Cosmic impact destroyed a biblical city in Jordan Valley

Date:
September 28, 2021
Source:
University of California - Santa Barbara
Summary:
In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3600 years ago or roughly 1650
BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. Located on high
ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea,
the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously
occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted
early civilization for a few thousand years. At that time, it was
10 times larger than Jerusalem and 5 times larger than Jericho.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE),
the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in
its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in
the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand
years. At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and 5 times
larger than Jericho.


========================================================================== "It's an incredibly culturally important area," said James Kennett,
emeritus professor of earth science at the UC Santa Barbara. "Much
of where the early cultural complexity of humans developed is in this
general area." A favorite site for archaeologists and biblical scholars,
the mound hosts evidence of culture all the way from the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, all compacted into layers as the highly strategic settlement
was built, destroyed, and rebuilt over millennia.

But there is a 1.5-meter interval in the Middle Bronze Age II stratum
that caught the interest of some researchers, for its "highly unusual" materials. In addition to the debris one would expect from destruction via warfare and earthquakes, they found pottery shards with outer surfaces
melted into glass, "bubbled" mudbrick, and partially melted building
material, all indications of an anomalously high-temperature event,
much hotter than anything the technology of the time could produce.

"We saw evidence for temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius,"
said Kennett, whose research group at the time happened to have been
building the case for an older cosmic airburst about 12,800 years ago
that triggered major widespread burning, climatic changes and animal extinctions. The charred and melted materials at Tall el-Hammam looked familiar, and a group of researchers including impact scientist Allen
West and Kennett joined Trinity Southwest University biblical scholar
Philip J. Silvia's research effort to determine what happened at this
city 3,650 years ago.

Their results are published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Salt and Bone


========================================================================== "There's evidence of a large cosmic airburst, close to this city called
Tall el-Hammam," Kennett said, of an explosion similar to the Tunguska
Event, a roughly 12-megaton airburst that occurred in 1908, when a
56-60-meter meteor pierced the Earth's atmosphere over the Eastern
Siberian Taiga.

The shock of the explosion over Tall el-Hammam was enough to level the
city, flattening the palace and surrounding walls and mudbrick structures, according to the paper, and the distribution of bones indicated
"extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans."
For Kennett, further proof of the airburst was found by conducting many different kinds of analyses on soil and sediments from the critical
layer. Tiny iron- and silica-rich spherules turned up in their analysis,
as did melted metals.

"I think one of the main discoveries is shocked quartz. These are sand
grains containing cracks that form only under very high pressure,"
Kennett said of one of many lines of evidence that point to a large
airburst near Tall el-Hammam.

"We have shocked quartz from this layer, and that means there
were incredible pressures involved to shock the quartz crystals --
quartz is one of the hardest minerals; it's very hard to shock."
The airburst, according to the paper, may also explain the "anomalously
high concentrations of salt" found in the destruction layer -- an average
of 4% in the sediment and as high as 25% in some samples.



==========================================================================
"The salt was thrown up due to the high impact pressures," Kennett said,
of the meteor that likely fragmented upon contact with the Earth's
atmosphere. "And it may be that the impact partially hit the Dead Sea,
which is rich in salt." The local shores of the Dead Sea are also
salt-rich so the impact may have redistributed those salt crystals far
and wide -- not just at Tall el-Hammam, but also nearby Tell es-Sultan (proposed as the biblical Jericho, which also underwent violent
destruction at the same time) and Tall-Nimrin (also then destroyed).

The high-salinity soil could have been responsible for the so-called
"Late Bronze Age Gap," the researchers say, in which cities along
the lower Jordan Valley were abandoned, dropping the population from
tens of thousands to maybe a few hundred nomads. Nothing could grow
in these formerly fertile grounds, forcing people to leave the area
for centuries. Evidence for resettlement of Tall el-Hammam and nearby communities appears again in the Iron Age, roughly 600 years after the
cities' sudden devastation in the Bronze Age.

Fire and Brimstone Tall el-Hamman has been the focus of an ongoing
debate as to whether it could be the biblical city of Sodom, one of the
two cities in the Old Testament Book of Genesis that were purportedly
destroyed by God for how wicked the cities and their inhabitants had
become. According to the story, one denizen, Lot, is saved by two angels
who instruct him not to look behind as they flee. Lot's wife, however,
lingers and is turned into a pillar of salt. Meanwhile, fire and brimstone
fell from the sky; multiple cities were destroyed; thick smoke rose from
the fires; city inhabitants were killed and area crops were destroyed
in what sounds like an eyewitness account of a cosmic impact event.

"All the observations stated in Genesis are consistent with a cosmic
airburst," Kennett said, "but there's no scientific proof that this
destroyed city is indeed the Sodom of the Old Testament." However, the researchers said, the disaster could have generated an oral tradition that
may have served as the inspiration for the written account in the book
of Genesis, as well as the biblical account of the burning of Jericho
in the Old Testament Book of Joshua.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_California_-_Santa_Barbara. Original written by Sonia
Fernandez. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Ted E. Bunch, Malcolm A. LeCompte, A. Victor Adedeji, James
H. Wittke, T.

David Burleigh, Robert E. Hermes, Charles Mooney, Dale
Batchelor, Wendy S. Wolbach, Joel Kathan, Gunther Kletetschka,
Mark C. L. Patterson, Edward C. Swindel, Timothy Witwer, George
A. Howard, Siddhartha Mitra, Christopher R. Moore, Kurt Langworthy,
James P. Kennett, Allen West, Phillip J. Silvia. A Tunguska sized
airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the
Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea. Scientific Reports, 2021; 11 (1)
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-97778-3 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/09/210928102235.htm

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