[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. Tonight, we're going to talk
about why Sodom matters. But before we jump
into that, I want to go into a little
bit of a review. How many of you--
I know some of you have because I recognize
a lot of faces. How many of you have heard me
do a past presentation on Sodom? Good. How many have not? OK, a few more nots than haves. So for you folks
who have not, I'm going to do a little
bit of a quick review. We're just going to walk through
it and enjoy it together. So let me get to the
first slide here. This is the one you really need. This one, Digsodom.com. That's easy to
remember, isn't it? It's really tallelhammam.com,
but nobody can ever remember that, so we use this one. [LAUGHTER] Its a little easier. Digsodom.com, that gets
you to the website. Website's a little
squirrelly right now because they're working on it. We're having to update it
with a lot of new stuff. So if some things and
features on there don't work, don't worry. Give it a few weeks
and it'll be ready. The next one you need as well. This will get you
on the update list. We do an update list, an update
every month, twice a month, four times a month
during the year. But during the excavation,
during the eight weeks of the excavation, we sent
out some photos, what's happening on the dig that day. And we do it every single day
with a little bit of commentary so you can follow the
excavation at Sodom moment by moment, literally through
the entire excavation season. It's a lot of fun. So if you'll just-- your
smartphone or your stupid phone will do it. Just text 22828 and
follow the instructions. Put in your email address. That'll put you on
the email update list. If you don't have a copy
of this, you need one. You can order it on Amazon. It is available
now in paperback. You can still get the
hardback version of it. I think maybe they have
some in the bookstore here at Parchments. If you can't get, that
you can [AUDIO OUT] [INAUDIBLE] It walks you step
by step by step through the
archaeological process. And it is very
exciting to do that. The next one, there we go. All right. We're going to do a
little bit of a review. Because frankly, what you
really need in your life-- and I always bring
this up when I speak-- is that when a lull
comes to your life, or things get a
little samey, things get a little monotonous, what
you really, really need is a geographical fix. You need some
geography in your life. And so tonight, we're going to
do a little bit of geography. Because if you're not
familiar with what we're talking about in terms of
the location of biblical Sodom, then you need to get
up to speed on that. And then, we're going to walk
you into some new discoveries. I want to show you
some interesting things and I want to take you a little
bit beyond biblical Sodom to a couple of other
discoveries that we've made in the same area
that are very important. By the way, we're entering into
our 12th dig season in 2017. Wow. It doesn't seem quite that long. Its been a long haul. We've gotten a lot
older, a lot balder. A lot of things
happen in 12 years, but it's been very exciting. And it's been exciting
to have Calvary Chapel Albuquerque with us for the
whole ride on this thing. Well, why is Sodom important? One of the reasons
why Sodom is important is because there are
a lot of scholars, a lot of people in the
world who would love to get rid of this, who
would love to dismiss this as a collection of myths and
legends that can't be trusted, something that has no
value for the modern world. We're in a battle for the Bible. And in this battle
for the Bible, there are some
things, some places, some issues on which
we need to fight back. And biblical archeology
can take us there on some of these issues,
and this is one of them. So the existence of Sodom
and the Cities of the Plain is a good test case for
the historical accuracy of the Bible for at
least three reasons. One, most scholars doubt
that Sodom and Gomorrah ever existed. They completely dismissed
the story out of hand. Second, those who do believe
that Sodom and Gomorrah existed, the more
conservative Bible scholars, have generally searched in vain
on the wrong end of the Dead Sea, on the south
end of the Dead Sea, and have never found anything
that scholars could remotely have confidence in
as biblical Sodom. This reinforces the
position of the skeptics. So if you have the wrong idea
about where Sodom is located, and you insist on it, and we
go in, look there and find nothing, that gives
fuel to the debate on the side of the skeptics
because there's nothing there to support that view. So since that's been the
traditional view all along, scholars have just dismissed
the Bible at that point. And by the way, after
its destruction, Sodom became a metaphor
throughout the rest of scripture for the wrath of
God, for the judgment of God, for the wrath of God. It goes throughout the
remainder of the Old Testament, it goes throughout the
remainder of the New Testament. It's found in all the Gospels. It's found in the apostle Paul. It's found in
Peter, Second Peter. It's found in the book of Jude. And it's also referred to
in the book of Revelation. So Sodom becomes a very
consistent historical metaphor for the wrath of
God and the fact that God's statements
of judgment-- I almost said threats. God doesn't make threats. When God decrees
judgment, it will happen. It will happen in His time and
in His way, but it will happen. So if we could get
it in the right place and prove that it
actually exists, that would help this situation. Well, there's a third reason. If a legitimate
scientific excavation could find the Cities of
the Plain and biblical Sodom amongst them, it would be a huge
confirmation of the historicity of the Bible. And so I think these
are three good reasons. In fact, I had someone
recently come up to me and say, you know, I became a
Christian because I heard what you said
about Sodom, and I went and I read some of your
books, and I checked it out, and I came to
believe in the Bible. So it can have impact. And so this is not
just a fun exercise. This is just not
something that we do because we like it or
we're interested in it. The bottom line is
if Sodom is real and we can demonstrate that
it was destroyed in a manner as the Bible describes it,
then we have a very good reason to take the Bible seriously
and to take God seriously. So there are some
impacts to this. Well, in about 12
years of doing this, we think we've finally
set the record straight. And it does take a while. By the way, it takes
between 30 and 40 years for archaeological
discoveries to find their way into the biblical
commentaries and literature. So some people keep
reminding me that by the time this process plays out,
I will be with Jesus. If he hasn't come back
for the rest of everybody and the world is
still continuing on, there'll still be a
lot of work to do. So it takes a long
time to do this. Archeology is a
very slow process. It's a painstaking process. It's a very tedious kind of
thing, and it's taken a while. But we think we've
finally got it. But there are some minimalists. And I always have to
introduce this gentleman because he has been
my minimalist nemesis over the years. He once said and
continues to say about me, "No responsible scholar goes
out with a trowel in one hand and a Bible in the other." OK, but I have to
say this in response. No responsible scholar
digging in the Holy Land can go out without
a trowel in one hand and a Bible in the other. [APPLAUSE] The reason is simply
because there is still no better historical
and geographical text from the ancient
world than this. There just isn't. And so you have to give
this thing its due, whether you want to believe
everything in it or not. You still have to use it. Now, how do you go about
finding a lost city like Sodom? Well, it's fairly easy. It's fairly straightforward. It would sort of be if there was
an alleged place called Santa Fe, and there was no
sign to it, and nobody knew where it was exactly except
descriptions that somehow it hung out between Albuquerque
and the Colorado border, off a little bit
to the northeast, about maybe an
hour's drive away, I suppose you might
be able to find it. If you follow the
directions, you could probably get
there, even if you didn't have a map with names. And that's how it is with
a lot of Bible locations. They have a lot of geographical
data embedded in the text. They'll say, well,
it's near this river. It's near this mountain. It's east of this city. And if you triangulate
around, you can generally identify
where these places are. And this is how locations
get on Bible maps. But there are three
things you have to consider, the right place. If the Bible says it's
in a particular location, then you go to that location. So you got to be
in the right place. The other thing is you got to
be in the right time frame. Because if Abraham
lives in the Bronze Age, and you'd find a location that
has Hellenistic or Roman ruins, but nothing from the Bronze
Age, then doesn't qualify. So it has to have the right time
frame for the Biblical story involved. It also has to have
the right stuff. By the right stuff,
we simply mean that if there are descriptions
about that city, then we need to check out
in the archeology whether those descriptions match
what's found in the ground. And when those three things,
the right place, the right time, the right stuff,
when they line up, we can be fairly sure that
we've got the right location, that we have actually
found a city in the Bible that has been lost
for a long, long time. Now, the right place means
we look at the geography of the Cities of the Plain. So let's do that. There's a particular passage
that we always have to turn to, and that's Genesis 13. Why Genesis 13? Because it's the only
passage in the Bible that has been
specifically written to take us to the city
of Sodom, the only one. There are others that talk
about it, talk about Sodom, various things about
it, various events. But this is the only one that
will get us the road map, so to speak. So let's read it. And I've cut out
almost everything here except the
geography, so let's just work our way through it. "So Abram went up from
Egypt to the Negev and Lot went with him. From the Negev,
he went from place to place until he came
to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai. Lot looked up and saw that
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 and 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." Now, there's a whole
lot of data there, but it's going to center around
a particular word translated "plain" 10 times in the
overall Sodom story, 3 times in this particular passage. The word "plain" is found in the
phrase "Cities of the Plain," and you'll see that here. The "plain of the Jordan,"
but what does this mean? By the way, it is not
the standard Hebrew word for plain, valley, flat place,
bottomland and so forth. There are plenty of words
for that, but this is not it. It is a different
word altogether. It's the word kikkar. By the way, the word kikkar
is used in the modern world. If you go to Jerusalem
and you find roundabouts, we're starting to get
a few roundabouts. You like roundabouts? Other people don't
like roundabouts. I would love roundabouts. Because if you forgot
where you were going to go, you just keep going around until
you find out which direction you need to take off,
so I kind of like that. But the word kikkar,
it means a circle. And so if you go to
Jerusalem, you're going to find kikkar this
traffic circle [INAUDIBLE] traffic circle Elijah. I don't know if that one exists. But you'll find traffic circles
that are just called kikkar. That's what it means. In the Old Testament, it mostly
refers to a talent of metal, a flat circular disk of metal,
or a pita bread, a tortilla, in essence. So talents or tortillas,
that's what it means. In fact, outside the Bible,
this word is used a lot, but it never ever has a
geographical meaning at all. It only means
talents or tortillas. There is a little meaning in
it in the Egyptian language, the word [EGYPTIAN], which
means to draw a circle in the sand with a stick. But kikkar just basically means
a circle, basically a talent or a tortilla. Now, here it is. The Jordan Valley, this is
the southern part of it, ends at the north
end of the Dead Sea. So here, you see the Dead Sea. Here, you see highlighted
in green, the narrow Jordan Valley coming down
and then widening out in a large expanse
about 30 kilometers wide as it enters the
north into the Dead Sea. So this is the Kikkar. This is the circle
of the Jordan. And this is the only
possible place this could be, because the Bible tells us very
clearly that [INAUDIBLE] Kikkar of [INAUDIBLE], the
Kikkar of the Jordan, ends at the bay of the Dead
Sea at the mouth of the Jordan below Pisgah, which is Nebo. So all of that's happening
north of the Dead Sea. And so you can see it all here,
the Jordan River, the Kikkar, the mouth of the Jordan
and Pisgah, all of that from the biblical
formula for the location of the termination
of the Jordan Valley, which terminates at the Kikkar. And so this is the only
possible location for the Cities of the Plain, including Sodom. The Bible also says in a
very astute observation that the Kikkar was
well watered, first of all, like the garden of
the Lord, garden of Yahweh. How was the Garden
of Eden watered? If you go back and read
that passage in Genesis 2 about the Garden of Eden, it
says a river ran through it. And then it broke into four
channels outside the garden. But in the garden, it
was simply a single river running through the garden. And that's exactly
how the Jordan River runs through the Kikkar. A single river goes right
down through the middle of it. But it's also
watered like Egypt. How was Egypt watered? Egypt almost never got rain. In fact, a thunderstorm in
Egypt was seen as a bad omen. Egypt was watered by
the Nile River, which overflowed its banks in the
delta next to the Mediterranean in the north, overflowed
its banks, covered the land. And they would then
plant in the silt left by the receding waters. And so that kind of
hydrologic situation drove Nilotic civilization
for 3,000 years. Sometimes it was
better than others. But it allowed the Egyptians
to build a great civilization because water was
hardly ever a problem. So the Jordan River
is exactly the same. It's like a Nile in miniature. And Moses, who basically is
putting this passage together, grew up where? Egypt. So he would have
immediately recognized as he was camped
in the area right before they crossed the
Jordan, and he finished up his writings of the Torah
books, in particular, the book of Deuteronomy
right there. By the way, in a
little bit I'm going to show you the chair
that I think Moses wrote the book of Deuteronomy on. Just kidding. But it could be. [LAUGHTER] It could be. But he's there. And he knows this phenomenon. He sees the river overflowing
in the spring time. And says, wow, that's
just like the Nile. And so he writes it up. It was watered like Egypt, and
so it was a good observation. Now, here is. That's a little bit of the
overflowing of the Nile, and the Kikkar, and
all the rivers that feed into the valley. And there's Jericho
on the west side. Now on the west side,
anybody been to Jericho? Jericho exists because
there's a spring there. And it's the only city
that really ever grew up on that side of the river,
because there's one spring. It's enough for one city,
not for two or three. So it was very sparse. A good living for one
city, but not for many. But on the east
side of the Jordan, it's a different
situation altogether. There are numerous springs
on that side, plus there are several perennial rivers
that run in on that side as well. So water just is hardly ever
a problem on the other side. It's the best watered
agriscape in the region. When everybody else through
the history of the region suffers famine and
drought, this location, the people in this
location survive and thrive when others are struggling
or dying completely, so it's an important area. The Bible also
says that Lot could see the whole area of the
Kikkar from Bethel an Ai. Remember it said he was
standing at Bethel and Ai and he looked over, he saw the
whole circle of the Jordan. Well, where was he? Here's where he was standing. Oh, by the way, that's
the traditional sites of Sodom and Gomorrah
in the south. Here's Bethel and Ai,
where Lot was standing. And you have to ask that
question, where was he standing when he saw what he saw? Could he have possibly
seen the southern sights? No, because it's completely
blocked by the hills. You cannot see in
that direction. What you can see
from Bethel and Ai, and we excavated at Ai for six
years, that's what you can see. You can see the Kikkar. And if you get over close
enough to the edge of the scarp, you can see the entire
thing, including Jericho. So that's what he saw. So Lot traveled eastward
then, according to Genesis 13. Here's Ai. Here's eastward, and voila. Doesn't say he took
a right-hand turn. He stayed north of the Dead Sea. So this is the
way it shakes out. Lot looked that
direction therefore, and he went that direction. And Sodom can therefore only
be in that particular location in the Kikkar of the Jordan,
north of the Dead Sea. And that's the geography. It cannot be in the
Dead Sea region proper. So that's a lock. Then, we have the chronology
of the Cities of the Plain. This is pretty easy. We can go through
this really quick. Abraham belongs to
what we commonly call the middle Bronze Age. It's the height of
Canaanite civilization. During the middle Bronze
Age, the great cities, the great walled
cities of Canaan that were eventually
seen by Joshua-- remember he said, oh,
we can't go in there. These cities are walled
up to the heavens. Those great cities came to
be during the time of Abraham during the middle Bronze Age. And so the early
Bronze Age is there. The middle Bronze Age is there. Abraham and Lot belong there. But Genesis 10 also talks
about Sodom and the Cities of the Plain. Genesis 10 takes us back to
the beginning of the building of great walled cities. And we know when that
happened archaeologically. It happened during
the early Bronze Age. And so Sodom then spans
the time from Abraham and Lot all the way
back to Genesis 10. So if we're going to find
the Sodom of the Bible, we are going to find
it in a period that spans those periods,
early Bronze, intermediate and middle Bronze Age. That's the proper
time frame for Sodom. Well, interestingly enough,
Jericho occupies that. All these little yellow lines
represent the roads and trade routes of the area. On the other side of the
river, there actually happened to be a whole lot of
little towns and cities, one big one in particular. They all have names. And the big one sitting
at the major intersection is Tall el-Hammam,
what we've been excavating for 12
years, the site that we believe
is biblical Sodom. And every single
one of these sites has the Bronze Age profile
that could qualify it as being part of the
Cities of the Plain. So not only did we
find Sodom we believe, but also many, many others that
can be Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim and any other smaller
cities that were associated as satellites. So here's Tall el-Hammam. And we're looking from the hills
to the east over to the west, and just catching to
the left there the north end of the Dead Sea. And it is overspread by
a large early Bronze Age settlement, and the
intermediate Bronze Age. And then the time
of Abraham, there is a large walled city there. And it is quite large. How big is it? In the same period,
remember a fellow by the name of Melchizedek? Melchizedek was hanging
out with Abraham at a time after Abraham had
chased after the kings. Remember they had sacked Sodom,
taken Lot, his nephew, captive. And he went after them, got
him, defeated the Chedorlaomer, brought the spoils back. And the King of Sodom wanted to
pay, and he said, no, no, no. And then, interesting, the
King of Sodom and Abraham went over to Jerusalem to
the Valley of the Kings and met with Melchizedek. Melchizedek had a city. That city was
Salem, or Jerusalem. How big was Jerusalem
in the time of Abraham, in the time of Melchizedek? It was about 10 acres. How big was
Jerusalem, say, later in the time of King David? Same, about 10 acres. It got a little bit
bigger under King Solomon, but Jerusalem was always
a rather small city. In comparison, the city of
Sodom, King Bera's town, was 62 acres inside
the city wall, not including a lot
of the city that lay in villages that lay
right in the shadow of it outside the city wall. So it was really,
really big in comparison to most, if not all of the
other cities in the region. So it's a large concern,
and was probably the dominant sociopolitical
force in the region. Now, what's the right stuff? The archeology of
the Cities the Plain. I want to focus on one
little quick thing here. It's fortified. Do you remember in
Genesis 19:1 it says, "Lot sat in the
gateway of Sodom." Remember that? "Lot sat in the
gateway of Sodom." Well, if you have a
gateway, you have a wall, because that's what
you use a gate for to get through
the fortifications and get inside the city. So sitting in the gate indicates
that the city was fortified. This next slide, my
assistant director on the Tall el-Hammam excavation
project, Gary Byers and I standing a few years ago on top
of the early Bronze Age city wall. That wall is 2.2 miles long. It is 18 feet thick, and was
probably about 40 feet high in its heyday. So its huge fortification walls. This is Danette and I standing
atop the middle Bronze Age rampart system. The upper city is
separately fortified inside the lower city. So you have a big
wall on the outside, a smaller fortification
on the inside, but still very substantial. And it took somewhere between
60 million and 100 million mud bricks to build the rampart
systems at Tall el-Hammam. Everybody else built
theirs out of packed earth. They just piled up
the dirt in big berms. But the people of Sodom built
all of their fortifications, including their defensive
ramparts, out of mud bricks. Amazing. Nobody else did that. It's the only city
where that's found. It's really incredible. So here's the southern defenses. So there's the early
Bronze Age city wall. And then later,
they refurbished it. And they gave us some new
towers on the outside. And the red color here gives
us the middle Bronze Age city wall. That's the one that was
there in the time of Abraham. And there's an
entrance to the wall. And then we have
a reconstruction of the middle Bronze
Age gateway system. This came to light
about four years ago. And I shared that with you. I want to show you an
updated version of that. We discovered a couple of years
ago that it had a pillared gate house. And I mentioned that before,
but I want to bring it back up. This is the configuration. It's completely different that
any Bronze Age gate house ever discovered in this
part of the world. We think it's because the people
who early on settled at Sodom, what became the city of Sodom,
were originally, many of them from the island of Crete. They were part of the Minoan
civilization of Crete. And if you study the
Cretan civilization, you begin to
understand that they had an interesting unique kind
of culture to raise young boys. And I've talked
about this before, and really don't like
talking about it, but it was a
homosexual arrangement where older men took for
a period of several years a younger-- starting at 12
years old, a 12-year-old boy, and mentored him
for about 10 years, including all the physical
activity that goes with that. And this became the warrior
culture of the Middle East, by the way. And this kind of culture
was spread to Sodom, and it probably
has something to do with how the Sodomites reacted
to the young men, the angels, who came to visit
Lot to warn him of the destruction of the city. And so there's all kinds of
little connections going on here. And so this ties us
to the Minoan culture. This is how the Minoans
built their buildings. And interesting, do you see
as you go in this-- if you ran in the gate and
weren't paying attention, what would you run into? There's a pillar right
smack in the central access of the gatehouse as
you come in the gate. Who would do that? Well, it's a notable question. Because guess what? The Minoans do that. Their temples are
built that way. Their buildings, they always
have right inside the doorway a central pillar. And we have that
feature here as well. So it was a pretty exciting
thing to discover that, because it makes
it quite unique. It even has, we think, a
light well associated with it. Well, here's what it looks like. This is Dr. Lane
[INAUDIBLE] cutaway drawing of what that gate house with
its flanking towers looked like. And so it starts to give you
an idea as Lot sat in the gate, this is the gateway
that he was sitting in. And he was probably
sitting in that very gate house in the shade as
people came in and out of the city doing whatever
he did in the gate. And then here's a recent
reconstruction drawing of what the city of Sodom
may have looked like. We haven't excavated
all of it yet, but we can extrapolate
because we know where the residential areas are. We know where the temples are. We know where the
palace is, and we know where most of the towers are. And this is a really good
faithful rendition of it, kind of gives you an idea. Just throw in one little
exciting discovery, this is one of the most
exciting things for me. It's just a little tiny thing. It's three or four plates of
scale armor wrapped in a tunic from the city of Sodom
from the time of Abraham. This is a piece of the
cloth that you can see. Cloth preserved from the time of
Abraham from the city of Sodom, it's amazing. It's just a little
tiny thing, but these are the kinds of things that can
get an archaeologist excited. We can actually tell that it's
probably made out of linen. It's not wool. It's linen. Just a couple of
pictures here while we're at it not from this past
season, from the season before. You can see what it looks
like on an average dig day. And I hope that
you, some of you, will go with us this coming
late winter, late January through early March. You take one week,
or two, or three, or four, whatever you like. Come and dig with us. And if you want to know
how to do that, you say, oh, I'm too old to dig. So am I. [LAUGHTER] In fact, our
photographer now, I think he just turned 84 this year. He started in his younger
years, and is still going strong going up
and down those hills taking all the photographs. If you can walk a mile on
uneven ground successfully, then you can be a good
volunteer digger at the Tall el-Hammam excavation project. We would love to have you. And if you want to find
out about how to do that, just give me a call. Come and see me afterword
or call me at 33B-IBLE and we'll be glad
to talk to you, tell you how you can do that. This is what it
looks like when you get to a final
photograph and everything that you've excavated
over the last six or eight weeks is all spit
shine polished, cleaned up, swept,
all looking good, and then you take
these photographs. And of course here,
we have this whole lot of different layers represented
from different periods. Now just quickly, I want
to bring some of you who haven't heard of the
destruction of Sodom evidence that we've found, I wanted to
bring you up to speed on that. In this particular area where
Tall el-Hammam is located, there are no late
Bronze Age sites. What that means is that
during the middle Bronze Age in the time of Abraham,
all of these cities in this civilization came
to a screeching sudden halt, and did not continue. They completely died out for
the next seven centuries. It's really unusual,
because remember this is the best watered
agricultural land in the region. They just died, were
wiped out suddenly, and then nobody lived
there for a good long time. Or at least there were no
cities and towns in the area. People still had
to cross the area and use it because
of the trade routes. But in this area,
it's interesting. There are just 0 sites
from the next period. Now you have to ask a
question based on some facts. And the two facts are that
Bronze Age civilization thrived for 2,500 years
with Sodom or Tall el-Hammam as its center. But this Bronze Age
civilization came to a screeching
termination about the end of the middle Bronze
Age, and it remained unoccupied for seven centuries. Why did this happen? What happened? Why did this occur? You have to ask the question. And the Bible gives us the
answer to the question. Now, it's very difficult for
scholars to dive into that. But the fact is that the
archeology absolutely confirms what the Bible describes. So you can't just pass it off. Digging down in the
very early seasons, we found a massive stratum
from the time of Abraham, this massive ash
layer, dark, stinky ash from the destruction
of the city. In this place, it was about
a meter, a meter and a half thick, laying over what
was left of the foundations of the buildings that
had been destroyed. So it was ugly stuff. And down at the bottom of a
similar in the same stratum, down at the bottom
of another trench, we found this little one. And by the way, if you come
to the Museum of Archeology and Biblical History at
Trinity Southwest University-- that museum will
be opening soon, and we'll keep you
posted on that-- this and other pieces of
this kind of material are on display in the museum. But you can see that this
particular piece of a storage jar has some similarities
to this other material to the right, carbon
separation, calcium separation from the silica
at a very high heat. What's interesting is
that the stuff on the left is a middle Bronze Age
pottery shared from Sodom. The stuff on the right is
trinitite from ground 0 of the first atomic
bomb explosion. So they're the same
that kind of material produced in the same manner. And it's pretty
stunning to see that. This is desert glass formed by
impact, meteoritic impact just about four kilometers between
Tall el-Hammam and the Dead Sea. And we now know from Dr.
Phil Silvia's research with seven other university labs
and scientists working with us that the city was literally
blown off its foundations. Here's some bone scatter,
human bone scatter in the ash remains. We also find lots of
other stuff, too-- beads, children's toys, look at
that beautiful vase, bowl, [INAUDIBLE] juglet, all this
stuff from the middle Bronze Age, pieces of bronze jewelry,
a beautiful Hyksos scarab. It's a personal seal. A Bronze Age jar, and prodigious
quantities of this black ash that overspread the
entire destruction layer. But we now know something
really interesting happened. We call it the
3.7KYrBP Kikkar event. That is a meteoritic object
came out of the southwest-- And? We now we think we
know the direction-- came out of the
southwest and obliterated 500 square kilometers that
is the Kikkar of the Jordan. And here it is. Now, what's interesting is
in that part of the city, there's almost no
mud brick adhering to the stone foundations. Literally the city has been
blown off its foundations. If you look behind this
100-foot high rampart for the upper city, this
huge mud brick berm that's about 50 meters
thick at the base, you find lots of mud
brick 10, 20 courses on top of the foundations
up to the top of the rampart so that the blast came
up over the rampart, blew the tops of the
buildings off, especially the palace which is probably
three stories tall at least. Blew it off, literally
sheared it off. And it's amazing. And so we find it
that the direction was in this southwest
to northeast direction. Now, something
else tells us that. Look at this. You say, oh, it's a
picture of a big rock. See that little grinder next
to it like a little stone bowl? Well, it's not little. It's about this big. That's about as big
as a watermelon. That grinding stone that
you see there, this guy, is over a meter long. It weighs over 400 pounds. And you see this nice surf--
you know what a metate is? Seen the grinders
around Here Yeah, this is a big giant metate. It's called a saddle quern. And there's the
surface on the side. The surface, the grinding
surface is like this. That stone was on a little
pedestal made of mud brick. And you'll never
guess which way it was turned over-- from the
southwest to the northeast. It was literally turned over
and spilling off the top of it is the carbonized grain
that was being ground at the time it was turned over. And all the pottery
on this floor was strewn from
southwest to northeast. It's really quite amazing. So it came in like this. Boom. Oh, that was fun. [LAUGHTER] Let's do that again. Let's bring it in
from the southwest. Here it comes. Shoo, at a low altitude it comes
in very shallow and explodes, and completely destroys
the cities of the Kikkar. Now, switch the subject
just a tiny bit. What happens when you
ignore the biblical text? In this particular case
of the Kikkar geography, good things do not
happen geographically when you ignore the Bible. Let me show you. I'm going to show you some
pages from the number one historical Bible
atlas on the planet. It's a really good one. It's very scholarly. It's really the only
scholarly Bible atlas that you could get away
quoting in an article, a scholarly article
or a dissertation. And he has a map
of the Holy Land in the various
archaeological periods. Well, here's one from
the Chalcolithic Period. This is the Copper Stone
Age, the time right before the Bronze Age. But look at this. The whole area in the Kikkar
northeast the Dead Sea where we're working is blank. It's blank. Look at this one. This is the early
Bronze Age site map. It's also blank. It's blank. Look at this one. Here's the intermediate. Except for Ik Tanu, it's blank. By the way, Tall
el-Hammam is now known in the scholarly world as
the largest intermediate Bronze Age city in the Southern Levant. We're the biggest. There's nobody else. I guess that's why
they were the biggest. There isn't another one. They all went out of business. Tall el-Hammam is thriving. All of its satellites
are thriving. Ik Tanu, this other
little city nearby, is just one of our satellites. But yet the information
of the archaeologist that produced this
hasn't gotten them to the point where they've
put it on their maps yet. Look at this Bronze
Age site map. It's completely blank. Now, when you ignore the
Bible, this is what you get. Because look at the actual
area northeast of the Dead Sea. You have lots and lots
and lots of places. Many of these have
been excavated. We've excavated Tall
el-Hammam Kafrein, Nimrin. Others have been excavated. People don't pay attention
to it because it's not part of their narrative. They haven't incorporated
the biblical story of Sodom and these events
into their narrative because they don't
believe they ever existed. The blind leading the blind. So this is being corrected. By the way, people often ask us,
how is the Tall el-Hammam Sodom excavation project being treated
in the scholarly community at large? Well the last three
years, I've been invited. I didn't have to put
in to read a paper and get accepted or rejected. I was invited to present
about Tall el-Hammam at three of the major conferences,
world conferences. Just a few months ago in
April, I had been invited and went to present
in the Jordan Valley section of the Chalcolithic to
EB1 section of that conference. It was the
International Congress on the Archeology of
the Ancient Near East, and I was invited to present. So how are scholars treating it? Well, very, very well from
an archaeological point of view, because they're
really going to look ignorant if they don't include it,
because it's so very important. So now, we're being
routinely asked to participate in these
presentations and conferences about Tall el-Hammam. And by the way, while
I was in Vienna, we were having this
dinner reception at the palace of the
governor, the mayor of Vienna. And one of the archaeologists
who actually works in the region was
not in my session, but she actually came over and
she said, Steve, you lucky dog. You have such a great site. How did you find Tall el-Hammam? [LAUGHTER] And she proceeded to get an
earful of Genesis Chapter 13. And she just smiled
and walked away. But they're starting to find
out you can't ignore the Bible and get away with it. You have to pay
attention to the text. So I start goading them
with this things like this. If in the past, archaeologist
and Bible scholars had taken the Sodom tale seriously,
they would have discovered the civilization in the Land
of the Kikkar a long time ago, but they didn't,
and they didn't. But we did and we did. We just followed the text. It was as simple as that. Let me just, and as we
start to wrap this up, show you a few things
from this past season. Working away, you
can see our folks. This great jar, it's
about this tall. And it was terrific,
but completely empty. Didn't even fill in with dirt. It had no lid. But we unearthed it, it
was completely empty. You could stick your arm
all the way down in there. Don't know why. Don't know how that happens. I've never seen
that happen before, but there it is, beautiful jar. These were our folks
digging this year. And this was a spectacular
find because this hardly ever happens. Well, there was a third jar. It's already been taken out. You see a [INAUDIBLE]
on the right there. These are three large
storage jars packed with grain, carbonized barley. And let's blow it up look at it. This is 3,500-year-old
carbonized barley. It's amazing. Now, that's from
a special place. I'm going to spend the last
three minutes doing this. Because we discovered something
in the last two seasons that just floored
me, just floored me. I didn't see it coming,
wasn't looking for it, but it hit us like
a ton of bricks. Moses and the
Israelites in the Bible, when they got to this location,
it's called the plains of Moab, they camped from Beth
Jeshimoth to Abel-Shittim. And here's the
passage real quick. "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. Now scholars have
already identified our site, Tall el-Hammam,
as the area of Abel-Shittim. What that means is the place
of mourning a catastrophe, Abel means a place of mourning
a catastrophe, where there are Shittim, acacia trees. Now, we're already that. But this other thing
that's interesting. What is Beth Jeshimoth? Beth Jeshimoth means
house of the desolation or the destruction, house of
the desolation or destruction. Now, I never even thought
about this before. I thought, it's just a place. We don't have a
geographical place because Sodom was destroyed
and there's nobody living there when Moses gets there. It's just a blank plain. That's why they don't
have to fight anybody. They just pull up. All the Israelites encamp
there, and they just wait to cross the river. But Moses being a
general would have noticed that on the top of
Tall el-Hammam, former Sodom, on the top, there had
been built a little house. Now, here's Abel-Shittim
and there's Jericho across the river, by the way. Moses' command
encampment would be on the top of that site
because of its 360 views. And the Levitical encampment
would be around it. And the Israelites then would
just camp wherever they could. Now, it looks like this. That's Moses' command camp, the
lower city, the Levitical camp, the Tabernacle in yellow. And the Israelites
camped all around it. It's a perfect set up. But what's interesting
is Beth Jeshimoth. Now, look at this. We discovered on the top of Tall
el-Hammam a single, isolated free-standing building from
the time of Moses and Joshua. It was a tariff house. I'll show you in a minute why
we know it was a tariff house. But it's just about a few
meters by a few meters. It's overly built.
It's got huge beams. It's a government thing. This is not a house. This is a government
building for collecting taxes from the people who are
coursing through the area. And guess what? Let me just show you here. There it is. Right there on top, here
it is right on the top of the pile of the ruins. That yellow represents that
house, the fallen down. Look at this huge beam 30
centimeters in diameter. And there's a carbonized
chair laying on the floor. Here's what I think. I think Moses would have
co-opted this particular house when he came there. Why not? You wouldn't have destroyed it. You would have used it and then
destroyed it on the way out. I have a sneaking suspicion
that Moses used this furniture. This is a leg of a chair
carbonized on the floor. There were other things. There were also balance
scale pans made of bronze. So they were enacting business
and some scales, some weights. I really think that
Moses very well could have co-opted and
used this particular house for the several months or
a year or so until they crossed over the river. And on a table seated
in this chair or one of the other chairs that were
carbonized on this floor, Moses completed the
book of Deuteronomy. Now, talk about goosebumps when
you look at something like that and you go, it sounds
so far-fetched, but the archeology, and the
logic and the geography, it all just works so perfectly
that it was so very exciting. So that's just
another little thing that's going on-- the
house of the desolation. By the way if, you
built a tariff house on the top of a pile
of ruins, might you call it the house
of the desolation? So maybe the house
of the desolation really was a literal
house after all. It accords with, it
matches the Bible exactly, so that was very exciting. Well, we could go on and
on and on until midnight, but we're out of time. We're going to get the band
out here to dismiss everybody. But listen, the
Bible works not only for your own personal life. It works in archeology. It works everywhere
you apply it. Trust it. Follow it. God bless you all. [APPLAUSE] [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.
