My bias for stories in the Bible that describe events is that they're likely real events that have been mythologized. If this finding is accurate and accurately reported, then believers will find proof of God's handiwork and atheists will find random chance which believers turned into divine punishment.
Personally to me this is one more example of a story in scripture which appears to have had a real origin. A search shows this was mentioned in a thread a couple of years ago but without a link to the study which includes the physical evidence.
New research suggests that fire from the sky in the form of a small asteroid annihilated an ancient city near the Dead Sea now called Tall el-Hammam in the biblical city of Sodom located in the Jordan Valley 3,600 years ago.
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About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.
...
How do we know that all of this actually happened near the Dead Sea in Jordan millennia ago?
Getting answers required nearly fifteen years of painstaking excavations by hundreds of people. It also involved detailed analyses of excavated material by more than two dozen scientists in ten states in the U.S., as well as Canada and the Czech Republic. When our group finally published the evidence recently in the journal Scientific Reports, the 21 co-authors included archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic-impact experts, and medical doctors.
...
It’s possible that an oral description of the city’s destruction may have been handed down for generations until it was recorded as the story of the Biblical Sodom. The Bible describes the devastation of an urban center near the Dead Sea in Jordan: stones and fire fell from the sky, more than one city was destroyed, thick smoke rose from the fires, and city inhabitants were killed.
Could this be an ancient eyewitness account?
Personally to me this is one more example of a story in scripture which appears to have had a real origin. A search shows this was mentioned in a thread a couple of years ago but without a link to the study which includes the physical evidence.
Asteroid Annihilated City Thought to be Biblical Sodom
New research suggests that fire from the sky in the form of a small asteroid annihilated an ancient city near the Dead Sea now called Tall el-Hammam in the biblical city of Sodom located in the Jordan Valley 3,600 years ago.
...
About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.
...
How do we know that all of this actually happened near the Dead Sea in Jordan millennia ago?
Getting answers required nearly fifteen years of painstaking excavations by hundreds of people. It also involved detailed analyses of excavated material by more than two dozen scientists in ten states in the U.S., as well as Canada and the Czech Republic. When our group finally published the evidence recently in the journal Scientific Reports, the 21 co-authors included archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic-impact experts, and medical doctors.
...
It’s possible that an oral description of the city’s destruction may have been handed down for generations until it was recorded as the story of the Biblical Sodom. The Bible describes the devastation of an urban center near the Dead Sea in Jordan: stones and fire fell from the sky, more than one city was destroyed, thick smoke rose from the fires, and city inhabitants were killed.
Could this be an ancient eyewitness account?
