The Last Days Of Sodom And Gomorrah

Modern forensics can perform miracles, even on old bones that have been buried for more than four thusand years. In the preceeding picture, we see the reconstructed image of your typical, garden variety Somomite. Further scientific investigations around the area of the environs to the Southeast of The Dead Sea have gone so far as to provide not just tantalizing clues, but a great deal of verifiable evidence as to what actually happenned to the old, long destroyed “Cities Of The Plain”.

There were five of them altogether, Sodom being, according to tradition, the most important of the five. Next in stature seems to have been Gomorrah. All of them were burnt to cinders, with the sole exception of one called Zoar, the smallest of the five, which later seems to have become abandoned. In fact, the names are actually incorrect. The actual original name of Sodom was “Bab edh Dhra”. Sodom was given as the name of the city way after the fact, and is a name that tranlates simply as “Burndt”. The name of Gomorrah was actually “Numeira”. The name by which it has become known to us simply translates as “A Ruined Heap”.

So what exactly happenned? How did Bab edh Dhra become “Burndt”, and Numeira “A Ruined Heap”? The answer seems to have been a coming together of a series of unfortunate catclysmic natural events. There is a vast fault along the coast of Africa that now seperates it from the Arabian peninsula by way of the Red Sea. Evidently, there was at one time a great earthquake that opened up veins of great reserves of natural gas, which, being lighter than air, floated up into the upper atmosphere. Simultaneously, the event that triggerred this massive earthquake simultaneously caused the ruption of a great volcana, possibly the volcano of Thera off the coast of Greece, or possibly another one.

As the hot burning ashes made their way across the atmosphere, they eventually made their way to the skies over the five cities,whereupon the exposed and escaping natural gas condensed around the sulpheric ashes and embers, which then erupted into flames, of thousands of degrees farenheit, which then rained down mercilessly on Bad edh Dhra and Numeira.

Numeira is an interesting case. For, by the time the catastrophe occurred, the city had been abandoned. Whether this was in response to the first earthquake, or whether Numeira, which may have been an astrological observatory and so might have seen the raining sulfur before it approached the city, is unknown. It’s quite possible that the city was abandoned before any of these events, as it had become economically unfeasible as a community, due to the natural arridness of the region. Whatever the case, they left. Not one person within the environs of “Gommorrah” died as a result of the “fire from heaven”.

Sodom is a different story. There was indeed a city there that was for the time vastly huge. In fact, it contained some 200,000 to 250,000 people. All of them in tombs. Yes, Sodom seems to have been a necropolis. The gentleman at the top of the page was not a victim of the flames from heaven, it seems, but a mere corpse who had been buried well before this event.

The city that was determined to have existed in these environs and which indeed contained a living population, seems to have amounted to an amazingly low figure of from 400 to 1000 persons. Possibly an ancient world funeral cult and community. Those buried here, including our featured Sodomite, may then have been from any number of areas of the Canaanite lands.

There is also a question as to the time of the destruction. Using the Bible as a guide, the timeline would have been somewhere between 2000 to 2100 BC. Yet, according to scientific carbon dating and other such analysis, these cities seem to have been destroyed actually some two hundred years before this.

So what is going on here? It seems to me that the ancient Hapuru, the ancestors of the Hebrews-the Israelites-had heard tales of the cities destruction, and this became the germ of a myth. In ancient times, almost all cultures contained symbolic stories of evil cities, ruled by wicked and avaricous people. This is the case of Homers The Illiad, and is also the reason for the Battle of Kuruksetra which forms the backdrop to The Bhagavad Gita. So these stories fit this need of the Hapiru quite nicely. But there must have been a point to it.

Most people assume the Sodomites were destroyed because they were homosexuals, and though the Biblical account does imply this as a partial reason, there were others as well. Given interpretations incude everything from ritual prostitution, to beastiality, to arrogance and pure avarice. Human sacrifice was as well said to be the norm.

But mainly, their chief sin seems to have involved the crime of inhospitality, as witnessed the account of the Sodomites demands to have sexual relations with Lots visitors, who were two angels. Once you look at this, and all the other reasons, for the Sodomites destruction, and you look at it plainly in the context of the times in which the story was being circulated, it becomes all too crystal clear.

The Hapiru were engaged in a policy of genocide. They were suppossedly told by God that all the then present inhabitants of the land-the Canaanites-should be destroyed. Every single one of them. Every man, woman, and child. Even their cattle and livestock were to be destroyed in some cases, and even in some cases their gold and other valubles were to be destroyed. The reason for this is a subject for another post, but suffice it to say, for whatever reason, it amounted to a cultural and racial extinction on the scale of mass murder, one that would have made the Nazis envious in it’s scale and scope, and, in the long run, in it’s degree of success.

Of course, something this profound has to have with it something in the way of an explanation. The long destroyed and yet, at the time, barely visible remants of Bad edh Dhra and Numeira , provided the entirety of the reason. The Canaanites were, in every way, as bad, if not in some cases worse, than the preceeding cities of Sodom and Gommorrah. These were the people that God himself had destroyed, due to their sin and avarice. Now, the Hapiru, God’s chosen people, were being called on to conduct this holy war, this merciless slaughter, of the people of Canaan. And they must not fail. They must not faulter. It wasn’t a mere murderous venture. It was divine retribution, as vistied by God himself through the hands of his chosen people.

The Caananites did indeed share all the qulaities of the Sodomites, including, it is vital to realize, what has been interpreted as their chief sin, that of inhospitality. They probably despised the Hapiru. They didn’ tfit in with the remainder of the population, and were to be carefully watched, if possible destroyed. Whatever the truth of the Canaanites feelings about them, it was probably the truth as the ancient Israelites saw it. And the long forgotten Cities of The Plain provided not just an excuse, but an inspiration, to destroy the people that were in the way of their destiny.