Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Some of the most chilling stories in the Bible are tales of legendary cities destroyed by the hand of God.
00:15Sodom and Gomorrah were incinerated in a hail of fire and brimstone.
00:22And Jericho's walls came tumbling down to the sound of trumpets.
00:28But are these stories fiction or fact?
00:33Archaeologists have recently begun to uncover some clues.
00:39There's undeniable evidence of catastrophic events.
00:42But does it support the biblical accounts or point to a more earthly explanation?
00:57One of the oldest stories in the world is a dramatic tale of two cities whose names are synonymous with sin and debauchery.
01:18Sodom and Gomorrah.
01:21The story of what happened to these cities is a powerful parable of sex and pleasure.
01:34A moral fable about wickedness and corruption.
01:38And the price tag that comes with sin.
01:464,000 or so years ago, the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah had an infamous reputation.
01:52Although the Bible doesn't specify exactly what they did to deserve it.
01:56Genesis simply says the men of Sodom were evil and great sinners before the Lord.
02:06Later on, it also mentions abominations.
02:10But doesn't elaborate as to what they were.
02:12We have very little information, actually, about exactly what was going on there.
02:18I think that's why Hollywood, among others, is so fascinated by Sodom and Gomorrah.
02:24It's open to whatever you want to think.
02:27What was going on there?
02:29I don't know, but it must have been bad.
02:30But if the Bible is vague about the sins that were committed, it's clear about the punishment.
02:46The Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah, brimstone and fire out of heaven.
02:55The Bible later goes on to suggest that after Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed,
02:59their people fled, leaving the cities abandoned.
03:06If this biblical story really did happen,
03:09it probably happened here,
03:11in these empty, desolate lands next to a lifeless sea.
03:16But this is far from certain.
03:21Like many things in the Hebrew Bible,
03:23it's hard to actually pin down a location for places.
03:26The Hebrew Bible talks about the five cities of the plain.
03:31The nearest we can get today is thinking that they're somewhere around the shores of the Dead Sea,
03:37say in modern-day Jordan.
03:39But even that is a best guess.
03:41According to the book of Genesis, the story took place in the time of Abraham, centuries before Moses fled from Egypt.
03:57Abraham was apparently the patriarch of a tribe of nomads who avoided towns and cities,
04:03which may be why we know so little about them.
04:05The Bible says that they were the people who wrote about them.
04:09City dwellers were usually the people who wrote the history.
04:14Nomads usually are archaeologically invisible.
04:18What we have in the Old Testament,
04:21in the writings of these very literate tribal people,
04:25who eventually became city dwellers themselves,
04:29is we have the nomads' side of the story.
04:31The Bible tells us that Abraham's tribesmen were constantly fighting with each other over pasture land.
04:40To settle the dispute, Abraham and his nephew Lot agreed to part ways,
04:48and Lot settled on the plain near the city of Sodom.
04:51Lot lifted up his eyes and saw all the plain of the Jordan,
04:59and Lot moved his tent as far as Sodom.
05:02So Sodom was already an established city when Lot moved there.
05:07If it was a typical Bronze Age settlement, about a thousand people would have lived inside its walls.
05:16No one had ever looked for, or found, any evidence that this biblical city actually existed.
05:27Then in 1924, an archaeologist named William Albright made a trip to the Dead Sea.
05:38Well, some of the people with him were certainly looking for Sodom and Gomorrah,
05:44generally the cities of the plains.
05:46So they came down there following the biblical text,
05:48and they circled around the southeast end shore of the Dead Sea.
05:53And just at the end of their survey down here, they came across the site of Babadra.
05:59Babadra was a Bronze Age site, but there was no evidence that it was a town.
06:05In fact, it seemed to be a cemetery.
06:07Albright didn't have the resources to excavate it at the time,
06:12and nearly 50 years passed before anyone went back to the site and began to dig.
06:19Archaeologist Paul Lapp led that 1967 excavation,
06:24and Thomas Schaub was one of the people digging.
06:27He's been back to the site many times since then,
06:30and over the years he's uncovered a cemetery that was vast, even by Bronze Age standards.
06:35This is the largest burial house that we've excavated at Babadra.
06:42It is some 15 meters long and 7 meters across.
06:46We found hundreds and hundreds of pots here and skeletons and bones.
06:52We found a burial with gold jewelry.
06:55We excavated over 700 pieces of pottery that were funerary gifts here,
07:00including many small perfume jugglets and many other objects,
07:03including cloth, and one unusual, the remnants of wooden poles that were used as a pallet
07:11to bring in the bodies to the burial house.
07:14It was an exciting discovery.
07:18A graveyard that had been in use for about a thousand years,
07:21around the time of Abraham and the destruction of Sodom.
07:24But there was nothing to link the cemetery to Sodom, except this.
07:31In about 2350 BC, the burial stopped, suddenly.
07:38The reason why was unclear.
07:40There are any number of reasons why a site might not be reoccupied.
07:49Some we can put our finger on, some we can't.
07:52Perhaps the water supply dried up.
07:54Perhaps the environment changed.
07:55Perhaps the climate changed.
07:57Perhaps the people were annihilated and completely killed.
07:59Over the next few seasons, the archaeologists expanded their search,
08:07looking for signs of a lost city.
08:12It wasn't long before they found something.
08:15Traces of human habitation on a hillside overlooking the cemetery.
08:18They uncovered stones and some pottery shards.
08:32But in their search for the biblical city of Sodom,
08:36the archaeologists at Babadrar dealt mostly with vast quantities of dirt.
08:40There is a fascination with what has once been lost and yet now is found.
08:53This is what drives some archaeologists and, to a larger extent, the general public.
08:59This idea that something could have been built and then completely lost
09:04and yet is there under the earth waiting to be found.
09:07Unfortunately for archaeologists, lost cities are usually buried underground.
09:17And that's where Tom Schaub and his team found traces of a Bronze Age wall.
09:24It was on a hill overlooking the cemetery at Babadrar
09:28and it was the first sign that they might have come across a town of some kind.
09:31The inescapable question was, had they found Sodom or Gomorrah?
09:39The archaeologists began to dig and gradually the outlines of a settlement emerged.
09:46You see the face of the western wall of the site.
09:54That's the foundation of the wall and you had a mud-brick superstructure above that.
09:58The wall was much taller than that as far as we can tell with the mud-brick that collapsed.
10:04One discovery led to another.
10:06This is a good view of one wall of the sanctuary and the other wall with the entranceway.
10:18It wasn't quite a city yet, but gradually the hard work began to pay off.
10:23Right here is an open plaza area and very likely the place where most of the town business was carried on inside of the gates.
10:40As the data trickled in, archaeologists realized that they'd come across something unique.
10:44The foundations of a town from the time of Abraham or even earlier.
10:50Just where the Bible suggests Sodom was located.
10:57Like the cemetery, the town had been deserted suddenly and at about the same time.
11:03But what exactly had been going on behind those mud-brick walls?
11:08Was it the usual monotony of Bronze Age life?
11:15Or was it something else?
11:19Something sinful and corrupt?
11:27Had the ancient residents of Babadra engaged in behaviour so depraved that it had to be punished from above?
11:34Were Babadra and Sodom one and the same?
11:41Not surprisingly, opinions continue to differ.
11:45Work done in the 1960s and 70s and subsequent years have revealed several sites from the time of Abraham, the early Bronze Age.
11:57The largest of them being Babadra.
11:58It would seem that that should be identified as the site of Sodom.
12:04The sites of Babadra and the other sites on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea are fabulous sites.
12:11But they're sites mostly of the third millennium, gradually abandoned around 2000 BCE.
12:16And I think we would all agree that the population of these sites was Canaanite.
12:20To the writers of the Bible, Canaanite wasn't a term of endearment.
12:26Abraham's tribe of nomads probably saw the city-dwelling Canaanites as corrupt and promiscuous.
12:35Perfect examples of the bad things that can happen when you stop living in a tent.
12:39This fits nicely with Sodom's reputation as a place with walls, rooms and secrets.
12:52And Lot, one of their own, had evidently forsaken his tent and moved into town.
12:57Had he too been corrupted?
13:01We have an account of Abraham living near Hebron, down in the southern part of Canaan.
13:11And angels coming to visit him with the message that they were going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.
13:19Abraham asked God to spare the town if some of its citizens could be shown to be good men.
13:28But how many good men were needed to avoid God's wrath?
13:34Abraham knew his nephew Lot was living there with his family.
13:39And so Abraham begins this dialogue for 30 righteous people, will you still destroy the city?
13:45God says, Well, find me 20 righteous men in the city of Sodom and Gomorrah.
13:50Just find me 20.
13:51And Abraham says, Well, how about 10?
13:55It's interesting that you have in the Bible, you know, you have a God who can bargain,
14:02whose mind can be changed by a good dealer like Abraham.
14:08To count the good men of Sodom, God sent two angels to visit the town.
14:12The angels walked through the city and prepared to spend the night on the streets.
14:29But when they came to Lot's house, Sodom's only good man took them in.
14:34That evening, they shared a meal with Lot, his wife and their two teenage daughters.
14:43But Lot's hospitable nature wasn't shared by the rest of the Sodomites.
14:49Indeed, they had something very different in mind for the angels.
14:52They wanted Lot to hand them over, apparently so they could be used by the townspeople for sex.
15:04But Lot refused, to a degree.
15:08Lot, at some point, he's trying to bargain with the townspeople.
15:12And what if I give you my two daughters instead of these angels?
15:17And the townspeople, you know, no, I want the angels.
15:20And that really becomes, in that cautionary tale, the final straw for God.
15:26And it's like, okay Lot, you and your family, get out of town, this place is toast.
15:30The debate about whether the Bible is an accurate historical record has been going on for centuries.
15:47And the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is no exception.
15:51Yeah, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah happened, sure.
15:56How we know it, we heard it from our forefathers.
16:03We need to remember that the biblical stories about the Israelites were probably not written down before the 8th or 7th century.
16:10Centuries after the period in question.
16:13I think the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities of the plain, these multiple destructions of cities,
16:20might be a telescoping of several cities that were destroyed at around the same time.
16:26There's no question that the destruction of a city would have been a memorable event.
16:33A story that would have been passed down from generation to generation.
16:37Throughout history, several cities have been destroyed for one reason or another.
16:43And their names have lived on.
16:46Troy and Carthage were demolished in a war.
16:49So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
16:50The wrath of nature buried Pompeii under 6 meters of hot ash when Vesuvius erupted.
17:04San Francisco was levelled by an earthquake.
17:14Hurricane Katrina battered and then submerged New Orleans.
17:21Insurance companies call events like these acts of God.
17:29But the people living in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't have argued with that assessment.
17:34When you read the Bible, you see their observations of a natural phenomenon as this mysticism, as this fantastic power of God.
17:44Natural disasters have always destroyed cities. We're seeing that very well in today's world.
17:54Whether it's a tsunami or it's an earthquake or it's an overflowing river and a torrent of mud.
18:01Yes, natural disasters destroy cities.
18:03And, of course, that could have crept into the biblical narrative.
18:11But of all the different kinds of natural disaster, one seems especially suited to the destruction caused at Sodom and Gomorrah.
18:22When we think about a rain of fire, the first thing that springs to mind is a volcano.
18:29Over and over again, we see the power of volcanoes being associated with the power of God.
18:35Sodom and Gomorrah is a perfect example of a volcanic eruption in the Bible.
18:40Many of the phenomena associated with volcanic eruptions seem to appear in the biblical account.
18:48We have the earth shaking, we have the saying, the pillars of fire, ash falling, stones falling, pyroclastic flows, consuming bodies.
18:55And, of course, sinners being punished by God for their sins.
19:04Unfortunately, there's not much evidence for erupting volcanoes near the Dead Sea in biblical times.
19:10But there's plenty of proof that another kind of geological upheaval was wreaking havoc in the area.
19:16A force that may have accounted for the famous destruction of another city, not too far from the Dead Sea.
19:22That city was Jericho.
19:26According to the Bible, an Israelite leader named Joshua conquered Jericho after its walls mysteriously crumbled.
19:40But there might have been a plausible natural reason for this event.
19:49It turns out that Jericho was built on an earthquake fault line.
19:53There are actually quite a number of falls on either side of Jericho.
19:59Virtually every century you had one or two earthquakes, in some centuries even as many as six.
20:05But it's an exceedingly unhealthy place to build a city, or a little bit like San Francisco.
20:13If there are world records for cities, Jericho certainly deserves one.
20:22Jericho is the oldest known continuously inhabited city in the world.
20:28It's been inhabited for 10,000 years. It's still inhabited.
20:31These days, the sprawling mound where all of Jericho's previous incarnations are buried lies under a cable car.
20:40A prime attraction for tourists visiting the Holy Land.
20:44It's going to be ruin upon ruin, inexplicable ruin upon top of another inexplicable ruin for the population living there.
20:52So, of course, you're going to get stories growing up as to why that wall has tumbled down, why that wall has fallen.
21:01Hidden within the mound are the ruins of City 4, which may date from Joshua's time, give or take an important few hundred years.
21:11Many of the walls here show signs of having been struck by an earthquake,
21:15which may or may not support the biblical account of how the city fell.
21:19The Bible story begins with Joshua's army gathered on the far side of the Jordan River,
21:27another group of herdsmen mistrustful of city dwellers.
21:34Here is Joshua on the east side with his nomadic tribes,
21:39and he is waiting for a way in which he could bring his animals across the Jordan River.
21:43This is not that easy. Well, lo and behold, suddenly there is an earthquake.
21:47What happens next is eerily reminiscent of the story of Moses' escape from Egypt,
21:54an inexplicable parting of the waters that allows Joshua and his army to cross on a dry riverbed.
22:00But there may have been a natural explanation for this miracle.
22:03In the region called Damia, when we get these earthquakes, we get huge avalanches that flow across and actually block the flow of the river for a day or two.
22:20Downstream, the river actually runs dry. In fact, Damia, that province is the province after which we derive the word dam.
22:29Did a military opportunity simply present itself to Joshua and his men?
22:36This is entirely possible because the Bible places the attack just after the spring harvest, an ill-advised time for anyone to plan a siege.
22:46If you're going to attack a city, you want to surround it and starve the people off.
22:57You don't attack a city when the crops have just been harvested and the city is full of food and there's no crops in the field for you to harvest for your army.
23:07What happens to Jericho next sounds miraculous.
23:15We read in Joshua chapter 6 that the Israelites walked around the city for six days and on the seventh day blew the trumpets.
23:24The people shouted and the Bible says the walls fell down and the Israelites stormed the city.
23:28Even the sound of trumpets can be explained.
23:34An earthquake almost always, just before it hits, is characterized by a roar.
23:40Very many people describe it from small earthquakes, for instance, like a fireplace roaring.
23:48Others say no, it was more like a jet plane that came by or thunder that is heard in the distance.
23:53Jericho was leveled and the Bible says that one of the walls fell down flat so the invaders could go up into the city.
24:04That description may support some of the archaeological finds, like the collapsed city walls at the base of the tell.
24:12These were very large, thick, mud brick walls, but one of the walls actually did, at the time of the destruction of Jericho's city 4, fall outward.
24:27And this is exactly what we see archaeologically.
24:29It formed a natural ramp up into the city where people could have walked up a rather smooth incline right into the city with almost no resistance.
24:40The Bible tells us that the Israelites sacked and burnt the city, but it wasn't looted.
24:51This seems to fit with the discovery of wheat and barley buried in city 4's ashes.
24:56Jars full of grain, not half full or quarter full, full of grain.
25:08Clearly, the harvest had just been taken in, in agreement with the Bible.
25:14Well, why was it left there at Jericho to be burned in the fire?
25:19Again, the Bible offers an explanation.
25:22The grain was not to be taken by the people seizing the city, that it was to be left there or burned or sacrificed to God by burning, but it was not to be taken.
25:36Most archaeologists agree that Jericho was destroyed at least once in biblical times.
25:43But the dates don't seem to correspond with Joshua's conquest.
25:47Now there is a big destruction, a violent destruction by fire, of the city of Jericho, which most archaeologists would date between around 1500 and 1475, and they would attribute it to the Egyptians.
26:00If we're trying to put Jericho into the context of the biblical story, and we're looking for Jericho that was built in about 1200 years BC, plus minus, it didn't have walls.
26:15So they didn't come tumbling down, whether it was a trumpet being blown at them or something else or an earthquake.
26:22There weren't walls.
26:23Here is the real problem.
26:24In the 13th century BC, when a Jericho might have been there to have been destroyed by a Joshua, there is nothing. The mound is abandoned.
26:33I always say to believers, if they need something like a miracle, Joshua destroyed a city that wasn't even there. The stupendous miracle.
26:39Whether or not Jericho was destroyed as the Bible says it was, there is no doubt that the city was repeatedly shaken by earthquakes.
26:54And the same seismic fault line that runs under Jericho continues on to the south, where it would have passed beneath Sodom, Gomorrah and the other cities of the plain.
27:055,000 years ago, humans had no rational way to explain the sometimes violent forces that swept over their world.
27:20Storms, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes seem to happen for no apparent reason.
27:30In the biblical lands, the earth underfoot constantly shifted, sometimes transforming the landscape almost overnight.
27:41The entire course of a river could change dramatically and you would end up having to rebuild your roads and your homes in the lifetime of an ordinary house cat.
27:52There was no common sense to the way things operated in their universe, a very, very chaotic universe.
28:04One example of that chaos can be found in the remains of an ancient city called Mashkan Shapir, located in present-day Iraq.
28:11Some historians have even speculated that what happened to Mashkan Shapir inspired the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and it's not hard to see why.
28:27Something unusual happened in Mashkan Shapir, something so unusual that the city was never rebuilt and inhabited again.
28:46Like Sodom and Gomorrah, Mashkan Shapir seems to have been destroyed in a rain of fire.
28:51Mashkan Shapir was a city that was built mostly out of mud brick, which really is not very flammable.
29:02And yet we find a tremendous conflagration that consumed at least one third of the city, burned animals to the bone.
29:11But today, we know something about Mashkan Shapir that the ancients couldn't have known.
29:20And it may explain what really happened.
29:23Mashkan Shapir, like almost any other city built in the Tigris Euphrates region 4,000 years ago, was over pools of natural gas and oil.
29:35And it's the natural gas that's a problem. If you get the right kind of earthquake, it's going to expand and it's going to come jetting out of the ground just like a volcanic eruption.
29:47Just like literally a gusher of natural gas.
29:51Gas followed by oil under pressure is a lethal combination. All it needs is a spark from a cooking hut.
29:58The effect will be like a giant fuel air bomb detonating over and around and in the city.
30:11And we know from just looking at the Kuwait fires how frightening that can be.
30:16I mean, the smoke is black. It blots out the sun. It blots out the stars. It's raining soot everywhere.
30:25You just see these huge, bright flames shooting into the sky, out of the ground, in the middle of the city.
30:35A tremendous waterfall of fire lighting up the night.
30:40The city was destroyed by something no one could explain, except with words like fire and brimstone.
30:51Could something similar have happened to Sodom and Gomorrah?
31:00It's certainly possible.
31:02Not only does the area around the Dead Sea have oil and gas deposits deep underground,
31:14but tar and sulphur exist closer to the surface.
31:18And sulphur was what the ancients called brimstone.
31:21Oil, gas, tar and sulphur in an area prone to earthquakes.
31:38The people of Sodom and Gomorrah, or Babadrah, might have been sitting on a time bomb.
31:43If what happened to Mashkan Shapir happened here, it probably started with a tremor.
31:59Well, the first thing usually is a movement which is more sort of up and down.
32:05And then everything starts swinging.
32:07And it can sway for a minute, maybe sometimes with very happy earthquakes as much as one and a half minutes or so on.
32:14For most people involved in it, it feels like an eternity, obviously.
32:21The earthquake would have opened up pockets of natural gas, while tar and sulphur deposits bubbled to the surface.
32:27If the people at that time were preparing food or anything like that, you only need one fireplace and this gas coming across it and you would have very significant effect.
32:41It would have been a spectacular Bronze Age disaster.
32:45When the gas ignited, oil, tar and sulphur deposits would have been set ablaze.
32:59Fire would have cascaded over the town.
33:07Anyone in the area would have been incinerated.
33:15But those at a safe distance would have witnessed something astonishing.
33:30People like Lot and his family.
33:35According to the Bible, they were headed towards the city of Zor when a hail of fire and brimstone took place.
33:45The angels had warned them not to look back at Sodom as they fled.
33:55But Lot's wife ignored the warning.
34:04She turned.
34:06And whatever she saw transfixed her to the spot, transforming her into a pillar of salt.
34:15But at Babadrar, proposed by some as the site of Sodom, there's little evidence of such a dramatic destruction by fire.
34:31Instead, the town seems to have fallen victim to an invading army that tried to enter through the Western Gate.
34:37Right in the center of the gateway, we found a blocking wall where they had used everything but the kitchen sink to throw in there, which was our first clue that the end of the site may have been associated with some sort of military encounter.
34:55Because they were blocking the entrance to the city.
35:03To get through the massive wooden gate, the invaders built a roaring hot fire next to it.
35:08What we find from the superstructure of the wall, the collapse of the mud brick, which was vitrified, almost reddish, showing the flame that was up against the town wall on the outside as they attacked.
35:29It doesn't indicate that they actually entered into the city, but certainly that there was some sort of attack on the city.
35:39There's no way to know when the attack happened, or what became of the people who lived there.
35:44All we know is that by about 2350 BC, no one was living in the town, or using the cemetery.
35:57Like Lot and his two daughters, any survivors from Babadra were now on their own.
36:02In the Bible, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah doesn't have a happy ending, even for Lot and his family, who managed to escape.
36:18We're told that Lot went to the city of Zor following the destruction, but he was afraid to live there.
36:25So Lot and his two daughters took refuge in a cave.
36:49Cut off from other men, and perhaps still under the corrupting influence of the city,
36:52Lot's daughters decided to seduce their own father.
37:03They plied Lot with wine, and then had sex with him.
37:15Both girls became pregnant, and the sons they bore went on to father two more tribes of Canaanites,
37:21who the Israelites later conquered.
37:34The Bible locates Zor near the modern city of Safi, about 50 kilometers south of Babadra.
37:39And in 1989, a Greek archaeologist discovered something there that was lost for a thousand years.
37:50A Byzantine monastery, built in front of a cave, dedicated to St. Lot.
37:55They thought that this particular cave, where they built their church, was the cave where Lot and his daughters live.
38:05Well, there's no way to prove that for certain.
38:08But it is interesting that inside the cave, they did find evidence for occupation back in that time period.
38:14This puts the occupation of Lot's cave in the early Bronze Age, the same time as Babadra.
38:27And it was just south of Babadra that Tom Schaub and his partner practically stumbled upon a second lost city.
38:34It started when they noticed an odd rock formation on top of a hill.
38:41It turned out to be a town wall.
38:46This is the same wall that Walter Rast and I spied from the road as we drove up during our 1973 survey.
38:57We almost ran up the steep hills of Numera, came along and walked along the southern wall line,
39:04began to see possible wall lines of structures within the town site.
39:08An examination of pottery shards convinced them that they'd found another early Bronze Age town,
39:17just a few miles from Babadra.
39:21They called the new site Numera.
39:24Like Babadra, it was walled.
39:27But it was much smaller, home to a few hundred people at most.
39:31We began to realize that this site was contemporary with Babadra
39:35and eventually, during our excavations, we began to realize it was almost like a sister city.
39:44I think it was a fairly prosperous town, but a kind of suburb of the larger city to the north, Babadra.
39:54But unlike Babadra, Numera had been abandoned not long after it was built.
39:59Numera was occupied for a relatively brief period, perhaps no more than a century.
40:03And fortunately for archaeologists, never settled again.
40:08So nobody actually lived on top of it, dug into the remains, reused the stones.
40:13Two settlements, one large and one small, just a few hours' walk from each other.
40:20Had they discovered Sodom's sister city, Gomorrah?
40:23If Abraham goes way back in early history, the only sites from that period, down to the Iron Age,
40:33that are walled towns, that are sizable, are these two sites of Babadra and Numera.
40:39So they have become, in the minds of many, prime candidates for the ancient traditions of Sodom and Gomorrah.
40:46Like Babadra, Numera showed signs that its inhabitants had fled and never returned.
40:54But not because of a war.
40:56There's no signs of breaching of walls that would have occurred by warfare.
41:02There are no remains of weapons.
41:03There are no dead soldiers, as you find, for example, at a number of sites where there have been battles.
41:08But they did find the skeletons of two men, crushed to death.
41:19Well, this is the tower.
41:20It's in front of that tower, of course, that we've found the most striking evidence of the last days of the town,
41:27because there were two skeletons underneath the collapse of the tower.
41:31And these were the skeletons of adult males, who had obviously died suddenly.
41:41This wasn't a burial. This wasn't a tomb.
41:44These were people who died in an open public area.
41:48And we think that they had died because the tower, where they were either squatting,
41:54or perhaps they'd been left behind as guards when everybody else left the city,
41:59simply collapsed on top of them.
42:03The suspected culprit was another earthquake.
42:08My hypothesis is that the inhabitants perhaps experienced a preliminary tremor
42:14and left the city for the open country because they knew they'd be safer there.
42:18And a few stayed behind, maybe as guards, and they were the ones who died in the city.
42:32The ruins of Numera also revealed something with a biblical echo.
42:37Unlike her sister city, Numera was consumed by fire.
42:42Everything that we've excavated has indicated a very heavy destruction level.
42:50We find up to 30 to 40 centimeters of ashy debris,
42:54including the remains of charred wooden beams and of the occupational debris.
43:01So whatever happened here, and it's pretty widespread over the site,
43:06there was a major fire that took place.
43:08There was a thick layer of ashes below the topsoil all over the site.
43:15Thatched roofs and that sort of stuff, wooden roof beams would have burned very quickly.
43:23If the fire had been accompanied by exploding gas, tar and sulfur deposits,
43:29the results would have been unforgettable.
43:31It doesn't take much to imagine that if you had a conflagration,
43:41the effects of bitumen and asphalt in that would be spectacular.
43:47And again, enough, I think, to earn these cities an enduring place in folk memory for their destruction.
43:55Afterwards, the skeletons of both towns would have sat bleaching in the sun,
44:04while a thousand years of travelers passed them by and heard stories about how they'd died.
44:09So you're talking about people handing down by word of mouth a story about the destruction of these two cities for more than a thousand years.
44:24And who knows what got changed in the telling?
44:29You might also have in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities that were destroyed in either this one great disaster or in several disasters over time that are telescoped.
44:42Again, possibly the nomad side of the story.
44:47You're picking up different strands from different periods of history, blending them together, creating a coherent narrative about an event which actually didn't happen.
44:58There's no doubt that something happened here, a little over 4,000 years ago, but whether it was invasion, earthquake, fire or some combination of all three, we'll probably never know.
45:15But here's something to consider. Sodom was derived from the Hebrew word Sodom, which means burnt, while Gomorrah was derived from the Hebrew word Amorah, meaning buried or submerged.
45:36There could hardly be better words to describe Numerah and Babadra in the centuries that followed their destruction.
45:46So perhaps the Bible was on to something after all.
45:56I think it's very important not to make the writers and the editors of the Hebrew Bible look like charlatans or fools.
46:02They were telling the truth as they understood it.
46:06The truth as they understood it involved sex and destruction, sin and the punishing wrath of God.
46:19It's a story that has already endured for thousands of years, perhaps the greatest morality tale ever told.
46:26A powerful lesson in the dangers of debauchery that will continue to intrigue us for centuries to come.
46:36Besides, O.K., we can survey after all the grounds and the joking and the terrible algunos bekannt happened, and our conclusion, our commonly died to the live area.
46:39But she will try to address what were the mostburgical errors and the torres, unfortunately according to her mind.
46:44On the CORCHOROPS on the horizon that has always wanted.
46:47LATAD DES thếx.
46:49DATISذT
46:51One More Power
46:52Land
46:54単