What really happened to the damned cities of Sodom and Gomorrah? Tristan Hughes and Dr. Dylan Johnson delve into the infamous biblical story to discover the context and supposed locations of these cities near the Dead Sea, and explore whether there is any historical basis to their destruction.They discuss the theological implications and examines archaeological surveys that sought to uncover the truth behind this fascinating ancient narrative.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here
Chapter 1: What is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah?
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Suddenly the Lord rained fire and brimstone on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed them and the whole valley along with all the people there and everything that grew on the land. Early the next morning, Abraham hurried to the place where he had stood in the presence of the Lord.
He looked down at Sodom and Gomorrah and the whole valley and saw smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a huge furnace.
Those were excerpts from Genesis 19 in the Old Testament, describing one of the most famous stories from the Hebrew Bible, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by God for their sinfulness. Today the names Sodom and Gomorrah, particularly Sodom, are well known and infamous, and when we did a recent poll asking which biblical story we should cover next, Well, Sodom and Gomorrah won convincingly.
We're going to explore the stories about these two cities that survive in the book of Genesis. We'll delve into the context, their supposed location near the Dead Sea, and whether there is any historical basis to the biblical of Sodom and Gomorrah. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Our guest today is Dr. Dylan Johnson from Cardiff University.
A historian of the ancient Near East and biblical scholar, Dylan has been on the podcast before to talk through the stories of Moses and the Exodus and that of the Ark of the Covenant. Dylan is a wonderful speaker and this was a really interesting chat about Sodom and Gomorrah. Enjoy. Enjoy. Dylan, it is a pleasure to have you back on the podcast today. It's great to be back.
And we did the Ark of the Covenant last time, and we did Moses as well. So you are one of our go-to experts for the book of Exodus, the book of Genesis, and exploring the stories of these well-known objects and figures from the Old Testament. And Sodom and Gomorrah, it feels like another well-known story from that part of the Bible.
Yeah, some people know a version of the story. I think in the podcast, we can kind of go through the fact that there's actually multiple, but most people know the names Sodom and Gomorrah, that's for sure.
So what is the big question, first of all? What is the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah?
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Chapter 2: What biblical context surrounds the destruction of these cities?
But that specific story with all the details, with Lot, with the three messengers or the three divine beings, the hospitality theme, the sexual deviancy component, it's only there. No other biblical text seems to be aware that Abraham has anything to do with Sodom and Gomorrah. But the problem is that once you read that story, you kind of can't escape it.
You always are going to be, with every reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, thinking of that whole story. So what I'm trying to piece apart here is maybe if that's the last piece added, there is to get to some of the, if not the historicity of these events, at least to access what the oldest story was.
And it's not there, is what I'm trying to say. But is that important to highlight? Also, we might think today, book of Genesis at the beginning of the Bible, it must have been written first. But of course, almost it feels like an onion. There are so many different layers to these stories.
And when they're added and compiled together, it's not that the oldest stories are at the beginning and that the stories we have today were the earliest versions of them either.
Right, exactly. It's something that I struggle to teach the students sometimes is that there's a clear narrative trajectory in the Bible from the beginning of time to more or less the Persian period. And at certain points, that intersects with actual chronology. But again, it's a narrative chronology.
So when something occurs early in the biblical text or it's based early, it doesn't have much bearing on when that text was actually written. So the best example is the story of creation is probably pretty late, whereas a prophetic text like Hosea is probably much older. So you can't exactly correlate the narrative context with the scribal context, the composition of those texts.
We've covered that main narrative story of Genesis book 18 to 19, but there's another part of the book of Genesis, isn't there, which talks about Sodom and Gomorrah that I feel we need to talk about first before visiting those other cities and the historicity and archaeology about it.
Right, exactly. So this gets to a completely different, also in Genesis, but it's a completely different chapter in chapter 14. which is a chapter that has long been recognized as one of the strangest chapters in the book of Genesis. It's going all over the place in terms of what it's talking about, its content.
It concerns international politics, which is completely out of place in the book of Genesis. That's more at home in Kings and Samuel and things like that. It has Abram in this section, essentially as a king with an army that he raises. He encounters a strange priest called Melchizedek, who's the priest of El Elyon in pre-Israelite Jerusalem.
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