[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