The Archaeological Evidence for Sodom and Gomorrah
Proving Genesis is a Historical Fact, One Bible Story at a Time
For most of modern history, Sodom and Gomorrah have occupied a comfortable category: moral fable.
The stranger parts of Genesis—and the Bible in general—are conveniently categorized as a metaphor, safely insulated from historical or physical scrutiny, removing the need to reconcile ancient text with material reality.
Sodom and Gomorrah becomes a simple cautionary tale about excess, depravity, and divine judgment—useful for sermons, easily dismissed by historians, and safely detached from anything as messy as geography or physical evidence. In popular imagination, the cities float somewhere outside of time and place, destroyed by “fire from heaven” in a way that conveniently resists further questions.
That framing has its advantages. If Sodom never existed as a real city, then its destruction never needs explaining. No location to identify, no mechanism to evaluate, no uncomfortable overlap between ancient text and physical reality—and perfectly useful for sanctimonious finger-wagging from the pulpit.
Unfortunately, archaeology has a habit of complicating convenient stories.
Finding Sodom
Over the last two decades, excavations in the southern Jordan Valley have revealed something far less metaphorical: large Bronze Age cities that were destroyed suddenly, violently, and in ways that do not resemble normal warfare, accidental fires, or gradual decline.
Among these sites, one in particular has emerged as a particularly awkward data point—one that aligns with the biblical description of Sodom in specific details around geography, scale, and destruction pattern.
What the ground preserves at this site does not read like allegory. Melted architecture, shocked minerals, human remains fragmented by extreme force, and centuries of abandonment suggest a catastrophe so abrupt and severe that it erased an entire urban center and rendered the surrounding land unusable for generations.
Metaphors tend not to leave vitrified pottery behind.