Sodom

No excavated site has been shown to be Sodom. There is no inscription that carries the name, no destruction layer tied to it, and no object from any dig that names the city. What exists is a short list of candidate sites and an argument about where the plain of Genesis 13 was. The map pin on this page sits in the southern basin of the Dead Sea, following the site's geocoding source and the older tradition. It marks the traditional southern candidate. The northern candidate is disputed, and the pin is a map convention rather than a finding. The basin itself explains the raw materials the text names. The Dead Sea lies in the Jordan Rift at roughly 430 metres below sea level, the lowest exposed land on earth. Genesis 14:10 says the Valley of Siddim was full of tar pits, and blocks of bitumen still rise from the sea floor and wash ashore, which is why classical writers called the water Lake Asphaltites. Sulfur nodules form naturally in the pale marl beds along the shore, the Lisan Formation, laid down by a much larger prehistoric lake. A ridge on the southwestern shore, Mount Sodom or Jebel Usdum, runs about 8 km and stands roughly 226 m above the water while still sitting about 170 m below sea level, all figures approximate. It is around four fifths rock salt, pushed up through the sediments above it and still rising a few millimetres a year. Rain and groundwater have cut caves and free standing pillars into it, and one pillar carries the local name Lot's wife. The name is old and the pillar is real. Nothing ties it to Genesis 19:26. The southern candidate is a group of sites on the plain southeast of the sea. Paul W. Lapp excavated the large Early Bronze cemetery at Bab edh-Dhra from 1965 to 1967. Walter E. Rast and R. Thomas Schaub surveyed the same plain in 1973, located four further sites at Numeira, es-Safi, Feifa and Khanazir, and then directed four seasons at the Bab edh-Dhra town site between 1975 and 1981 for the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain, published as Bâb edh-Dhrâ': Excavations at the Town Site (1975-1981) in 2003. They raised the possibility that the five sites answer to the five cities of the plain, and they raised it as a possibility rather than a finding. Bab edh-Dhra was walled from about 3000 BC and was burned at the end of Early Bronze III, about 2350 BC, and was not rebuilt as a town. Numeira, about 13 km south, is a smaller site of the same period that also burned. Bryant G. Wood, of Associates for Biblical Research, argues the southern identification in print, with Bab edh-Dhra as Sodom and Numeira as Gomorrah. Associates for Biblical Research is a confessional body, and this page says so rather than presenting it as neutral ground. The southern case carries a date problem and it is fair to state it: on the ordinary reading of the biblical numbers Abraham belongs several centuries after 2350 BC, in the Middle Bronze Age, so the identification needs either a much earlier Abraham than most chronologies allow or a later destruction than the excavators assign, and neither adjustment is free. The northern candidate is Tall el-Hammam, in the eastern Jordan Valley about 14 km northeast of the top of the Dead Sea. Steven Collins, of Trinity Southwest University, has directed the excavation there since 2005 with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, and set out the identification in "Where Is Sodom? The Case for Tall el-Hammam," Biblical Archaeology Review 39:2 (2013), and in Discovering the City of Sodom, written with Latayne C. Scott the same year. He reads Genesis 13:10 to 13:12 as geography. The Hebrew word there is kikkar, the disk or circle of the Jordan, and the plain in that sense is the broad northern flat where the river runs into the sea. Lot is standing near Bethel when he looks, and from that height the northern plain is in view while the southern end is not. Tall el-Hammam is much the largest Bronze Age site on that plain, it was heavily fortified, and it was destroyed in the Middle Bronze Age and then left empty for centuries. Two answers stand against the northern reading, gathered by Todd Bolen on BiblePlaces in 2013. On geography, Bill Schlegel, author of the Satellite Bible Atlas, argues that Genesis 19:27 to 19:28 has Abraham looking down toward Sodom from the high ground near Hebron, which faces south. On chronology, Eugene H. Merrill, of Dallas Theological Seminary, argues that a Middle Bronze II destruction in the region of 1650 BC is too late for Abraham on any straightforward reading of the biblical numbers, and that accepting it would mean giving up the biblical dates before the period of the judges. Collins answers that the northern reading of kikkar is the plain sense of the Hebrew and that the biblical chronology is more elastic than his critics allow. This page prints the positions and the works and leaves the question where the evidence leaves it. In September 2021 a team led by Ted E. Bunch published a paper in Scientific Reports arguing that a Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, and it was widely reported as scientific support for the Genesis account. Scientific Reports retracted that paper on 24 April 2025. The retraction note says the editors are no longer confident in the conclusions, identifies problems in the mineralogical, geochemical and comparative analysis, and states that the proposed destruction mechanism appears not to be sufficiently supported by the data. Eleven of the authors disagreed with the retraction and nine did not respond. The published criticism had come from several directions: Elisabeth Bik raised image duplication concerns in 2021, the geologists Scott Jaret and R. Scott Harris questioned the impact evidence in 2022, and the physicist Mark Boslough argued with Ari Bruno in 2025 that the data had been read through a false comparison with the 1908 Tunguska event. The retraction is a judgment on the airburst mechanism. It says nothing about whether Tall el-Hammam is Sodom, which is argued on geography, stratigraphy and the size of the site. One claim that readers meet online is worth naming here. In 1989 Ron Wyatt examined pale formations near the Dead Sea, said they were the ash remains of Sodom and Gomorrah, and offered round sulfur nodules found in them as proof. Archaeologists and geologists do not accept it. The formations are lake sediments of the Lisan Formation, laid down when the water body was larger and deeper, and Elizabeth Gierlowski-Kordesch of Ohio University has said so directly. Sulfur nodules of that kind form naturally in those beds. Wyatt published nothing on the claim in a reviewed venue and no excavation has confirmed it. The claim is unsupported. What the ancients said they could see belongs on the record as testimony rather than as survey. Flavius Josephus, writing about AD 75, says in The Jewish War that the country of Sodom was once a most happy land, that it was burnt for the impiety of its inhabitants, and that the traces of the five cities were still to be seen in his day, along with fruit that looked fit to eat and dissolved into smoke and ashes when it was picked. That fruit is generally identified with the Sodom apple, Calotropis procera, which grows around the Dead Sea. The Madaba map, the sixth century floor mosaic of the church of Saint George at Madaba in Jordan and the oldest surviving map of the Holy Land, marks Zoar at the southeastern end of the Dead Sea with the sanctuary of Saint Lot beside it. That sanctuary has been dug. Konstantinos D. Politis worked at Deir 'Ain 'Abata, on the slope above Safi on the southern shore, from 1988 to 2003, and found a Byzantine monastic complex built around a natural cave that Christians identified with the cave of Genesis 19:30, with mosaic inscriptions dated April 606 and May 691 and two further Greek inscriptions on stone naming Saint Lot. It shows what Christians of that period believed and where they went to believe it. It does not show where Lot's cave was.