(September 24, 2021 at 8:42 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote: Sodom and Gomorrah were cities in the book of Genesis, which were destroyed by fire from the sky for their sins (everyone was horny and liked male angels).
Lot was a good man and was warned, but his wife looked back at the destruction and was turned into a pillar of salt.
As mentioned in Wikipedia, Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan valley near the Dead Sea has been proposed as one historical site for Sodom, if Sodom was in fact a real place that was destroyed.
Well, according to https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-0...78-3#Sec68 , the best explanation for the archaeological investigation of Tall el-Hammam was that it was destroyed by a meteorite airburst, of larger magnitude than the Tunguska Event in 1908. This also seems to have spread salt from the Dead Sea over a large area of land, making it infertile for 100s of years.
Could it be that this ridiculous story was originally inspired by a real event?
I think most of biblical stories can probably be traced to some event, even if retelling, embellishment, and no doubt many layers of purposed distortion by self righteous moralizers makes what the original event was hard to make out.
