Sulfur Balls of Sodom and Gomorrah

so i'm up here on the site uh called locally numera and this is the site that the archaeologist associated with gamora so here you can see that ashy layer that's just underneath the surface this is full of burned pottery it's full of the fragments of human bones the question is is what evidence is there of this burning sulfur that rained down well it seems that the culprit are these sulfur balls that are also found in this area well i'm off on a camping trip today i'm driving down to the southeast shoreline of the dead sea and this is the area that the bible calls the cities of the plain it's also the area that has the archaeological sites that date to the time period of what's known as the early bronze age and this is the time when abraham and his nephew lot lived this is the time when the bible says that the lord destroyed the cities of the plain so i'm standing now at the largest of these early bronze sites on the southeast side of the dead sea this one locally is known as babadra and is the site that is associated with sodom in the bible it was discovered as an uh early bronze site back in 1924 it was excavated in the 1960s and 1970s and what archaeologists found here was this uh burn destruction that goes across this site this city came to an end through a fire destruction so here you can see this ashy burn destruction layer uh just underneath the surface it's full of human uh bone fragments burn pottery and it's covering the entire site so off in the distance here you can see uh bobby draw uh identified as sodom and then right here to the southwest is this massive cemetery that you can see with all these pits that mark its boundaries and these are formed because of the locals for decades have been coming and digging into these graves looking for antiquities to sell in the antiquity market and so it's estimated from the archaeologists that dug here back in the 60s and the 70s that there are around a half million people buried in this cemetery and it's just staggering and and what's really intriguing then is that they found a burn destruction across the cemetery that happened at the same time that the city was destroyed so the city and the cemetery were destroyed in the same fire disaster and uh there's no reason why an army would attack a bunch of graves and burn a cemetery and so this was one of the major reasons that they interpreted the destruction here as being caused by a natural disaster in the excavation report they show pictures of the bones in the graves that were warped by the heat okay so i'm just uh leaving the cemetery of babadra that is sodom and i'm driving about eight miles to the south to another excavated site identified as the biblical city of gomorrah so i'm up here on the site called locally numera and this tower behind me was excavated and uh two skeletons were found underneath the collapse of the tower on this side and one on the other side there was burn destruction all through here as you see in the picture from the excavation however it does seem like the collapse was able to preserve those skeletons uh better than most of the human remains here um you can see there's ash right here and human remains bones are all through this ash as you can see there's uh this this destruction layer is filled with human bone remains um here's some ribs uh found in this area uh burned pottery a total burn destruction the excavators here the main excavator here is walter rast who excavated also at bobby draw and he describes what they found in the excavations here at numera he writes the burnt debris covering this site has appeared in almost every area excavated whatever the cause it was certainly a tragedy obviously the town suffered a severe fire and was forever abandoned now despite walter rast being a secular archaeologist his conclusion about what he found in excavations at babadra and here in numera were these he says this in the author's opinion the facitudes of these two early bronze three cities of babadra numera may well be reflected in the stories of sodom and gomorrah in the bible okay so babadra was destroyed by fire at the same time that its cemetery was destroyed by fire the city was never rebuilt this city associated with gamora has a burn destruction over it the city came to a dramatic end with the fire destruction at the same time that babadra was destroyed by fire and this city was never ever ever lived in again what is it that burned these cities and the cemetery uh at babadra the bible describes it as burning sulfur raining down from the sky and is there anything that that matches this description that's still left in the geological record in this area what is this burning sulfur and there is an archaeology museum here that uh where the excavations that have taken place here over the years the artifacts are on display so i'm going to take you to that um museum called the museum at the lowest place on earth and show you their display and what they make as a connection between the destructions and uh and this burning sulfur described in the bible and so here at this archaeology museum they have on display here these sulfur balls that are found in the area down near the dead sea and um and so their interpretation is that these are the culprits uh that this is what caused these cities in this area to be burned in the ancient past now when i first saw this display i got really excited and i went and scoured the archaeological sites searching for sulfur balls and i couldn't find any anywhere and so one day i was guiding a well-known geologist through this area and i brought him here to this museum i showed him this display told him my dilemma and he said oh well these would not be preserved on land they would only be preserved in water and so he encouraged me to go look for them in the areas that were once under the dead sea and so i went down near the shore of the dead sea and looked in these areas where the dead sea waters have receded and this is when i started finding sulfur balls just to give you an idea how many sulfur balls there are so this is a sulfur ball sulfur balls all these are sulfur balls here here here look at all of them there sulfur ball sulfur ball everywhere [Music] where are these sulfur balls coming from they're coming from this geological formation you can see sulfur balls what is called nc2 in place they're they're placed right here in this particular layer so if i but so what they're doing is they're eroding out of this right and and then washing down in the ravines and so you have all of these preserved in this geological layer that goes uh goes and goes and goes and so that's where they're coming from so one thing that i should say is the reason one of the main reasons that i'm doing so much research uh here is that i'm working on a book i i published and and released a another book called where god came down if you're interested in that it's an archaeological book you can uh i'll put a link in the description below where you can order that but i'm working on a sequel to that the next book in that series and so i'm dealing the first book was all sites in israel this uh this book that i'm currently working on takes on more sites from israel but also some from jordan as well i'm going to burn one of these sulfur balls just to show you how flammable they are uh i got to be careful because man when you get a whiff of these things it's really nasty okay so this is one of the reasons why sulfur balls would only be preserved in water because if they strike the land then they're going to burn up you can see the goo it's just melting down to goo and then dripping off so really anywhere that they would have landed on land they would have burned up like this and they would have burned anything flammable around them this is how the cities in the plane were burned however if they would have hit the water of the dead sea that would have extinguished them and therefore they wouldn't have burned up and uh they would have sank down to the bottom uh of the floor of the dead sea and been preserved in a geological layer [Music] i've lived in the biblical world now for um over 15 years and i mean things just always end up being more obvious than uh mysterious so when you have something described in the bible and you go to that place and you look it over you look at the excavation work that's been done uh there's always not just a fit but an obvious fit and so the more that i explore this land the more that i excavate in it and the more that i understand these different places and what the bible describes in them the more the biblical count just comes to life and is substantiated and this is a perfect example of this we're not talking about a burn destruction layer over just one city we're talking about multiple cities we're talking about burn layers over graves in the cemetery and we're uh talking about a historical source in the bible that gives us a description of what happened describing this burning sulfur that is coming down like rain out of the sky and then in this area we have this geological um phenomenon of these sulfur balls that are preserved in an in a geological layer and uh and preserved because uh they were once under the dead sea and so you bring it all together the historical the archaeological the geological uh evidence and uh we see very clearly how this all works exactly is uh it maybe still needs some more study but we see very clearly the correlation between the history the archaeology and the geology and uh and so the biblical account is substantiated [Music]

Channel: Expedition Bible

Views: 2,106,058

Keywords: Sulfur Sodom Gomorrah, Sulfur Balls of Sodom and Gomorrah, sulphur balls, sulfur balls sodom gomorrah, Joel Kramer, Christian archaeology, Bible teaching, biblical apologetics, apologetics, Christian, Expedition Bible, Bible, inerrancy, archaeology, Old Testament, the Bible is true, biblical archaeology, christianity

Id: jQl4KaRtef8

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022