[majinuub]

I like the theory that this event is what inspired the biblical story of Sodom. It reminds me of how paleontologists use the ancient art and stories of Native Australians to figure out what Pleistocene animals looked like and how they may have behaved.

In the story, Lot and his family were one of the few people to escape the city before its destruction. God told his family to not look back at the city as it was being destroyed. Lot's wife looked back and turned into "a pillar of salt". Maybe this is a metaphor for the people who went back to the site and couldn't grow food there due to the hypersaline that was spread across the region by the airburst.

[sgc]

That area is full of salt pillars. The geology served as an opportunity to create a moral and religious story. Could this have also influenced the story? Perhaps, but the salt pillars are quite large, obvious, and unique.

Edit: I note that nearby Jericho is dated to have been destroyed and abandoned in the same time period (within 50 years, likely well within margins of error). One of the most striking thing about the Tel in Jericho is that half the Tel is missing. Specifically the side to the East, which would be facing this Tel. I have never seen any good reason given for that missing section of Jericho, and would not be surprised at all if the same event destroyed both cities. Obviously lending more weight to this event having been integrated into Biblical writings.

[lifeisstillgood]

I get correlation and causation, but if I was sitting in an ancient Jericho, and watching another Army walk round the walls - and after they did a sodding great meteorite fell from the gods and blew down half my city walls, I would certainly think about religious conversion. :0)

On the other hand we should not get too carried away matching up events like this. The team behind this article took pains to prove it must have been an airburst by finding molten glass that could only come from certain temperatures etc etc.

I always understood that walking round the walls of Jericho was supposed to be cover for the sounds of sappers, just as the wooden horse of Troy may well have been a animal shaped cover for a battering ram, as opposed to a rather easy to avoid foot-gun.

[sgc]

My edit was to indicate that the air burst might have been a distant inspiration for the Jericho story as well as the Sodom story. There are about 600-1000 years between event and writing by most estimates, so there was plenty of time for it to inspire more than one story. But local geology plays a big role in many Biblical stories, not just these. People who are teachers look for teaching moments, and find them in the things that surround them.

[hyperpallium2]

> A sapper, also called pioneer or combat engineer, is a combatant or soldier who performs a variety of military engineering duties, such as breaching fortifications https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapper

[eloff]

Wasn't Jericho the one where they brought down the walls by making noise in the biblical story? I wonder if that could have been inspired by finding the wreckage of the city with the East wall destroyed.

[pyinstallwoes]

Could it be the result of a weapon? I know this is on the edge of absurd but to let the possibility entertain the mind wouldn't a laser or some payload from space "glass" an area on the ground? I've never thought about people turning into salt before... it seems possible?

[scroy]

I think it's best to use Occam's razor on that one. But it would be great for an episode of Stargate.

[pyinstallwoes]

Sometimes "aliens did it" makes more sense than a lot of the imaginative narrative that somehow explains 15 billion years in confidence of certainty. But yeah, I get your drift indeed.

[jonathanlb]

Some time ago, I heard of another theory for the Sodom and Gomorrah story:

An asteroid clipped a mountain in the Alps, causing a landslide in Köfels (but no crater). The asteroid's trajectory had a low angle, which made the mushroom cloud arc over the Mediterranean and over the Levant, raining down fire and such. This asteroid was actually recorded by Assyrian scribes on a clay tablet, but its trajectory wasn't plotted until relatively recently (2008-ish).

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html

[codesnik]

air resistance is too high on the height where asteroid can clip a mountain, for something to reach levant. it’d explode right there. But I could believe in asteroid fragmented much higher

[pythonlion]

nice article. but 700 BC is my be more fitted to another biblical story. sorry I forgot exactly which one but there is a story about a battle that ended when god rained fire on one of the sides

[chrismorgan]

You’re probably thinking of Joshua 10:11, but that’s quite some hundreds of years before 700 BC, which is more the time of Hezekiah.

[ChuckMcM]

I know that for a people who were not yet understanding about bolides and ways in which the astronomical environment interacted with the planet, ascribing the destruction of the city to a deity seems quite plausible.

If this event is the cause for the salt pillars in the area then I could also see people making up stories about it as well.

I am left with the question though of how does a bolide become full of salt?

[scns]

Or maybe they watched her burn to a crisp from afar, did not go back to check and took the ashes for salt.

[bmcahren]

Like this? https://theconversation.com/of-bunyips-and-other-beasts-livi...

They reference this book which seems interesting: https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/edge-of-memory-9781472943262/

What is your source?

[Ericson2314]

Well, that sure makes it work out to be one hell of a victim blame!

[elwell]

I find it interesting that despite so many years of scrutiny these biblical stories have yet to be conclusively invalidated. It seems there's some balance between each critique and each discovery, always leaving room for faith, never 'proving' but never snuffing out.

[ben_w]

Given one side is positing an entity with a mysterious personality that can create literally everything, ex nihilo, in 6 days, I wouldn’t expect it to be possible to conclusively invalidate anything, ever, under any circumstances.

No matter how much evidence there is on the side saying the Bible is just as fictional as the Olympian, Roman, Egyptian, Aztec etc. pantheons, believers can always counter it.

The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

[splistud]

What does validating or invalidating have to do with a work of allegory?

Scoring points in some long-running argument based on the common misunderstanding of both sides isn't really all that important.

Why not, instead, focus on what you yourself can accept as ineffable and universal?

[nwatson]

There's a large contingent of a minority of Evangelical Protestants who want to feel scientific exploration and discovery is done in good faith while also wanting to believe the Scripture, as currently received and understood (39 "books" of O.T., 27 "books" of N.T., written by diverse authors over more than a millenium), is what Almighty wanted us to have, and that it represents the spiritual truth as we should understand it ... how literal/symbolic/allegorical that Scripture might be is hard to determine.

So, this contingent usually is berated in religious forums ("No, the first two or three chapters in Genesis are 'historical narrative', heretic! ... BTW, here are the mental gymnastics for addressing inconsistencies in the two creation narratives [0]") or secular forums ("The Old Testament is a collection of inconsistent myths with no value in historical interpretation! There's no archaeological evidence of the Exodus! The New Testament passages weren't written till the year 300!").

But ... we (of this contingent) still want to meld the scientific and scriptural views, and we aren't too proud to be monkeys. For someone with this view, most of the New Testament makes little sense unless there was a literal Adam/Eve at some point, while evolution must also hold. There perhaps aren't many ways of reconciling these, so it's a struggle. The best I can reconcile is that "God made humankind from the dust of the earth" is the beautiful hack of evolution, and the Almighty chose, during one code review, from among candidate resulting species, his version 1.0 of the physical substrate of humankind, and "breathed the breath of life into [them]" to make them spiritually conscious. Then Garden-of-Eden, Tree-of-Life-vs-Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil, Partaking-of-the-Forbidden-Fruit, and we get to humankind's current reality. I look forward to seeing how wrong or right I am.

[0] https://answersingenesis.org/contradictions-in-the-bible/do-...

EDIT: mention the Exodus

[ben_w]

> For someone with this view, most of the New Testament makes little sense unless there was a literal Adam/Eve at some point

I’m surprised to read this. I was raised Catholic in the UK, and everyone in my school years seemed to be fine melding scientific and scriptural views without having any problem assuming that Adam and Eve did not need to be literal.

[pyinstallwoes]

A proof requires the faith of truth, as truth can only exist as an axiom of consensus.

[jonny_eh]

Here's just one of many anachronisms from the bible.

"Last week, archaeologists Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University released a new study that dates the arrival of the domesticated camel in the eastern Mediterranean region to the 10th century B.C. at the earliest, based on radioactive-carbon techniques. Abraham and the patriarchs, however, lived at least six centuries before then."

https://time.com/6662/the-mystery-of-the-bibles-phantom-came...

[throwawaygal7]

This is a really bad example of an anachronism, stop using it. They carbon dated a camel remain found in a particular settlement and are using it as the upper bound for domestication when it should be the lower bound. That's silly. Earlier this week on HN we saw evidence that camel statues in Saudia Arabia date to 5k BC or so. Clearly people have been interacting with camels in the region for quite a while.

[worker767424]

"The 'Mystery' of the Bible's Phantom Camels"

There's one really obvious solution to that mystery.

[choeger]

If you're going to tell us that the Bible is not composed of historically accurate accounts by contemporary writers, that's really nothing new.

I wonder about the camel thing, though. Did the authors/editors of the texts consider camels ubiquitous? Did they know that camels were very special and wanted to mention it? Was it a mistranslation?

[crooked-v]

Art and literature of all kinds has a long, long history of portraying people from the past in historically inaccurate ways that the people doing the portrayal take for granted.

One obvious religious example would be the many paintings of Christ showing him as a blonde European wearing contemporary (for the time of the painting) European clothing.

[ocschwar]

Camels were ubiquitous. And feral. The taming (camels remain undomesticated to this day - "trust in God and tie down your camel.") and exploitation of camels is what's anachronistic, not the camels themselves.

[setr]

According to everything I can google, camels are definitely domesticated, and the vast majority of them are today. According to wikipedia, there’s technically only 1400 “wild” camels or so, from the wild Bactrian group

Some other neat facts I just learned:

1. Apparently domestication can be defined as simply “12 generations of selective breeding”. What exactly is being selected is left open.

2. Feral is defined as first domesticated, then released. The only truly wild population of camels is apparently the wild Bactrian camels, in the gobi desert

3. Apparently camels started in the NA, traveled to Asia, got wiped out in NA (presumably by humans), got tamed in Asia, and then brought back to NA.

4. Apparently this also true of horses.

[Gibbon1]

I remember seeing a late medieval painting of a saint and he's wearing spectacles.

[unknown_apostle]

And that solution comes in many, many shades of gray. Picking the right shade is less obvious.

[pythonlion]

I don't understand why you being downvoted, what is wrong with bible treasure hunting or validating one of the oldest books. if the bible was some part wrong it doesn't mean anything in it is false

[ben_w]

Some part of it being wrong literally means that a thing in it is false, so I think you should rephrase the point you’re trying to make.

[gaoshan]

It's because many religions and mythologies based the stories they tell on actual events (or handed down stories of events). People naturally incorporate those into their own system of beliefs. Often the most prominent tales are shared amongst various religions and cultures and that certainly doesn't "prove" any one of their belief systems in particular. The prevalence does, however, help to validate the science behind the discovery.