large meteor impact: descriptions in genesis 19?

8/14/2019 Large Meteor Impact: Descriptions in Genesis 19?

1/4

Large Meteor Impact: Descriptions in Genesis 19?By Tom SlatteryThe August 8, 2006, Jordan Times (Amman, Kingdom of Jordan) published an articleannouncing the discovery of a large meteor crater near the Jordan-Saudi border.

The location might be significant to archaeologists and biblical historians. Thecrater is in Jordan just short of the Saudi border. And it is directly east of theDead Sea.

The article cites two Jordanian scientists and one German scientist associatedwith reputable institutions. Several minor news organizations picked it up. Youcan find their articles if you Google something like "meteor crater Jordan." TheJordan Times account, though, seems to have been superseded by another news story.

According to the newspaper article, there is a dual concentric crater. One ring isabout 2.5 km in diameter. The other is 5.5 km. Thus it was caused by a chunk ofspace debris of considerable size and mass.

It was quite literally a breaking news story. Some of the Jordanian governmentinstitutions seemed to be in the process of yet being notified. So it would seemto be a while before a careful studied scientific appraisal gets into science

journals.

The most interesting thing in the article is the claim that the meteorite impactedso recently. It cited the scientists as saying it struck the earth between 10,000years ago and 7500 years ago. That is to say, it may have impacted as recently as5500 BC and thus possibly into the modern age of written records.

And that fact might set a good to average mind to wondering. Could there be arecord of this impact?

After wondering for a day about ancient clay tablets and possibly ancient papyriand thinking about what story material about the awful event might have gotteninto the modern world, I took a look at the Sodom and Gomorrah story of Genesis

19. There are two Sodom and Gomorrah stories. The first one is probably about areal historical battle between city states.

The second one, Genesis 19, is the mythical metaphorical morality tale of thedestruction of the two corrupt cities that we all know and love. It almost seemslike a modern science fiction or fantasy story with a twisted morality plot.

But the inspired author or series of ancient authors may have taken a very old andvery significant story and used elements of it to cobble together the now famousmorality tale for the obvious intended religious teaching purposes. Let's considerthat possible more ancient story.

Take, for instance, the story element of the angels blinding those who were

attacking Lot's house, apparently with a bright light of Genesis 19:11. If angelswould go so far as to blind people, they might reasonably break their legs, ormake them deathly ill, or even smite them with death. But they blinded theattackers. So might the blinding have been an important and integral part of amore ancient story?If a meteorite large enough to make a 5.5 km diameter crater impacted it wouldhave exploded in an enormous flash of blinding light, not unlike an A-bomb.

So let's look at a possible remnant of what appears to have been severaleyewitness accounts. To illustrate this I am using an old worn King James Bible,


2/4

but the chapters and verses are the same in most Christian or Jewish holy books.

If you go deeper into the yarn, especially between Genesis 19:23 and Genesis 19:30you get to the meat of what might be some ancient eyewitness accounts of theimpact.

First, there would seem to be a clear report of the time of day. People did notwear digital watches, but day and night would have been noted. And, as if it had

been made an integral part of the original eyewitness story, important in such away that taking it out may have spoiled the story, we see that the terrifyingevent took place in daylight, apparently in the morning.

Genesis 19:23 says: "The sun was risen on the earth when Lot entered unto Zoar"(apparently at the southern tip of the Dead Sea).

Continuing on, we might suspect that the probable cause of what must have resultedin enormous unprecedented destruction was known to have come from above. We haveall seen televised images of meteors captured by amateur videographers. And we areaware that sometimes those meteors go for hundreds of miles and are seen bythousands and maybe millions of people.

Just the mere huge fireball zooming overhead in the daytime sky would have struckawe into ancient observers. Not all, of course, would have happened to look up orto be in a position to see the heavenly fireball. So there are actually tworemnants of eyewitness accounts.

We get the viewpoint of those ancient people who actually saw what must have beena spectacular meteor in the daytime (morning) sky in the form of Lot'sobservation.

Genesis 19:24 says "Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone andfire from the LORD out of heaven."

Brimstone, as you know, is an early-English term for the sulfur of the crest

(brim) of a volcano. Brimstone means sulfur. As one who has dabbled in ceramics Iknow that heating any earthen material to a kiln temperature produces a sulfurvapor. In fact, the kiln rooms of ceramics courses stink of sulfur.

A meteorite impact would have done the same. Enormous heat generated by the impactwould have fused earthen material and released sulfur vapors. The air probablywould have smelled of sulfur for a while. That this is in the Genesis accountwould seem to betray links back in time to people who had actually experienced thesulfur smell. They made a slight understandable error in believing that thesulfur-brimstone came from above. It was the high-temperature baking earth fromthe impact energy that really would have caused it.

And it would have seemed as likely as not that the foul brimstone odor had come

from above with the fireball that some may have seen impact the earth. If theancient author or eyewitness had seen the impact and smelled the brimstone odor,and even possibly known that there were no active volcanoes in the area, he or shemay have drawn the natural but not quite correct conclusion.

In other words, what we may be seeing in Genesis 19:24 could be a very accuratedescription of a large meteorite impact event, a rendering that is too detailedfor just some simple morality tale author to bother about.

But everyone would not have seen the actual meteor as it zoomed through thedaytime sky. Some may not have been looking up. Some may have been distant and


3/4

behind hills or mountains. So we have another viewpoint, represented in the storyas that of Abraham. Abraham in the Genesis 19 story was living some significantdistance from his relative Lot.

Abraham, perhaps the arch religious person of history, would have been known byancient audiences to have a shrine at the top of a hill. Outstanding and maybe noso outstanding hills and mountains had a religious aura and nomenclature in thosedays.

Genesis 19:27 says, "And Abraham gat up early in the morning to the place where hestood before the LORD."

What we might infer from the story is that Abraham, and so many others, saw thebright flash hundreds of km away. He was either performing religious duties at thetop of the hill or went up to the top of the hill to see what the enormous brightflash and subsequent blast and earthquake might have been.

And what Abraham and all of those other would have seen was something that we arefamiliar with in the nuclear age, a rising mushroom cloud. That would surely havebeen what the hot gasses and debris from a large meteorite impact would havelooked like.

Genesis 19:28 then says this of Abraham -- Abraham possibly representing manyancient people who say and told of the same view. "And he looked toward Sodom andGomorrah, and towards all of the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smokeof the country went up as smoke from a furnace."

There follows the famous incest story. It may reveal two things here. One may notethat Lot (as representing so many others who were closer than Abraham) may havebeen living in a cave prior to the impact. That is what could have saved him andhis daughters. His wife may have been up doing the chores, or, like so many whohad been known to perish, unable to run as fast toward the cave as Lot and hisdaughters.

It may be stretching this hypothesis to say that Mrs. Lot may have been struck bythe hot debris and covered with it, like so many others, the gray-brown dustgiving them an appearance of pillars of salt. But bodies that appeared like downedpillars of salt must have been numerous after the meteor impact cataclysm.

The incest segment may also represent the appalling depopulation of the region andrepresent desperate measures subsequently taken. Of course, the biblical accountis meant to put down the neighboring Moabites and the Ammonites. But it may be atoken of the massive depopulation. But it may also identify the Moabites and theAmmonites as two of the few tribes that survived the awful catastrophe partiallyintact. Their historical geographical location would seem to have been on thefringes of the area of total destruction.

One interesting thing is that clay tablets that are somewhat in question found atthe ancient Ebla site in present Syria have the four Cities of the Plain, Sodom,Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim. These tablets would appear to predate the Biblestory.

Sodom means "burnt" in Hebrew. Gomorrah means "a ruined heap." The Semiticlanguage of the Ebla tablets is similar to Hebrew so Sodom and Gomorrah probablymean the same in that language.

"Burnt" and "A Ruined Heap" would not seem likely names for two corrupt ancientcities. The ancient cities probably had different names. The names given in the


4/4

story seem to have been concocted after the real names had been forgotten, perhapsafter generations of traders and travelers crossed the desert there with someanxiety after hearing hand-me-down tales of what had happened and seeing theburned and ruined evidence of it.

But in addition to the Bible, there is another reference in the ancientMesopotamian story of Gilgamesh. On Tablet IV, as translated by William ElleryLeonard, Viking, 1934, Gilgamesh says:

My friend, I saw a third dreamAnd the dream which I saw was horrible.The heavens shrieked,The earth bellowed,A storm gathered,Darkness came forth,A flash flamed,A fire shot up,The clouds thickened,It rained death.Then the brightness vanished,The fire went out,

The blaze that had fallenTurned to ashes.

The crater is real. It would surely have generated stories. This conjecture may beway off, but it may initiate some inspired digging into the archaeology and loreof the ancient powerful event.Tom Slattery

large meteor impact: descriptions in genesis 19?

Documents