Last night we watched a show on the History Channel about attempts to locate the historical Sodom and Gomorrah. Surprisingly enough, there actually seems to have been two settlements, in the right locations, and which seem to have been destroyed by some disaster at around the right time. I didn’t get to the end of the show, so I can’t say more about what kind of disaster it was, but I imagine it was something geological in nature. One can even imagine Lot’s wife pausing to look back and being overwhelmed by a cloud of burning ash and gas.
Here’s what’s puzzling me, however. The cities were located on the southern shores of the Dead Sea–one of the most climatically hostile regions in the world. How could they have lived? They couldn’t have irrigated from the River Jordan, since that’s on the other end of the Dead Sea. Was the climate more hospitable c 4000ya as seems to have been the case in the Sahara?
I recall reading some speculative material on why Lot might have chosen that area over the Hebron area, and what might have actually happened to the Cities of the Plain.
Essentially, the lower end of the historical Dead Sea is very shallow, and may have been above water level in patriarchal times. Remember that that entire area is geared to relatively low-precipitation natural flora and agriculture/animal husbandry. It’s entirely plausible that a flat land area at the bottom of a graben might get sufficient stream flow and/or groundwater from the neighboring uplands to sustain a pretty fair fertility. One must also remember that much of MENA had a late-prehistoric/protohistoric climate significantly less arid than the present.
So the area of Sodom and Gomorrah may well have been a fertile land near the south shore of the Dead Sea, destroyed by whatever natural or supernatural processes, sudden or gradual, suit your taste, and later flooded by the Dead Sea. (From the looks of DDG’s link, it appears the area is now being reclaimed, which is news to me.)
I stress that this is reportage of a hypothetical scenario I had read years ago, not a definite clearcut answer.
A recent issue of Smithsonian magazine I was reading in a doctor’s waiting room (so, no better id) had an article about the Dead Sea. It stated that not only is it much lower and saltier than it was in the past, but it is fed by two major rivers and zillions of small fresh-water aquifers. During migrations, 500,000,000 birds of 300 species stop there.
You don’t mention where the program located these cities, but there is - and more to the point, was - a lot of fresh water in the area to draw from.
It is purported to have been a “land of milk and honey” a few thousand years ago.
;j