Discovering the City of Sodom: The Fascinating, True Account of the Discovery of the Old Testament’s Most Infamous City

It has been hiding in plain sight of those who, for no good scientific reason, didn’t just summarily cross it off a list of candidates for Sodom.

In fact, in the last century, practically no one put it on the list in the first place.

Traveling up through the mountains and crags that huddle around Tall el-Hammam, it is at first indistinguishable at least in hue from the dun-colored Kafrayn Dam across the road from it and the sagging slopes of runoff-sliced hills all around. From that vantage point, everything from here to the east is beige and taupe and light brown and tan and off-white. . .

Towering above the fields, Sodom looks as natural – and upon observation, as designed and processed –as an enormous anthill that has erupted from the earth, once of the earth and now in it. Like an anthill, too, almost nothing grows on its higher slopes, perhaps in tribute to the fact that its desolation speaks of upheaval and transport and other times, of a hidden history revealed, of secrets and threats and dread.

Once within its mighty walls, both hot and cool springs are now in the open, anchoring a spot of luxurious foliage, home to Sodom’s abundant little green frogs.

Every rock on this mud mountain was hauled up there, from the small ones to the great boulders that formed foundations for immense walls. Some have not seen light for four, five, six thousand years. Even the mud itself, decomposed bricks, came from somewhere else.

Along the approach to the site from the east, in the foothills of crumbling dirt, sits a waist-high, room-sized pile of pottery sherds from seven years of archaeological excavation. But these are the discards, the pieces of pottery that weren’t important as “diagnostics.”

Around the other side of the great mound you can bend downward and make out human bone fragments, protruding like a thousand compound fractures through the skin of a balk, one of the vertically-cut sections of the excavation.

These are not tombs. They were dwellings for the living. And the people whose remains lay blasted and scattered here were not gathered to their fathers with respect and ceremony. They died suddenly in their own private places and kitchens as they ate and drank from the pottery vessels whose sherds now surround them.