Sodom and Gomorrah

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Ancients – Episode on Sodom and Gomorrah

Introduction

In the March 9, 2025 episode of The Ancients, hosted by Tristan Hughes from History Hit, the focus delves into one of the Bible’s most infamous narratives: the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Featuring esteemed guest Dr. Dylan Johnson, a historian specializing in the ancient Near East and a biblical scholar from Cardiff University, the episode explores the biblical accounts, historical contexts, archaeological investigations, and the enduring cultural significance of these legendary cities.

Biblical Narrative of Sodom and Gomorrah

Dr. Johnson begins by outlining the primary biblical accounts of Sodom and Gomorrah found in Genesis chapters 18 and 19. These cities, often referred to collectively as the Cities of the Plain, are emblematic of sin and divine retribution. The narrative centers around key themes of hospitality and morality:

• Divine Visit and Hospitality: In Genesis 18, Abraham and Sarah demonstrate exemplary hospitality to three visitors, one of whom is identified as God himself. Dr. Johnson notes, “Hospitality is one of the key themes... rewarded with a divine blessing” (05:20).

• Judgment and Destruction: The tone shifts in Genesis 19, where God reveals His intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah due to their rampant sinfulness. Abraham intercedes on behalf of the cities, negotiating for the salvation of the righteous, epitomized by Lot and his family. However, the negotiations fail to spare the cities, leading to their obliteration by fire and brimstone.

Dr. Johnson emphasizes the prominence of Sodom over Gomorrah within the biblical text, highlighting that “Sodom is mentioned 38 times compared to Gomorrah’s 19” (07:11). This underscores Sodom’s role as the primary symbol of vice.

Historical and Archaeological Context

The discussion transitions to the historical and archaeological pursuits to locate Sodom and Gomorrah. Dr. Johnson references the 1973 surveys by archaeologists Thomas Schaub and Walter Rast, who identified potential sites such as Bad Ed Dara and Numira near the Dead Sea. Despite these findings, Dr. Johnson remains skeptical about directly associating these sites with the biblical cities due to a significant temporal gap of approximately 1500 years between the alleged destruction and the composition of the biblical texts.

Furthermore, the episode addresses the 1976 Ebla Bible Controversy, where initial interpretations suggested that ancient Ebla texts mentioned Sodom and Gomorrah. However, subsequent analyses debunked these claims, reaffirming that the references were to Mesopotamian cities unrelated to the biblical narrative (35:16).

Literary and Theological Analysis

Dr. Johnson delves into the literary complexities of the Genesis accounts, contrasting Genesis 14 with Genesis 18-19. Genesis 14 presents a narrative where Abram acts as a military leader, rescuing Lot from hostile eastern kings. In contrast, Genesis 18-19 introduces themes of divine judgment and morality without direct historical references. This suggests an evolution in the storytelling, where earlier narratives focused on familial loyalty and bravery, later incorporating theological motifs of sin and punishment.

He also explores how Sodom and Gomorrah have been reinterpreted in later biblical texts, such as Ezekiel 16, where Jerusalem is metaphorically compared to Sodom, emphasizing themes of decadence and divine retribution. Dr. Johnson states, “The association of Sodom and Gomorrah just generically with sin... comes to the fore in exilic and post-exilic literature” (32:24).

Parallels in Other Ancient Cultures

Addressing the broader ancient Near Eastern context, Dr. Johnson notes that many cultures possess narratives of city destructions attributed to divine or supernatural causes. Comparable stories include the mythical Atlantis and various Sumerian city laments, which, although differing in specifics, share the motif of divine or catastrophic destruction as a response to human folly or decadence. He remarks, “Human cultures have a tendency to converge in that way” (39:38).

Modern Reception and Cultural Significance

The episode also explores why the story of Sodom and Gomorrah remains relevant and captivating today. Dr. Johnson attributes its enduring appeal to several factors:

• Familiarity and Mystery: The cities’ legendary status and the fact that they remain unlocated in modern times imbue the narrative with a sense of mystery and adventure (42:03).

• Cultural and Religious Relevance: References to Sodom and Gomorrah permeate contemporary discussions on morality, ethics, and divine justice, maintaining their prominence in both religious and secular discourse.

• Symbolism of Lost Civilizations: Similar to other lost cities like Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah symbolize the hubris and eventual downfall of civilizations, a theme that resonates across various cultures and historical epochs.

Conclusion

In summary, this episode of The Ancients provides a comprehensive exploration of Sodom and Gomorrah, intertwining biblical exegesis with historical inquiry and cultural analysis. Dr. Dylan Johnson effectively elucidates the multifaceted dimensions of the narrative, highlighting its significance within ancient texts and its lasting impact on modern cultural and religious thought.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Hospitality and Divine Blessing: “Hospitality is one of the key themes... rewarded with a divine blessing” (05:20) – Dr. Dylan Johnson

• Sodom’s Prominence: “Sodom is mentioned 38 times compared to Gomorrah’s 19” (07:11) – Dr. Dylan Johnson

• Ebla Bible Controversy: “He makes a very ostentatious claim... it fizzled out” (35:16) – Dr. Dylan Johnson

• Cultural Narratives: “Human cultures have a tendency to converge in that way” (39:38) – Dr. Dylan Johnson

• Enduring Appeal: “They’re well known... it was the same appeal with Troy” (42:03) – Dr. Dylan Johnson

Timestamps

• 05:20 – Discussion on hospitality as a key theme in Genesis
• 07:11 – Emphasis on Sodom’s prominence over Gomorrah
• 35:16 – Explanation of the Ebla Bible Controversy
• 39:38 – Parallels with other ancient cultures’ destruction narratives
• 42:03 – Reasons behind the enduring appeal of Sodom and Gomorrah

Transcript

[Tristan Hughes]

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the Ancients ad free. Get early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with the History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary All About Petra and the Nabateans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.

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[Biblical Narrator]

Suddenly, the Lord rained fire and brimstone on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed them and the whole valley along with all the people there and everything that grew on the land. Early the next morning, Abraham hurried to the place where he had stood in the presence of the Lord. He looked down at Sodom and Gomorrah and the whole valley and saw smoke rising from the land like smoke from a huge furnace.

[Tristan Hughes]

Those were Excerpts from Genesis 19 in the old Testament describing one of the most famous stories from the Hebrew the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by God for their sinfulness. Today the names Sodom and Gomorrah, particularly Sodom, are well known and infamous. And when we did a recent poll asking which biblical story we should cover next, well, Sodom and Gomorrah won convincingly. We're going to explore the stories about these two cities that survive in the Book of Genesis. We'll delve into the context, their supposed location near the Dead Sea, and whether there is any historical basis to the biblical of Sodom and Gomorrah. It's the Ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Our guest today is Dr. Dylan Johnson from Cardiff University, a historian of the ancient near east and biblical scholar. Dylan has been on the podcast before to talk through the stories of Moses and the Exodus and that of the Ark of the Covenant. Dylan is a wonderful speaker and this was a really interesting chat about Sodom and Gomorrah.

[Host]

Enjoy. Dylan, it is a pleasure to have you back on the podcast today.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

It's great to be back.

[Host]

And we did the Ark and the Covenant last time and we did Moses as well. So you are one of our go to experts for the book of Exodus, the book of Genesis, and exploring the stories of these well known objects and figures from the Old Testament and Sodom and Gomorrah. It feels like another well known story from that part of the Bible.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Yeah, some people know a version of the story. I think in the podcast we can kind of go through the fact that there's actually multiple. But most people know the name Sodom and Gomorrah, that's for sure.

[Host]

So what is the big question? First of all, what is the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah?

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

So the one that most people will know is more or less contained in two chapters in the book of Genesis. That's the first book of the Bible, chapters 18 and 19. There's a couple allusions a little bit earlier to what's about to happen, but basically Sodom and Gomorrah are what are known as the Cities of the Plain. Two of five, actually. And in a little while we'll get to what those other three cities are. But for the most part, these two are a pair. Sodom and Gomorrah. They're mentioned together quite frequently. Not always, but quite frequently. And the content of Genesis 18 through 19 is kind of two stories smushed into one. The first story in chapter 18 about a divine visit. Three men, they're called men, initially show up to the house of Abram and his wife Sira or Sarai. And these three men are very. At least one of them is very quickly identified as none other than God himself. So very interesting. Has kind of parallels with Greek stories about divine visitors.

[Host]

And hospitality as well, I'm guessing. As well.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Exactly. Hospitality is One of the key themes, in fact, it's probably the connecting theme between the two chapters. And so in this first divine visit, these three visitors come, one of whom is God. The other two, who knows? Obviously Christians, very simple answer for who those other two are. But for the ancient Jews who produced it, this is actually somewhat of a mystery who these other two are. We'll get to them maybe in a moment. But because Abram and Sarai demonstrate the guest hospitality rites, which are basically, you know, to welcome your guests, to offer them food, to house them, give them lodging, they're rewarded with a divine blessing. And that divine blessing is a promise that Sarai, who's well advanced in age, already, will bear a son, and that son would eventually become Isaac. So that's basically the first part of the story. Positive, happy. And then it turns a little dark. And then it turns a little dark because this guest, who is none other than God himself, reveals what he's been conspiring to do to these two cities called Sodom and Gomorrah. We'd had a couple references a little bit before this episode, so we know that Sodom and Gomorrah, they exist somewhere near the Dead Sea or maybe in the Jordan Valley. We're not exactly clear.

[Host]

So they're geographically positioned in the literature, in the story, at least.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Yeah. So again, not consistently, but it seems to be that based on quite a few descriptions geographically, but also geological descriptions of the region should situate them in the Dead Sea. And we can kind of get to that in a moment. But basically, these two cities are for some reason, synonymous archetypes of places of sin, the worst places that could possibly be. And basically what this divine visitor reveals after the blessing he gives to his guests is that he's planning to destroy these two cities. Fire and brimstone.

[Host]

Fire and brimstone. That's it. And just to clarify, so the location of this house where the divine visitor, where God and his two followers, they receive hospitality, that house itself is not in Sodom or Gomorrah. It's a different location. And he's talking about Sodom and Gomorrah from outside, almost.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Yeah, exactly. It's at a place called the Oaks of Mamre. And Mamre's some biblical figure who's associated with this kind of pre Israelite group known as the Amorites, who they are. You'll need another podcast to cover that. But basically it's away from the Dead Sea region. But Abram has a vested interest in these two cities because his kinsman Whose name is Lots, has settled in Sodom, and we know about that a few chapters earlier. So he tries to dissuade God from destroying these cities. And there's kind of this interesting didactic back and forth between God and Abram, which raises really interesting theological questions of can you really dissuade God from doing things? And why would God need to be reminded of morality and things like that? But in any case, the back and forth negotiation is basically, if they're able to find just 10 good people in Sodom, then Sodom and Gomorrah will be spared. So the takeaway again from this first chapter is Sodom is definitely taking the lead in the narrative. Gomorrah is really. It's there, but it's really not as prominent. So the main story is following the city of Sodom. And in fact, if you actually just look across the biblical text, sodom is mentioned 38 times in Gomorrah, only 19. And Gomorrah is only ever mentioned with.

[Host]

Sodom because always, even now, we say Sodom and Gomorrah, it's never Gomorrah and Sodom, is it?

[Tristan Hughes]

Right.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

And there's no independent stories about Gomorrah. Right. It's just destroyed alongside Sodom. So if we're really going to focus in on the narrative, it's really Sodom we're talking about. And then Gomorrah kind of tags along. So that gets us to the end of the chapter 18. And then the narrative switches, and what happens is basically these other two men who are now suddenly called what are called malakim in Hebrew, angels, messengers, not human beings, in any case, they're sent to Sodom and they go to the house of Lot. And again, this hospitality theme recurs. Lot brings them in, he shows them hospitality. The problem is the Sodomites are the antithesis to that. They show up at the door of Lot and they demand that Lot give these two men angels, whatever they are, to the crowd, to the mob, and in proper euphemistic biblical words, so that they may know them. And that specific line is where a whole bunch of associations of Sodom with sexual deviancy and other different sexual acts. That's where that derives from, because the threat is quite clearly sexual assault of some kind. Lot refuses. There's a strange offer to send his own daughters out to appease the mob. It didn't come to fruition because ultimately the messengers, the men, the angels, they manage to ferry Lot and his family out of the city, his wife, his children, to the Nearby other city of the plane called Zoar. And then we get the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, presumably as well, with again, these classical King James words, fire and brimstone. No one knows what brimstone is anymore, but it's just sulfur. So the story essentially ends there. And then after this episode, these two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, become bywords for sin and punishment. And they're going to enter into the biblical imagination as these archetypes of those two outcomes, which obviously happens quite a bit, recurs quite a bit in the unfolding history of Israel.

[Host]

And then Judah describing enemy cities, I'm guessing is Sodom and Gomorrah or describing their own cities.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Jerusalem is destroyed by the Babylonians because it was sinful and it's being punished. Samaria, the northern capital of the northern kingdom, is destroyed for the exact same reason. So in the Psalms and in various other texts, in fact, far more often, they describe their own cities as Sodom and Gomorrah. A couple times they will label places like Babylon.

[Host]

But it's interesting also how there is a lot, and you've mentioned this to me before we started recording, I mean, theological baggage with those two chapters, isn't there, surrounding Sodom and Gomorrah and this whole narrative, saving this one family related to Abraham, but then everyone else is just consigned to being destroyed by God. I mean, the theological discussions are aplenty in the chapter.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Exactly. So it's extremely theologically loaded based on the questions of sin and of mercy and of proportional destruction. And the other component is also that it's bound up in this bigger narrative. The Sodom and Gomorrah story that most people would know from chapters 18 and 19 concern Abraham and his wife Sarah. And the catch is also is that it's part of this broader narrative about Abraham or Abram and his kinsman Lot. And so when we encounter other references to Sodom and Gomorrah and then the five cities of the plains, which we'll get to, it's assume that narrative that I just described, chapters 18 and 19. But we now think that that's a pretty late development. Sodom and Gomorrah is probably an old tradition, folk tradition, but that specific story with all the details, with Lot, with the three messengers or the three divine beings, the hospitality theme, the sexual deviancy component, it's only there. No other biblical text seems to be aware that Abraham has anything to do with Sodom and Gomorrah. But the problem is that once you read that story, you kind of can't escape it. You always are going to be with every reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, thinking of that whole story. So what I'm trying to piece apart here is maybe if that's the last piece added there is to get to some of the, if not the historicity of these events, at least to access what the oldest story was. And it's not there, is what I'm trying to say.

[Host]

But is that important to highlight also, we might think today, Book of Genesis at the beginning of the Bible, it must have been written first, but of course, almost, it feels like an onion. There are so many different layers to these stories, and when they're added and compiled together, it's not that the oldest stories are at the beginning and that the stories we have today were the earliest versions of them either.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Right, exactly. It's something that I struggle to teach the students sometimes, is that there's a clear narrative trajectory in the Bible from the beginning of time to more or less the Persian period. And at certain points, that intersects with actual chronology. But again, it's a narrative chronology. So when something occurs early in the biblical text or it's based early, doesn't have much bearing on when that text was actually written. So the best example is the story of creation is probably pretty late, whereas a prophetic text like Hosea is probably much older. So you can't exactly correlate the narrative context with the scribal context, the composition of those texts.

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[Host]

We'Ve covered that main narrative story, Genesis book 18 to 19, but there's another part of the book of Genesis, isn't there, which talks about Sodom and Gomorrah that I feel we need to talk about first before visiting those other cities and the historicity and archaeology about it.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Right? Exactly. So this gets to a completely different also in Genesis, but it's a completely different chapter in chapter 14, which is a chapter that has long been recognized as one of the strangest chapters in the book of Genesis. It's going all over the place in terms of what it's talking about, its content. It concerns international politics, which is completely out of place in the book of Genesis. That's more at home in kind of Kings and Samuel and things like that. It has Abram in this section, essentially as a king with an army that he raises. He encounters a strange priest called Melchizedek, who's the priest of El Elyon in pre Israelite Jerusalem. And then of course there's these references to this strange battle between the four kings of the east and then the five cities of the plain. And so what's most interesting here, before I even get into the content of Genesis 14, is that this is the story. This is the Sodom and Gomorrah and then the three other cities that other biblical texts seem to know, they don't know Genesis 18:19, at least there's no clear indication. But texts like Amos, 4 Hosea, 11, and 1 Isaiah, so texts that we tend to date earlier or at least while there's still a monarchy around, they know this text, they know this story and the associations of Sodom and Gomorrah therefore, are not with sin and punishment and all of the details in chapters 18 and 19, but with the strange battle in chapter 14.

[Host]

Sorry, just to interject there, you mentioned a monarchy and all that. Just so we know, what do you mean by monarchy there? What are we talking about?

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Right, so we're talking about the existence of biblical or Israelite and Judahite monarchies. Basically, time frame we're imagining here is roughly 1000 till 586. So texts produced in that period we call monarchic. Texts produced after 586, when Judahites were exiled into Babylon, we'll call exilic. And then their return. I mean, there's phases of return, but we'll say roughly 539 and later into the Persian period is post exilic. So the only text other biblical traditions seem to know is this Genesis 14. So what is Genesis 14 the story basically picks up with? Again, it's about Abram. He's living near the city of Hebron. That's currently in the west bank, not too far from Jerusalem, but not at the Dead Sea, importantly. And his brother Lot has settled in the city of Sodom. So that kind of gives us the connection to the bigger picture. But the actual content of Genesis 14, at least the first 11 verses, have nothing to do with Abram, have nothing to do with Lot, have nothing to do with that. It talks about a group of four eastern kings who make war on the cities of the plain. So I suppose I'll start with the eastern kings. So first off, none of these kings are known from history. Their names are clearly meant to evoke Eastern empires. Some are accurate and some are less clear, but we can't identify any of them. The first king is Amrafel, King of Shinar. Shinar, we know, is how biblical writers refer to the land of Sumer, that is extreme south of modern Iraq.

[Host]

Place like Uruk and Dur in the Sumerian kind of area.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Exactly, yeah. Yeah. So pre Babylon. Babylon, basically. The next is Arioch, King of Elessar. No idea. No idea about these. There's hypotheses, but really this is the only reference to this king or to this place. The other king is Hedor Laomer. That's a tricky name because it's an Elamite name. And Elam is pre Persian Iran, so it's an ancient kingdom as well. And the last is Tidal, King of the Goyim. And Goyim just means the nations. So these are figures who the biblical writers are associated with extremely great antiquity, but also coming from the east. So before they get to the Dead Sea, we learn about how these kings of the east, they kind of have some kind of coalition. They come, they fight with a motley crew of peoples who are the peoples of the land. As far as the biblical writers are concerned, these are the pre Israelite inhabitants. So again, they're clearly setting these events in a very, very ancient past, in the very distant past. So these kings encounter groups like the Rephaim, which are often remembered as giants, the Amalekites, this quintessential enemy of Israel, the Hurrians, which is a Bronze Age people who lived up in kind of Syria, northern Iraq region, and other obscure groups. So they come make war with these peoples before then turning their attention to the cities of the plain. And finally we get to the cities of the plains. So we have Bera, king of Sodom, one of the targets, Birsha, king of Gomorrah. And then we get the other cities of the plains. We have a king of a place called Admah named Shinab, a king of a place called Zeboyim named Shemeber, and then a king or the king of Bela. We don't know if that's the name of the king or the name of the town which is associated with this. Zoar. Zoar was the place where Lot and his family fled at the destruction of Sodom. So these are the enemies of these eastern kings. And long story short, they lose the fight. And the instigator of all of this, Gerola Omar, king of Elam, he takes prisoner Lot. So this is the kinsman of Abram. But only after 11 verses, I should say, does Abram suddenly appear in the story. And then it goes in strange directions. So it really seems like this whole chapter is a bit of a patchwork. But that first 11 verses, that looks like some kind of a core old story, at least as far as it's represented in other texts. Because in other texts we have these cities named. So Zeboyim and Admah are named in other biblical texts. So they know these places. And in fact, those places are sometimes named without Sodom and Gomorrah. So exactly what the association is with these cities and this story is not entirely clear, but at least we know that biblical writers are aware of it outside of the book of Genesis.

[Host]

Is it also interesting? Because what really struck me is when you mentioned how it's almost kind of the coming together of five different cities. And if memory serves me right, isn't it with the Philistines later that they have five cities, and sometimes they do here, like the Pentapolis, five city states together. You almost see this repeating idea of five cities being linked in some sort of entity or another in particular stories.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Yeah, I hadn't actually thought of that or made that connection. That's a great connection I'm sure somebody has somewhere in the literature. But, I mean, it's important then, too, because of course, the Pentapolis becomes kind of the fixation of the enemy in the early history of Israel, at least as it's depicted. So there may be a connection there. Now the question is just how fixed were these five cities of the plain? Because eventually they start to get paired off, and Sodom and Gomorrah kind of stand on their own. Admah and Zeboyim are mentioned on their own as well. But at least, I guess when we think about bringing all of these diverse traditions together, it becomes five, and that could be significant. Just as significant as well is the four Eastern kings, because the places that they're associated with Sumer, Elam, maybe something in the north and maybe something in the west. These might fall into a basic cognitive map of the ancient Near Eastern world, which usually makes its appearance in royal inscriptions as the four quarters of the world, which is much like the cardinal directions, northeast, southwest. They describe these in terms of cultures. And certainly Sumer and Elam are two cardinal directions. The other two places, we have no clue where they are, so we can't really decide. But some scholars tend to think that that's what's being evoked here, that these are the kings of the whole world coming to bring war to the Dead Sea region.

[Host]

But also, it's almost like the five cities standing up against these powerful, mighty powers coming from the east. And as you've highlighted earlier, if this is the story that includes Sodom and Gomorrah, that seems to be more better known when referring to these cities later in the Bible. Should we therefore think that actually, many of the people who were reading the Bible would not have associated Sodom and Gomorrah first and foremost with sin and infamy, but actually, this story of defense against these powers to the east, first.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Of all, it's certainly possible. It's hard to exactly tell because there is some kind of a judgmental tone in even some of these earlier ones. They talk a lot about the overthrow of these cities. And so whether or not that judgmental tone is there in the original narrative, we just have Genesis 14 in the prophetic texts. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah. There is that judgmental tone, so they do somewhat associate it, which makes sense because then there's room for extrapolation in chapters 18 and 19 then to really build on this. So there is a sense even in this early stage that these places got what they deserved. But I should also add that after we leave verse 11 and go into verse 12, Abram shows back up, he musters an army, he goes to war with herd ala Omar, and he is victorious. So there is also this kind of redemption through the figure of Abram, who's for the only time in the entire book of Genesis acting like a king here. So it's really hard to tell, I would say, if all of this sin and sanction emerges only in those chapters, but it's certainly much less prominent in chapter 14.

[Host]

Well, let's now look at the location as you mentioned earlier there, Dylan. So is it believed, or, I mean, is it expressly mentioned, that as you said, the location right by the Dead Sea or in the Dead Sea, I mean, what does it seem to suggest?

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Yeah, so it seems almost definitive that the, the imagined landscape of both these stories is probably just south of the Dead Sea because of. Well, for reasons I'm about to get to. So let's start with the oldest story, at least what we think looks like the oldest story, which is Genesis 14. Now, there's some references just to the geology of the region. The city of the plain, it's taken to be the Plain of Jordan. Now where exactly the Plain of Jordan is, that can be a lot of different places, but usually if they're going to refer to, let's say, just the region east of the Jordan river, that's usually the plateau or the highlands. The plain is usually associated with this area just to the south of the Dead Sea. Again, we're not 100% sure this is historical geography, but we get a little bit of clarification that the battle happens in a place called the Valley of Siddim. And then it says explicitly that is the Salt Sea. So we're fairly certain, at least in the biblical writers imaginations, these cities were located down there. But also then they start to describe certain geological features that pretty much seal the deal. So the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, there's really no doubt that they're talking about the region of the Dead Sea. Just the reference to sulfur or King James Brimstone is a very basic geological reality of the area. I don't know if you've ever visited the Dead Sea or anything around it. It's a strange alien world. It's absolutely going to be inspiring of stories reflecting on what could have possibly happened here to make this place like this. And so you can imagine stories being spun just based on the experience of being at the Dead Sea. Salt, complete, lack vegetation, sulfur, extreme heat. I mean, the temperatures around the Dead sea regularly exceed 40 degrees Celsius. It's kind of hellish, really. So surely if there were cities here, they must have done something horrible to result in this, especially when everything around is more or less fairly fertile.

[Host]

Do you think that there is any potential historicity or historical basis behind the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, or at least kind of cities in that environment? Maybe the wider five cities that are.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Mentioned together, for the most part, at least as the narratives are concerned? I'd say no. I think these narratives are what we call etiologies, because in both Genesis 14 and especially Genesis 18:19, they really conclude with explanations for what the landscape looks like now. Were there cities there? Yes, there were cities there, especially in the early Bronze Age. So these would have been ruins by the time biblical writers are composing these stories. So you can kind of imagine that. And maybe I can touch a little bit on the fact that there were archaeological surveys in and around the region. Scholars looking for Sodom and Gomorrah, of course, serious surveys also going on in the 1970s, Thomas Schaub and his co director, Walter Rast, they did a fairly thorough survey of the region in 1973. They do find a couple of sites. Bada Bay, Bad Ed Dara, which is an early Bronze Age site. So Early Bronze Age is putting us somewhere around 3200-2000 BCE, something like that. And this was a fairly big site. And it did come to a fairly dramatic end around the end of the early Bronze Age there. And then about 13 kilometers south of that, they found another site, Numira. So there we have our two Sodom and Gomorrah. Pick which one you want to be which. And it also is destroyed around this time period. But again, this puts us about 1500 years between the destruction of those cities and the composition of those texts. So my inclination then is not that these cities are Sodom and Gomorrah or that the narratives describing their destruction are really connected to these archaeological sites. But what I can imagine is that people, biblical writers and Israelites and Judahites who, living in the region, who would have obviously encountered the strange geological features of the landscape and perhaps see these types of ruins, would have come up with stories explaining how these cities, which nobody could live there at that time could have existed. Perhaps the landscape was once fertile. And in fact, we have a biblical description of this area is essentially a Garden of Eden. And it was fertile until they sinned and the region was more or less desolated. So that's kind of what I imagine the history being is. Ancient encounters with the landscape. You don't need to go any further than the biblical text itself, than the Book of Genesis itself. There's two explanations for that possibility, right? One is this group of four kings from the east came and destroyed these cities, and the landscape was always like that, at least in that story. And then Genesis 18 and 19 and some other texts offer an alternative explanation about how that region transformed from what was once a fertile landscape into a desolate place. And then that this explanation of sin and punishment comes in. So that's kind of where I see the Sodom and Gomorrah tradition. They stand as archetypes of punishment because of the landscape, because the landscape is punishing. And no one can live there in the days of these biblical writers. So why people could have lived there in the past begs some kind of explanation. The biblical writers are human beings who want to explain the world in which they live as well. And they offer two explanations for us.

[Host]

If you're saying that that later story of Sodom and Gomorrah is written post the sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, and then you have the Judeans either coming back from Jerusalem or those writing in exile, and I guess they have a different agenda for wanting to write then a story of Sodom and Gomorrah compared to those writing pre that time. You can see the different agendas of the writer right there as to why they create that story.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Right? Yeah. So the association of Sodom and Gomorrah just generically with sin, it's not exclusively associated to Genesis 18 and 19. That there does seem to be other texts that are aware of this association. But what's interesting is the detail and the fixation on very particular types of sin and punishment really come to the fore in what we call exilic and post exilic literature. And no more is it more explicit than outside of Genesis, than in Ezekiel and specifically in Ezekiel 16, where he's explicit about the fact that Jerusalem is the new Sodom and its punishment is more or less understood in analogous terms. So with that understanding in mind, a lot of scholars, based on other factors which have to do with the growth and development of the Book of Genesis, kind of see this is a setting when that Genesis 18:19 story makes the most sense coming into existence.

[Host]

So trying to explain why Jerusalem was destroyed, why God allowed that to happen, is it kind of that thinking?

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Exactly. And Ezekiel makes clear also that for as bad as Jerusalem is, it's not quite as bad as Sodom, because there's a remnant, there is the possibility for return and renewal, which obviously something Sodom and Gomorrah don't get. So it's not all negative, but it definitely shows us a moment when those motifs and those archetypes would have been of great interest to biblical writers, because Ezekiel dedicates essentially an entire chapter to it.

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[Host]

Now I'd like to return to archaeology and Sodom and gomorrah in the 20th century, Dylan. Because I got in my notes something called the Ebla Bible controversy. Now, what was this and how does it relate to Sodom and Gomorrah?

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Right? So 1970s, kind of a decade of great interest in Sodom and Gomorrah. So we have Rast and Shab who are conducting these archaeological surveys all around the southern plain of the Dead Sea. They're finding sites like Badadara and Umera. And right around this time in 1976, Italian archaeologists in Syria, in western Syria, discovered a massive archive of an ancient city known as Ebla. The city is also extremely ancient. The texts date to sometime around 2300 BCE. So to give you an idea, this is about the time of Sargon of Akkad. These are extremely old texts, but they're very difficult to decipher. Even today, some 50 years after their discovery. You can imagine how difficult it was to decipher them in the initial years after their discovery. Nonetheless, a certain epigrapher of the expedition, Giovanni Pettinato, he starts trying to work through these texts. He finds a document that seems to be listing various cities, and he notes some of the cities or interprets some of the cities as nothing else but these cities of the plains, Sodom, Gomorrah, Zeboiim, Admah, and Bela or Zoar. And he makes a very ostentatious claim. He goes to a couple conferences and says, hey, look, these are the names of the cities of the plain, these cities that Rast and Shob are uncovering. They're showing up in roughly contemporary texts from ancient Syria. They're real. Sodom and Gomorrah did exist. Now, the problem was we knew so little about Eblite, which is a very obscure Semitic language, and it's written in really archaic Sumerian signs, basically. So what Petinata was translating then first off, wasn't published, so no one could really check his work outside of the members of the excavation. And the other member of the excavation disagreed with him vehemently. So what ultimately happens is this claim, it got scaled back one by one, city by city. The reading was wrong until we finally, ultimately understood what this text was, which is describing cities in Mesopotamia. It has nothing to do with Jordan. So it fizzled out. But you can imagine the 1970s there. They're finding the remains of cities, we're finding texts that may mention them. So there's a great interest in. And then basically by 1980, all of this kind of fizzles out. The archaeologists start to just talk about, really. These are, for the most part, cemetery sites. They don't seem to have the major urban centers that are described in the biblical texts. They're interesting Early Bronze Age sites for the region, but let's stop trying to interpret them through the lens of the Bible, which more or less brings us to where we're at today.

[Host]

I must also ask, because it is really interesting, when exploring biblical stories, parallels with other stories from the ancient world. Is Sodom and. Or are different, Are there any parallel stories that we can see in other ancient cultures? As, in my mind, actually, we go to something like Atlantis, kind of a similarity there of a city destroyed by the gods. But, I mean, are there others that we can talk about?

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

There are sets of texts which are known as city laments, and they're all composed in Sumerian, and they're not quite directly having Gods destroy the cities. They are more or less describing great conflagrations of places like Uruk and Urban by human agents. But within the texts, its divine agency is completely intermingled. So the goddess or the God departs their temple, and that enables the flood to sweep over these destructions to happen. And, of course, Jerusalem itself is the obvious other parallel for Sodom and Gomorrah of divine judgment. So the destruction of any city, I think, would, at least in some respects in the ancient Near Eastern mindset, be a result of divine causation. Things don't happen unless the gods will them. So I'm not so sure. I'd have trouble finding parallels. I think I'd probably find too many parallels, and it's just degrees of similarity. It is ironic that the Atlantic's narrative is perhaps the most similar, at least as a typology of divine destruction of a city and its complete annihilation and disappearance forever. Because usually these cities are then rebuilt. And I don't know what to make of that. I sometimes think just human cultures have a tendency to converge in that way.

[Host]

Well, I guess also that human mindset isn't it because actually, that wider narrative of a city either being conquered or being destroyed, because in the eyes of the victorious, that city become decadent, and all of those things where they're partying too much and then another power comes in, overpowers them, and the reasons they give is because, well, that city just became a place of sin. The Romans do it multiple times with cities that they capture. I think of Tarentum, Monte Taranto in southern Italy. They label the Greeks there as becoming incredibly decadent and a city of sin, Corinth as well. So actually, if we kind of explore that wider narrative, Sodom and Gomorrah, of course, the fact that it's destroyed and never rebuilt, but actually, it's a human mindset thing of people trying to explain why a city was destroyed or conquered is because their city just became a place of sin and they were taken over by people who considered themselves more virtuous, I guess.

[Tristan Hughes]

Right.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

And I think that's actually exactly in some of the Ezekiel texts, is that he's not fixating on specific sins, much less a specific sexual sin of Sodom, but he's labeling them as excessive and decadent and exactly these same parameters, because again, he's trying to justify and explain these calamities. Why do these things happen? Because otherwise the world's a very scary place and randomness is not a good thing. Right. You want cause and effect rather than four strange Eastern empires coming and capriciously destroying your cities and you have no control over. So I think what we see across these cultures then is justification, but also maybe a bit of catharsis that if we just avoid those things, we won't be the Persians, we won't be the Greeks, we won't be the Atlanteans, whoever it is.

[Host]

Yeah, exactly. Don't share that same kind of fate. When we did a poll, we did a poll after our Tower of Babel episode asking which story from the Old Testament you'd like us to cover next. And the overwhelming answer for that, the one which had the most votes was Sodom and Gomorrah. And we had some other juicy topics in there like David and Goliath and so on and so forth. So Dylan, why do you think that of all the stories in the Bible, including the Old Testament and the New Testament, but why Sodom and Gomorrah is always there in like a top five most popular or people want to hear about, why has it remained such a well known, intriguing story to people down to the present day?

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

I think there's a certain level of familiarity with the terms obviously sodomites and stuff like that. Sodomites and just a cultural awareness of it. So that already kind of sparks the interest. If you know about something or you think you know about something, you're going to have that interest. So they're well known. The next thing is they're lost, they're not to be found anymore, they're Atlantis. Right. So that's appealing. It's not just Rome was destroyed, Rome was destroyed, but you can still go to Rome and see it. Right. I think it was the same appeal with Troy. Right. We need to find these lost civilizations, which is why there's so much media and everyone's always disappointed when you do find it. Right. We find Troy and it's, oh, it's an ancient Anatolian culture. How disappointing. Right. And of course the same would be for Sodom and Gomorrah. But I think so long as we don't have these places, we aren't able to pinpoint them on a map. There's kind of a sense of adventure and discovery that could still be there. And so Sodom and Gomorrah offer that the biblical connections obviously are going to speak to people of faith by finding these cities, reinforcing, you know, the concrete dynamics of their belief systems. So anything with the Bible always has that really important and heavy component. So I think that's probably the dynamics. And then again there's always, you know, the personal connections which I can't really account for. But I think that's enough to explain why it pulled so well.

[Host]

Dylan, this has been fantastic. Always a pleasure to get you on the podcast and it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

Thanks. It was a blast.

[Tristan Hughes]

Well, there you go. There was Dr. Dylan Johnson talking you through the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

[Host]

Thank you for listening.

[Tristan Hughes]

Please follow the Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor. Now if you want more ancient history videos and clips in the meantime, then also be sure to follow me on Instagram Ncients Tristan don't forget you can also listen to the Ancients and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you [e-mail] subscribe that's enough from me and.

[Host]

I'll see you in the next episode.

[Dr. Dylan Johnson]

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