I have been a Christian for as long as I can remember and yet I must confess that doubt is something I have often struggled with. The Bible calls us to live the Christian life by faith but I am aware that all the faith of all the Christians in the world is worth nothing if this story and those like it did not happen.

One of the most crazy stories in the Bible is found in Genesis 19 which gives the account of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, the most famous being the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. When we read a story like the one above, there are two options to consider:

This January I boarded a cheap flight to Jordan to help my (now) friend Dr. Steven Collins and his team on their archaeological dig. I wanted to come with an open, academic mind willing go where the evidence led. Not prone to believe anything without looking at it critically, I was impressed with how his whole team was working with this attitude. 

If this is going to work out, that is - if the Bible story of the destruction of Sodom and all the “Cities of the Plain” is true, digging it up will reveal the: 1. Right time. 2. Right place. 3. Right stuff.

Genesis 13 tell us that around the time of Abraham and Lot (Middle Bronze Age) there existed a city named Sodom which was part of a group of cities called, ‘The Cities Of The Plain.’ One of them was a sister city of Sodom called Gomorrah. Sodom was the biggest of the cities, it was much bigger than Jericho or Jerusalem.

When you dig through the remains of the city, you see Middle bronze age pottery in a Bronze Age strata. I dug up a lot of pottery sherds. Even brought some of them home too! They make nice souvenirs costing little more than the dirt I found them in!

There are classic Middle Bronze Age walls that are made of stone and mud brick up to 6m thick. Now when I say classic, I mean, “this is what the professionals call ‘classic.’” To me, it just looked like a row of rocks piled on each other. I wish they wrote “Middle Bronze” on them. That would have helped.

I do that with journal entries now just for the sake of polity for my future excavators. 

To the experts, the good news is that these indicators of chronology (walls, pottery, dirt layers) line up perfectly with the Biblical account of when Abraham and Lot were around.

Right time. We are one for three thus far.

Genesis 13 says that Abraham and Lot stood on a mountain known as Bethel. It overlooks the Dead Sea and the entire Jordan Valley. The text says that they saw all the “Cities of the Plain” but the word “Plain” in Hebrew is “Kikkar” which is also translated as a “disk” or flat bread…what looks like a tortilla.

Genesis 13 says that Abraham took the west and Lot went into the valley as far as Sodom.

You may want to now turn to your Bible in the uninspired section…the maps.

Now for various reasons (mostly because they don’t believe the story is real) liberal scholars in the 20th century put Sodom either under the Dead Sea or just South East of it. 

That’s not what the Bible says, however. Dr. Collins has one by one confronted skeptics and already published material. Some of them like author of Biblical Archaeology, Hershel Shanks, Dr. Collins has taken to the site itself and had to lay out what the Bible actually says about Sodom.

Dr. Collins believes the best way to find out about the cities of the Bible is to look at what the Bible says. 

In 2002, Dr. Collins got a grant from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and started digging at the site of where he believed to be Sodom. The time matched up, but in a way that most would find hard to believe (unless you believed the Bible). They discovered early on that something happened during the Middle Bronze Age to this city that wiped it out, living it inhabitable for approx. 500-700 years. 

Interestingly enough, all the other Cities of the Plain excavation sites report the same thing. They report a mysterious gap in the strata from Middle Bronze to Early Iron. This is also called the LB (Late Bronze) gap. All these booming cities came to a screeching halt, all around the time of Abraham.

Not only is the city missing, I must tell you of the destruction layer. I was given a square to dig down and found it creepy to dig through what they call on the site, the ash layer. These layers (“or terminal layers” or “destruction layers” as they are also called) are sometimes thin and can be up to a meter deep. You can see the lines left in the dirt. 

In some of the pictures you can see stone foundations of walls that, according to MB2 buildings, were covered by up to 10 feet high of mud brick. In many places the mud brick is there, sometimes it is gone entirely and sometimes it lays in a heap on a floor. It is not uncommon to find bodies underneath.

Bodies have been found. Some incinerated from the waist up, and some with limbs completely thrown from the original body. One person died with their toes completely curled up.

Something dramatic happened here.

You can have the right place and time but if you go digging and find nothing, well that certainly makes the case a lot more difficult to make. 

Lastly, one of the key findings was a glazed piece of pottery that Dr. Collins first found 10 feet deep. Knowing that glazed pottery was not introduced in the Middle East until the Ottoman days of the 8th century, Collins told me that he first swore out loud thinking that his site had been compromised. Upon looking closer, it was not a glaze but a melt. In fact, the surface of the sherd was of a different substance altogether. A few of these findings were taken to a lab back in the New Mexico and it was said to be of similar essence to Trinitite. I was not familiar with this stuff so Dr. Collins explained that neither the heat of the sun, a fire or a kiln can create the stuff. It has been found in the wake of a nuclear explosion. 2000 degrees! That’s the kind of heat we are talking about here.