Home
Book of Genesis
The Book of Genesis contains some of the most dramatic stories ever told. One of them has stood for thousands of years as a powerful lesson in the perils of wickedness: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
According to the Bible, the men of Sodom 'were wicked, such sinners against the Lord, He decided to destroy them'. God allowed Lot, the one good man living there, to flee the town with his family, before God showed his wrath. But Lot's wife disobeyed God's warning not to look back towards Sodom as she fled, and she was turned into a pillar of salt, where she stood.
For the wicked people of Sodom, not even that escape was open to them: soon the Lord showed his displeasure, and 'rained down fire and brimstone... He destroyed everyone living there and everything growing in the ground'.
'There's no agreement among archaeologists, scientists and Biblical scholars that Sodom and Gomorrah existed at all...'
The story is certainly dramatic - but is it just fiction? There's no agreement among archaeologists, scientists and Biblical scholars that Sodom, and its sister town Gomorrah, existed at all - let alone that it came to a sudden and apocalyptic end.
However, one man is convinced that Sodom and Gomorrah not only existed, but were also destroyed by a terrible natural apocalypse matching the description in the Book of Genesis. Graham Harris is a retired geologist with a passion for solving ancient riddles - and the clues to this one, he says, are in the Bible itself.
The Bible places Sodom and Gomorrah in the region of the Dead Sea, between what are now Israel and Jordan in the Middle East. Harris spent a decade working in the area. He became convinced the conditions there were right for a huge earthquake that would trigger a massive landslide. So complete would be the destruction, the event would pass into folklore.
Could science prove that Harris's scenario might have happened? Professor Lynne Frostick, a geologist from Hull University in England, and Jonathan Tubb from the British Museum, decided to investigate just that.
They travelled to the Middle East to pursue their research, and their findings there enabled Dr Gopal Madabhushi, at the Cambridge University Centrifuge Laboratory back in England, to build an accurate scaled-down model of the buildings in Sodom, and the ground on which they stood. Dr Madabhushi then subjected the model to a simulated earthquake - and his data provided the ultimate proof on whether whole towns could have been destroyed.
 |
Computer-generated impression of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah |
 | |
| Requires Real Player. See WebWise for help downloading it. | |
Published: 01-04-2001
Bookmark with:
What are these?