Although the precise origin of the peaks in salinity at TeH is unknown, we speculate that an impact into or an airburst above high-salinity surface sediments and/or above the Dead Sea may have distributed hypersaline water across the lower Jordan Valley.

So, the impact went into the Dead Sea, and then ALSO to the site?

Lot’s wife being blown around is a bit more convincing.

Note that Sayce was an early Biblical literalist of the 19th century (his translation of that poem was published in the 1870s), the least reliable source to consult today. We would need to find and consult a more objective and modern translation and commentary, which would require an actual identification of that Akkadian tablet (Sayce gives no accession number or anything by which to locate it now). But a lot of Biblical myths are copies of earlier myths from surrounding cultures (like the Flood), and those aren’t historical either. The “500 year gap of occupation” is already addressed in my article. It cannot be due to an astronomical catastrophe, as the surrounding data indicate and actual experts conclude.

That said I have volunteered to dig at Tall al Hammam on several occasions, all prior to the Covid pandemic occurring. I choose this site because it was, at the time of occupation, the largest site in the Levant. And because of its location on the east bank in Jordan it hadn’t been properly excavated before. I suppose I was also intrigued by a possible Sodom connection. As a site bigger even than Hazor was, it would have been a dominant force in the region during its period of occupation and would likely have left a significant imprint in the minds of local Canaanites.

I have not been involved enough in the analysis and interpretation of the evidence to comment intelligently on the claims made. Whilst nice people, the team leading the digs clearly are evangelical in nature and have an agenda to prove the site is Sodom. And I do share the concern of many in the profession that the evangelical interpretation is more likely to force facts to fit the agenda, than to conform understanding to fit the facts. But I trust science to sort it out over time.

Whilst the credibility of the science is to be debated, I would suggest that from what I saw there was some very good archaeology done under the supervision of key archaeologists from Jordan’s antiquities department. I have met with many of them personally, and they are all intrigued by the site generally. There was always someone there to supervise, and often the Jordanian archaeologists were on their knees troweling out mud bricks the same as the rest of us. There were many other very interesting finds that will certainly keep archaeologists busy for many years to come.

Airburst event or not, one thing that has made me think whilst on the digs is that a city of such significance would surely have made a big impact. It is also interesting that the 1650s BCE destruction layer, which I personally dug, was carbon dated and the site (again for whatever reason) was inexplicably abandoned for at least 600 years. Which is interesting as Jericho – directly across the valley – was not. I am also intrigued by the partial Akkadian poem found and translated by Archibald Sayce that seems to indicate there may work outside the biblical narrative for belief in a city destroyed by some event, as told by a survivor. Although that too many be more mythology than reality.

In any case, I think it is also worth pointing out that there is strong debate even amongst the evangelicals as to whether Tall el Hammam is biblical Sodom. Many feel the time and dating isn’t right to fit the biblical narrative as they understand it, and many still favor the view Sodom would have been south of the Dead Sea.

I do hold out hope that another team will go to Tall el Hammam with fresh eyes and better science to get an improved perspective on the archaeology. It is a very important site.

He is close to what is said in the Islamic tradition but not 100%.

What is said in the Islamic tradition is that the angel Gabriel either lifted the people of the towns and their animals or the plate of earth (of course implied, there it’s mentioned that he lifted the towns) including the people and their animals on it on his wing, ascended with them into the sky, flipped them upside down then threw them back to the earth (I can’t believe I used to believe in this for 27 years 🤦‍♂️).

As for the source, it’s attributed in Tafsir (exegesis) books to some of the students of the prophet’s companions (2nd generation Muslims who saw the disciples of the prophet). These students of the prophet’s companions include Mujahid ibn Jabr and Qatada ibn Di’ama.

One such tafsir book which makes this is Al-Tabari when he was interpreting verse 53 in chapter 53 in the Quran and another is Ibn Kathir when he was interpreting the same verse.

I have diligently looked online to provide links to them but it looks like both are not translated into English (frustrating, especially Al-Tabari as it is widely considered to be the most important exegesis of the Quran ever).

Please let me know if you want more information on this Dr. Carrier.

Lol. I was not aware even Jordan Peterson was on the trend.

I don’t have any confident ideas about this, and thus nothing to blog usefully about.

Partly because I have no real data (anecdotes aren’t data; this phenom seems highly prone to availability bias: like with astrology, you only hear from the people who say yes), and partly because I am not all that interested in it (statistically there will always be something lots of people think about, even if what that is is selected at random, e.g. say there are a million things people could think about, and a hundred million people: odds are one of those million things will be thought about by a million of those people, just by chance distribution; it’s called clustering), and partly because I have no direct access to the needed psych data (I actually am a historian of the Roman Empire, so I can’t have much direct insight as to why someone who isn’t that is obsessed with the Roman Empire; I can only speak to why I was interested in it, and it doesn’t seem the same reason so far as I’ve heard, e.g. I went into Roman socio-intellectual history, not military-political).

Really, to answer it, psychologists need to determine the actual size of the phenomenon (how many men do this, and how often actually), and then case-interview their way to adducing hypotheses why, i.e. you need to actually talk to these guys, and a diverse lot of them, and get their psych and demo profiles, to see if there is any trend (do only certain kinds of men do this, or is there no predictor; and what do these men say is their reason, and are there any commonalities; etc.), and then that hypothesis has to be tested by some instrument (which would depend on what the hypothesis was).

So that’s three scientific studies, probably costing upwards of a quarter or a half million dollars altogether.

So odds are we will not really know even if the phenomenon is real, much less what caused it.

The matter is complicated by the incongruity of public evidence: e.g. there is no trend for producing movies or TV shows about the Roman Empire (in fact it is surprisingly rare a subject there); but there is for superhero movies. Do guys think about superheroes proportionately more than the Roman Empire? Or what if you asked men if they think about cowboys a lot? Would the statistical response differ from the Roman Empire? Also, is there a variance by race? (Do hispanic or black or asian men think about the Roman Empire as much as white men; or is this a white man thing?)

But if I had to place an office bet on it right now just for fun, and there were dozens of squares to bet on each with a different hypothesis, I wouldn’t bet much, but I’d place my bet on “the phenomenon isn’t real; it’s a statistical anomaly” in all the ways I just suggested, and therefore there is no causal hypothesis.

I might place a smaller hedge bet on “the RE is mythically believed to be the purest white-man’s manly man-man empire in history; and American men cling to such myths in the face of challenges to or under-usage of their masculinity in modern society.”

Speculatively, this is also the appeal of Westerns and the cowboy myth, but there it is closer to post-apocalyptic fantasies (Mad Max; The Walking Dead), since it was a state of chaos and rugged independence rather than order and power. So to fantasize about the latter, the RE is pretty much all that one could choose (outside fantasy worlds altogether; e.g. how often do men think of The Lord of the Rings?).

For example, the British Empire has too much stigma of villainy upon it (we went to war with them after all—three times, if you count their support for the South in the Civil War; they even burned the white house to the ground in 1812) and carries an air of unmanliness (the British aristocracy has never had a manly rep), and is “too soon” (its global war crimes are still in living memory). Likewise the Chinese Empire is wholly untaught and thus unknown to American men (and also, not “white enough,” and whiteness is associated with power even by nonwhite populations). And so on.

One can look at it the other way around, too: why do women not think about the Roman Empire much? (Assuming that is the case; again, it hasn’t really yet been shown to be.)

I would wager it is because there is no narrative for them there (women had almost no major role to play in the RE’s history, certainly as taught to Americans, so the women of the RE and their roles and heroism has been narratively invisible, and even when visible, depressing). In short, the RE is a narrative of women’s subordination to men; not an attractive target of fantasy for the oppressed. Whereas the RE is the ultimate white-man’s power fantasy.

The lack of organizing narratives for women’s heroism and triumph is actually one of the cultural critiques that has occupied analysis of the last forty years or so. One might find something close in Jane Austen (how many women think about any Jane Austen story or character every day?), because she writes women so well, particularly as facing their sexist societies with courage and ingenuity.

But I don’t in my experience see that to have become as universally appealing as the RE to men. I know lots of women in that category; but also quite a lot who are not, and even disdain the category or find nothing in it that speaks to them. So women’s target fantasies seem fragmented right now, whereas men seem readier to rally around more widely shared fantasies. But this could all be misperception on my part. I have no more hard data for this than for the RE thing. So I don’t really have anything confident or reliable to say.

Anyway I’m curious if were aware of all the trending talk concerning “How often men (supposedly) think about the Roman Empire”, that is being spread on TikTok and people such as Jordan Peterson.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/09/18/how-often-do-men-think-about-the-roman-empire-a-lot-according-to-new-tiktok-trend/?sh=60b485ff4a38

I have my own theories about it. That it is part power of suggestion, part subliminal thought from the recent discussion itself being spread, and part because we are mostly a Christian nation where the Roman Empire is central to the story around the death of Jesus.

But I’m curious if you have any thoughts on this, or if this could be something that you might’ve considered as a topic for one of your upcoming blog articles.

If you find the source for that claim do post it here.

It is not scientifically plausible of course (such an event would leave unmistakable geological evidence). But it can be interesting to find out when and by whom these legends arise.

BTW, inverted strata are a thing in geology. In California, at the juncture of the continental plates (the San Andreas fault), there are entire sections of the land that have broken free and rolled over, thus inverting the geologic history of the Earth.

Alas, this was never on a scale of space or time that could destroy even a town much less a city.

Some scholars say a plate of earth came up in the sky , flipped upside down and landed on the entire sodom and gomorrah towns. Not a volcano or earthquake..

I’m not sure what your point is.

There are only two kinds of people to address here: those who can feel ashamed of being taken in, and those who cannot. The former will not be put off by any kind of debunking, as their resulting shame at being the victim of disinformation will compel them to abandon it. But the latter can almost never be convinced, for the very reason that they feel no shame.

Hence the only way they can be convinced is without any appeal to shame, but using their anger against them. They must be shocked into cognitive dissonance until their anger compels them to try and prove us wrong and they find out they are wrong—or it fails to do even that, in which case no reason or evidence will ever change their mind.

Our only recourse then is to marginalize them with ridicule to reduce their social influence and thus staunch the spread of the infection, just as we do white supremacists, Scientologists, and lizard-people theorists. Remove their respectability, especially their pretense of it. Take away their stolen glory.

I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I have met hundreds of the deconverted. I even polled a large audience of them once. The “just be nice” approach converts almost no one. The “pissing them off” approach has secured nearly every deconvert I have ever met.

Ridicule is powerful for a reason. That is why disinformationists try to use it illegitimately—because it works. But moral people only use ridicule legitimately. And that means: that which you ridicule has to actually be ridiculous. Then it is merely radical honesty. In any other application, it is a delusion or a lie. Such as when manospherists and white supremacists try to ridicule their ridiculers.

Anchor yourself in reality with a reliable epistemology and you will be immune to this for the right reasons; while the delusional and the liars are only ever immune to it for the wrong reasons, and for that very reason, they are immune to every other form of persuasion as well.

For more, see my discussion in Katherine Cross on Tone Policing.