar, the disk of the Jordan. You see, the Jordan
River comes down narrowly from the north
into the Dead Sea, but it widens out into
a broad circular plain. It looks even more
circular from the ground. You get on it, you do a 360,
you can see the green ring around the perimeter of it. Because this is where Jericho
is and the agricultural land on one side and Sodom, the
agricultural land on the other. It's a disk. The ring, the disk,
is very important. The Jordan River comes down. It overflows its banks, and
this is a very fertile area. The Bible says the
Jordan River empties into the mouth of the Jordan
at the bay of the Dead Sea below Pisgah. Well, there's Pisgah. Mount Nebo and Mount
Pisgah, same basic mountain. And it's all in the
north into the Dead Sea. So we have to get
that geography right. It "was well-watered,"
according to Genesis 13, "like the garden
of Yahweh," springs and a river running through it. Well, what runs
right down the middle of the Kikkar of the Jordan? The Jordan, OK, right
down the center. And it's watered like Egypt. How is Egypt watered? Overflows its banks annually. They plant behind the receding
waters in the newly deposited silt. That drives Nilotic
civilization for 3,000 years. It also drives the civilization
in the southern Dead Sea Valley, the same hydrological
system, of course. The Jordan is not
as big as the Nile. It's sort of a
Nile in miniature. But Moses collates
this whole story together in the Book of Genesis. Where is he from? Ah, Egypt. So when he sees this,
oh, it's just like home. It's just like Egypt. It works the same way. He recognize it--
he recognizes it, and he looks at it carefully
and writes about it in that way. Here's Jericho on the
west side of the river. On the other side
of the river, we have all of these springs
represented by stars. This is the region's
best-watered agriscape. How do we know that? Because when all the other
civilizations in the area, in Israel and Jordan, collapsed
in certain periods because of drought, the cities
in this area flourished. It's amazing how they prospered. And so Sodom was a
very, very good place to be as far as
that's concerned. He also said Lot could
see the entire circle or disk of the Jordan, the
Kikkar, from Bethel and Ai. In fact, you could see it,
because here's Bethel and Ai. Oh, here's Bab edh-Dhra. That's the traditional
sites of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here's Bethel and Ai. We excavated there
for six years. We know what you can see. You can't see that. You can't see the southern
end of the Dead Sea. But you can see the Kikkar
north of the Dead Sea. You can see that. And if you get
close to the edge, you can actually see
the Jericho below you. You see the entire Kikkar. The Bible also says in
that passage in Genesis 13 that Lot traveled where? Eastward. He didn't take a
right-hand turn. He didn't go anywhere else. He traveled eastward
from Bethel and Ai. And that's easy to plot. Here's Bethel and Ai. That's east. And he pitches his tent on
the Kikkar as far as Sodom. So in a nutshell,
that's how it works. Lot goes that direction. Sodom can only be there
on the eastern part. By the way, why does
it have to be up away from the river like Jericho? Because of the flooding, right? It floods. You can't build
close to the river. So it has to be up on the edge. So our map reflects that. It cannot be in the
Dead Sea Valley. That's dead water. It's a different system. It's spoken of
differently in scripture. You have the Dead Sea, Sea
of the Arabah, the Salt Sea. And then you have
[? hajardin, ?] the descent of the fresh water
of the Jordan River, the living water. And of course, that's often
been used spiritually, isn't it, how our lives are-- fresh, running, flowing
of the Holy Spirit, right, the fresh water. But then some people
are like dead seas. Something running in,
nothing running out. Yeah. All right, right time. Place is easy to
establish from scripture. The right time, the chronology
of the Cities of the Plain, we can make quick
work out of this. Abraham belongs to what we
call the Middle Bronze Age, and here it is. The Early Bronze Age is there. The Middle Bronze Age is there. Abraham and Lot belong
to the Middle Bronze Age. All scholars agree on that. But Genesis 10 talks about
Sodom and Gomorrah as well, and that takes us back to the
earliest time of urbanization, the building of the first
great fortified cities, according to that passage. We know when that is. It's Early Bronze 1 and 2. So we have to have that. So Sodom has to span
all of that time frame. And so if we're going to get
the right time frame for Sodom, we need the Early, Intermediate,
and Middle Bronze Age, and that's the right
time frame for Sodom. So if we go to the right
place and we excavate but we don't find
that, we don't find this chronology
in the excavation, then we haven't found Sodom. OK? So the chronology is a
very important issue. Once you build a city and
you have literally hundreds of tons of pottery-- because everything's made out
of pottery, they bury in it, they eat off of it,
they do everything with pottery-- it
doesn't go away. Fire from the sky
just makes it better, just kind of fires it up. Doesn't go away. So it's got to be there. It doesn't go-- it
doesn't disappear. So it will be there
when we excavate. Now, look at all these. These are the
ancient trade routes. I love this map, because,
well, number one, we walked every
one of these roads. You can walk for-- by the way,
finding an ancient roadway from one city to another
is a piece of cake. How do we know? Because you go to
one place and you know where the other
place is, and you just take the most obvious-- you take the best,
easiest walk from point A to point B. That's
your ancient route. OK? It's easy. Well, here they are. You take the easiest
route, and there you go. And you can go to all of these
cities all around the area. And how many sites are
there on the eastern Kikkar meeting the Kikkar
cities criteria in the Book of Genesis? Well, there's a great big
one at the intersection, and there are lots
of others too. Look at them. They have names. By the way, these
were never known until we started excavating. Well, they were known in
a few reports and surveys, but not much was
ever written on them. But look, whole cluster of
cities, towns, and villages, a great civilization. In fact, the greatest
continuously occupied civilization in
the Southern Levant went undetected until we took
the biblical text seriously and went there and found it. And they have names. We even got to name some of
them for finding them first. And the big one on the block
is Tall el-Hammam, and that's the one we're excavating. By the way, why did we
pick that one as opposed to all those other
ones to excavate? Because it's the big one. Why would you pick a little one? Sodom is the
biggest city, right? It's always mentioned first. It's mentioned by itself. The city-- the King of
Sodom is the only one that has a voice in the story. It's the big one. So you pick the big one,
and that has to be Sodom. Here she is. By the way, I say she
because God says she. In Ezekiel 16, God
calls her she, Sodom, and her sister
Jerusalem, Samaria. Area And so here she is. She's a pretty girl. And she has all of
the strata, look at that, the Early and
Intermediate and Middle Bronze Age, everything you need. So there she is
archaeologically. Right place, right time. And then right stuff. The Bible says very
clearly that Lot sat in the gateway of
Sodom, 19:1 Genesis. What does that mean? It's a fortified city. Now, you might, but
not too many people would build a gate
without a wall, right? [LAUGHTER] Maybe, I don't know. But you build a
gate because it's a way to get inside
the fortifications. So this is a fortified city. And here is Gary Byers and I,
one of my assistant directors, standing on top of the
very early city wall from Genesis chapter 10. And here's my bride,
Danette, and I standing atop the
defensive rampart from the Middle Bronze Age,
from the time of Abraham, on the upper city. And then the-- this takes you--
hearkens back several years, because we closed out this
part of the excavation about four years ago. But this is the
southern defenses. And I love this, because look
at the Early Bronze Age-- that's the Genesis 10 fortifications. There's the fortifications
in the time of Abraham, re-utilizing,
reincorporating all of that from the
earlier periods, entries into the towers. Magnificent place to excavate. This is Dr. Leen
Ritmeyer's reconstruction of the exterior of
the Middle Bronze city gate from the time of Abraham. And you can see by the
scale of the individual he's drawn inside the
gate-- and by the way, do you see that
little column right in the middle of the entrance? You see it? Yeah. I see heads. Yes. See it? Who does that? You turn the lights off
and run into the gate. [LAUGHTER] Who puts a column right smack in
the middle of the central axis of the entry? Well, the Canaanites don't. The Assyrians don't,
and the Egyptians don't. Nobody else in the region does,
but the Minoans do on Crete. Thus the beginnings of our
Cretan or Minoan connection to the culture of
Sodom, which gives us a great deal of insight into
the sexual behavior of the city, if you want to study that. Now, here's our
excavation of the gate. By the way, that's
the raw excavation of the Middle Bronze Age level. We got down below it. But here's the
way it renders up, and then it gets an isometric-- or it gets a top drawing
and then an isometric. And then I mentioned
the Minoan-- by the way, that
Minoan architecture, no other gates have
pillared halls. You have a column hall. Nobody has that in that part
of the world, except in Crete. Interesting. Here's the recent
cutaway isometric of this gate, beautifully
done by Dr. Ritmeyer. And here's the city of Sodom
in the time of Abraham, as we estimate it to be,
a beautiful upper city and a lower city. By the way, the city of Sodom
was continuously occupied without military defeat
for over 3,000 years before God said enough. Is God patient or what? Yes. All right. I just show this because-- what is that? Do you recognize it? Yeah. What is it? It's cloth. This is scale armor,
a tunic with scale armor discovered at Sodom
from the Middle Bronze Age. It's cool. I love it, little
things like this. It's about this big,
but you can still see the weave of the cloth. Here are some of the
excavation, just to give you an idea what it looks like
when you're getting down and you're getting deep. The stuff at the
very, very bottom is from the Middle Bronze
Age, from the time of Abraham. Then let's just quickly go
over the terms of destruction. How was Sodom destroyed? We now think we know. Clearly, the science
is building on this. We have some publications
ready to go on it, but they can't be released
until the analysis team from seven different
universities across America tell us it can be. Scientists are nervous about
anything getting upstaged or-- they want to make sure that
it's all original stuff so it gets into the best
scientific journals. And so once it's out, it's
going to be very difficult for the liberals on that day. [LAUGHTER] But it's coming. That day is coming. If you go on any
of these roads, you go to Late Bronze Age
cities all around. Why is that important? Because if Sodom was destroyed
in the time of Abraham in the Middle Bronze
Age, then there wouldn't be any Late
Bronze Age, right? How many Late Bronze
Age sites in this area? All around the area there's
Late Bronze Age sites. How many Late Bronze
Age sites there? None. Why? I think we know. They were all destroyed. That civilization
was snuffed out in an instant toward the end
of the Middle Bronze Age. Here's an archaeological
fact that our excavation has brought out. The Bronze Age civilization
on the eastern Jordan Disk, the Kikkar, with Tall
el-Hammam, or Sodom, as its cultural center,
flourished continuously for over 2,500 years as a city. Another fact. This same civilization
came to an abrupt end toward the end of the
Middle Bronze Age, and that area remained without
cities, towns, and villages for the next 600 or 700 years. Now, those are
archaeological facts. What's the operative
question that rises from those two facts? Here it is. Why did the best-watered
agricultural land in the region remain without cities and towns
for those 600 to 700 years following the Middle
Bronze 2 destruction? The water didn't go away. You know what went away? We now know and have some good
evidence that the entire-- not only were the
cities virtually blown off their foundations,
but the agricultural fields lost their A soil layer. The soil layer was
stripped from the area by the catastrophic event that
destroyed the civilization. Took 600 to 700 years
for it to recoup. All right. Well, there's the Middle
Bronze Age stratum, and right on top of it
is the Iron Age stratum. But look at that. That's a full meter, meter and
a half of destruction debris. This was in season 1
or 2, I think season 2. This was the first
time we had seen it. And now we have
found it everywhere. Everywhere across the 62
acres inside the city wall, we find this massive,
ugly destruction layer. Down at the bottom
of that destruction layer under the Iron Age
city that was built there-- I'm going to talk about the
Iron Age city in a bit-- we found a storage jar
sherd, large storage jar about that big, piece of
it, the shoulder of it, and the exterior is
melted into glass. All these little areas of
black is carbon separation. Calcium separation
in the areas of red. What's interesting about this is
that that's the pottery sherd-- and by the way, we
have others now. And you can see them where? Museum. In the museum, very good. And that's the pottery sherd. That's trinitite from ground
zero of the first atomic bomb explosion. It's identical material. In other words, the heat index
of the destruction of Sodom was on a par, or
actually exceeded, that of a nuclear explosion. All right? Don't run out of here as
people have done and put on the internet or
Facebook, Dr. Collins said that Sodom was
destroyed by a nuclear bomb. [LAUGHTER] Spare me the ridicule
of my colleagues, on that note anyway. Don't go do that. Here's desert glass
found at [INAUDIBLE]. This is a-- I won't go into it. This is a tri-lithology. This has three
lithologies to it, three different kinds of stone
mashed, pulled up, melted, and mashed together
and falling back down. It's about that
big, if you can see. Very hot temperatures
in order to melt this. This is called desert glass. This is impact glass. Here's the Middle
Bronze Age city. This is the living area,
the domestic quarter. In the domestic quarter,
we found skeletal-- human bone scatter. It appears that
people were literally heated up and blown apart,
or vaporized, most of them. A toy wheel, a bead, bits
and pieces of their lives, a beautiful carinated bowl
from the Middle Bronze Age, a piriform juglet
all from that era, jewelry, scarabs
from the same period showing that they had contact
with Egypt of that time. This is the ash all around
the plaza, on the plaza black ash of the destruction. We call this destruction
now the 3.7 thousand year Before Present, BP, event. And here it is. What's interesting about it, we
know the directionality of it. It came, just like
the Bible said, "from Yahweh out of the
heavens," came from the sky. Now, in that part of--
in that part of the city, there's little or no mud brick. The mud brick is
literally seemingly blown off its stone foundations. Find the big stone foundations,
mud brick basically gone. But there's a 100-foot-high
part of the rampart, the protective system that
supports the upper city, and behind that
massive earthen rampart we find a lot of
mud brick remaining, 10, 12, 15 courses of mud
brick remaining on some of the Middle Bronze buildings. In other words,
what has happened is that there's a directionality
to the blast that literally blows the foundations off
the more exposed lower city and preserves some
of the mud brick behind the great ramparts
of the upper city. So there's a
directionality to it. Now, look at this. Do you see this big rock
at the bottom, the big one? Do you see the-- do you see those meter sticks? Those meter sticks,
they're like this. That's a meter, OK, like that. It's not the big
fish tale, like that. That stone is over a meter. It's almost a half
a meter thick. It weighs over 400 pounds. You see the left side of it's
very smooth, curved and smooth. Do you know what that is? It's a colossal metate,
the grinding stone. It used to be on a platform,
used to be on a pedestal. It's called a saddle
quern, Q-U-E-R-N. And you sit over the top of it. You just sit on it. It's like a saddle. See there's a little cutout. You can see it. You go straddle over it,
and you put your grain on it and your grinding
stone, and you do this. You grind the
grain on top of it. It's like a big
saddle, a saddle quern. This saddle quern
was blown off-- 400-plus pounds-- was
blown off its foundation and turned up on its edge. The grain hit the
floor, scattered, continuing in that
northeasterly direction. The pottery from
hundreds of vessels were broken into small
chunks and scattered in the same direction
across the floor and smashed against that
wall you see to the left. This is down inside behind
the protective rampart, and the directionality is
still pulling everything in a northeasterly direction
from the southwest entry of this object from the sky. Very powerful stuff. Well, here it is. This is my-- just shows
you where it came from. There it is. Let's watch it again. It's going to come
from the southwest. Boom. How long did it take to
destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? [SNAPS FINGERS] Like that. That's all. Instantly destroyed an
entire civilization. Now, quickly, what happens when
scholars or Bible students, anybody, what happens when
you ignore the biblical text, particularly in the
case of this Kikkar geography we've
been talking about? This is a page-- I'm going to show you three
maps from The Sacred Bridge. By the way, the
2015 version of it-- I have 2006 version here-- the 2015 version of these
maps in this book is the same. OK? They haven't updated it yet. They will, but not yet. Now look at this. East side of the Jordan
River opposite Jericho-- blank. Nothing on it. Nothing on it. Look at this one. Let's take it to the
Intermediate Bronze Age, the time just before Abraham. Look at this. Nothing, except a little
town that we now know as one of Sodom's satellites. Look at this-- nothing. The Middle Bronze Age-- blank. My goodness. [? Look, ?] that's
how it should look. Look at all the
cities and towns. That's how it should look. Doesn't look that way yet. This is how stubborn
and how difficult it is to get archaeological
discovery into the literature that people actually use. So man, weren't you tired of
doing this after 12 years? No. Because the work is not
finished yet until people-- liberal, conservative,
otherwise-- see the reality of what is there
that the biblical text reveals, not only in the text,
but in the ground. Until they see it, we
will keep pressing. But here's what we say to them. If in the past archaeologists
had paid attention to the Sodom stories,
they would have found this most important
civilization in the Southern Levant. It's not just a little thing. It's the biggest, most-- Sodom is the largest,
continuously occupied city in the Bronze Age in
the Southern Levant. Not understanding Sodom and
the civilization around it is like trying to explain
California without Los Angeles or France without Paris. In other words,
they're completely misunderstanding and misreading
the history of the Holy Land without getting this right. How do you get it right? Well, they didn't
follow the Bible, and they didn't
discover the cities. We did, and we did. It is there. And all credit goes to
the Bible, of course. Just a little bit from
some of the excavation. Now, in the last
10 minutes here, we are going to really roll fast,
because I want to bring you up to date, all right? So here we go. Couple of years ago,
we got Beth-jeshimoth. Now, that's crazy. Why Beth-jeshimoth? Just a little snippet
here, very important. Moses and the Israelites
"camped on the plains of Moab by the Jordan
across from Jericho. There on the plains of Moab
they camped along the Jordan from Beth-jeshimoth
to Abel-Shittim." Numbers 33. Now, here we are. Everybody recognizes--
all scholars recognize Tall el-Hammam as
Abel-Shittim, or the location of Abel-Shittim. There was no city there
during the time of Moses. It's just a big hulking ruin. But that's where Moses went. And by the way,
as you look around this photograph--
look at this photo. What's around the city? Flat. So if you're a
military man, where are you going to put your
command camp and your camp? You're going to get up high. The lower city, as you can
see out there in the distance, the lower city is 100 feet
below the surrounding terrain, and the upper city is
100 feet above that. So it's way up. That's where you go. That's why scholars
have always said that's where the
Israelites went. It's opposite Jericho. It's exactly the opposite
of Jericho on the east side. Now, look at this. There's Jericho. That was Moses' command camp. There's no doubt about it. That's the Levitical
encampment on the lower city. Nice, big, flat,
500-meter-across, flat platform, that's where the
Levitical encampment is. And the Israelites
just camp, then, wherever they could around it. By the way, they're surrounded
on both sides by two rivers. So this whole encampment is
surrounded by two rivers. They have plenty of water. They can hang out as
long as they want. They're there many, many months,
as much as a year or more, and this is where they camped. And here it is from the top. There's Moses'
command encampment, the Israelite-Levitical
encampment, the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant
sitting right there. By the way, you know
what's underneath that? The pagan temple of Sodom. I always think, isn't
that just like God to stick his holy presence
right on ground zero of evil? You know what ground zero
of evil is spiritually? Your heart. The heart of man is
on evil continually. But when we receive
Jesus, Holy Spirit gets stuck on ground zero. That's why he grieves. When we see him, he grieves,
because he can't leave. If you can't leave, you grieve. All right. Wow. The Israelites camp around. So who hung around
Tall el-Hammam? Not just Abraham and Lot. Bera, King of Sodom. But later, a few hundred years
later, Moses, Joshua, Aaron, all the folks of
Israel, there they are at the site
right on top of it. Now, Beth-jeshimoth,
this was interesting. This came out of the clear blue. This caught me by
surprise, because we found no other Late
Bronze Age stuff from the time of
Moses and Joshua anywhere on this
whole 62-acre city. And we excavated every
sector of it, or at least in every sector. But we found a
freestanding building. It's just a tariff house. It's a freestanding
building right on that little spot on top of
the upper city And here it is. Boy, you can see it. Look at this. I love reading excavation. Look at these balks and the
locus tags from the excavation. Look at this. See that line? I'm going to back it up. Look at that. You know what that-- you
know what's below that line? The destruction of Sodom. You know what's above that line? This Late Bronze building. And you can see the
destruction of it, all there. It's a big pile of ruins. But there's no settlement. It's just a government building
out in the middle of nowhere. And if you built a
government building-- how do we know it's a
government building? Because it's small and overbuilt
and I guarantee you overbudget. [LAUGHTER] OK? It's got huge timbers. It's got the fanciest pottery. It's got beautiful
tables and chairs. It's got all the accouterments. It's got lots of storage because
they can't farm there yet. There's no fields. But they have a building. Well, what's the building for? To collect the customs of
the tariff off the trade routes that cross at
the base of the site. You have to cross from
one side of the Jordan to the other, so the
fords of the Jordan. This is where you cross. This is this building. And if you-- and there's
one of the timbers, carbonized timbers. Here's a pot. You see the leg of that chair? I'm not going to tell you
Moses sat in that chair. But if I were Moses, I wouldn't
have destroyed the building when I came upon this site. I would have chased
the inhabitants off, and I'd have occupied the
building as my headquarters for the time until I left. Thank you, General Patton. I mean, that's
what you do, right? You move in. You occupy, and then maybe you
burn it down on the way out. Moses-- I can imagine
that Moses sat on a chair like this inside that room and
wrote the Book of Deuteronomy. I mean, it's chill bumps
excavating that kind of stuff. Maybe it didn't happen,
but I think it did. And so there you go. Now, how do we know it's a
tariff house, customs house? Scale pans, bronze scale pans. For what? For weighing out money. You're out in the middle of
nowhere collecting money. All right. Tariff house, customs house. And-- well, let me just
back up to that, whoop. I'm going to back up
to Beth-jeshimoth. What does that mean? The House of the Desolation. If you built a customs
house, a tariff house, on the top of a
hulking pile of ruins, wouldn't you maybe call it
the House of the Desolation? Well, that's what everybody
passing by would call it. Oh, the House of the Desolation. There it is. Well, Beth-jeshimoth. So the Israelites camp
from Beth-jeshimoth on the top of Tall el-Hammam at
the customs house, the command camp, to Abel-Shittim, the
lower city along the Jordan. And there they are. All right. In closing, oh,
we're in great shape. We got five. We didn't know this
till this season. We suspected it,
but now we got a-- we got a big view
of it this year. I call this Solomon
builds a store-city on the strategic side
of ancient Sodom. Site's topography is the same. Sodom was built there because
of its strategic location and because of the
local natural resources. Every city built there
after that-- the next city was built 700 years later
in the time of King Solomon. Why did he come back and build
on the top of that same hill? Because of the same reasons-- defensibility,
agricultural land, which had now recuperated, and
water, the three-legged stool. You got to have
those three things. Take any one of those away,
you don't have a city. It falls. All right? Solomon built store-cities
all over his 12 administrative districts. We think we have the
big one in the Gilead district on the east side of
the Jordan within sight of-- signal fire sight of Jerusalem. And we discovered
it this season. This is Group-1. This is the first
group that showed up at the site this year
just a few months ago. And here's what we excavated. Leen Ritmeyer's top
drawing of the brown-- you see the brown building? We excavated out
this brown building. Now, we were hoping it was going
to be the Middle Bronze Age palace. It turned out not to be. We really struggled
with this for weeks. If you followed the
updates, we really, really worked on this, because
the pottery just wasn't clear. But finally, it did
clarify, as it always does. And what we wind up with here
is a very large storage facility and a palace next door. Look at this. Here's the elevation of it-- palace to the left, storerooms,
and then a house a little bit to the east of that. Magnificent structures. We're actually bringing
an adobe and mud plaster team from New Mexico
next season to help do the reconstruction on this. It's going to be real cool--
the New Mexico-Sodom connection. [LAUGHTER] And here it is. You can see it, how it
hooks up with the city gate there on the top
of this drawing. And wonderful, wonderful
stuff that we're seeing from this season's excavations. It was frustrating for me,
so I had to make lemonade out of the lemon. Irony just kind of lemonaded me. I want the Bronze Age. But anyway, let's get off that. Now, just in closing, last
couple of minutes here, why does the discovery and
excavation of Sodom matter? Why does it matter? Here's why. European Christianity
was a vital force for world evangelism
from 1850 through 1900. I mean, they
evangelized the world. They were going everywhere. Missionaries were being sent out
from all the European countries and England all over the world. By 1945, within one
generation, Europe was declared post-Christian
by historians. In one generation,
Europe went from being a vital Christian
powerhouse to being declared culturally
post-Christian, in one generation. That was because liberal
German higher criticism, which said that Moses didn't
write the Pentateuch, had all kinds of reasons to
say the Bible is not credible, Bible was not really history,
it was pious fiction, it undermined the confidence in
the historicity of the Bible. Why? Because all the
colleges and seminaries were teaching the
priests and the clerics, the clergymen, that the
Bible wasn't really true, and it started eating away at
the fabric and the foundation of European Christianity. And we are really close to that. We may now be in the
post-Christian era in America. I fear that we are. I hope that we're not. Maybe we're just
teetering on the edge, and I hope we can
be pulled back. But how is that possible? Well, one thing is that
biblical archeology is the most powerful
means of demonstrating the historicity of the Bible. I mean, it is the powerhouse
that says, this is it. This proves it. This demonstrates it. This is consistent with
the biblical record. And this is how I think
we have to carry it to the next generation. We have to give them powerful
reasons to read the Bible and to commit their lives
to the God of the Bible. If we don't do this,
then America is doomed. The Tall el-Hammam
Excavation Project represents the cutting edge
of biblical archeology. We fight for it. We work at it. We haven't taken a
season off in 12 years. Every other excavation we
know about digs a year, takes off a year or
two, digs another year. We stay after it year
after year after year. Why? Because it's important work. It needs to be done. The voice needs to be heard. If you had a once in history,
not once in a lifetime, once in history
opportunity to prove the historical
reliability of the Bible, would you take that opportunity? Would you take it? Two ways you can take it. Give money to the excavation. Keep up with us, pray for us,
and give money to support it. Or do yourself a favor and
us, take a great vacation and come excavate with us. It's deductible. [LAUGHTER] It's tax deductible. So come and do that with us,
and we invite you to do that. Your involvement with
TeHEP may, in fact, impact the way the next
generation approaches and uses the Bible. That's what's at stake here. The Bible and the
trowel, as I always say, work remarkably well together. So let's keep them together. God bless you. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Let's pray. Let's stand together. Father, great and mighty and
gracious God, we love you. And we thank you in the
name of Jesus for all that you've done for us, the
salvation through the cross, the power of your Word, and
the power of your Holy Spirit. [MUSIC PLAYING] Bless this congregation. Bless each person
as a missionary to those around them. Go with us and guide us. Strengthen us every moment
with your powerful presence. And it is in the name of that
presence of Jesus that we pray. Amen. Amen. [MUSIC PLAYING] What binds us
together is devotion to worshipping our
heavenly Father, dedication to studying His
Word, and determination to proclaim our eternal
hope in Jesus Christ. For more teachings from Calvary
Albuquerque and Skip Heitzig, visit calvaryabq.org.
