Forbidden History - Sodom & Gomorrah: Lost Cities

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Often remembered as symbols of divine judgment, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah remain some of the most haunting stories in the Bible... In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we explore their fall, the lessons they left behind, and the enduring question: what really happened? Cast List: Tony McMahon: Former BBC news producer, author, print journalist and historian  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Of all the stories in the ancient world, few cast a longer shadow than that of Sodom and Gomorrah. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah have gone down in history, in religion, as symbols of sheer wickedness. In religious tradition, their destruction is held up as the ultimate warning. A tale of punishment, of wrath, of boundaries crossed.

And yet, beneath the ash and sulfur lies a far older question. Were they real? And if they were, what exactly happened to them? Sodom and Gomorrah were these two cities that were destroyed by God because of their wantonness, because of their... depravity. God utterly, utterly destroys them. And they're described in no uncertain terms as being centres of gross immorality, of lawlessness. The ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah have never been definitively found. Some say they lie beneath the southern end of the Dead Sea. Others argue they

were never cities at all, but allegory, warning, or myth. And their sin has basically merited their destruction, they deserve everything that is coming in their direction. And what is coming in their direction is basically fire and brimstone. And you know, preachers down the ages have loved to tell a story because you can imagine the pulpit. They're like, and God rain down fire and brimstone. They've loved telling this. You know, if you're a hellfire preacher, the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is a great sermon and a symbol of divine punishment. And essentially, it's What will happen to you if you don't adhere to the word of God, if you do not obey the religious laws?

You will face the same fate as Sodom and Gomoros. In that sense, it's an object lesson for all time. But in recent decades, archaeologists, geologists, and even astrophysicists have all begun to revisit the story with fresh eyes. Could the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament be a record, however distorted, of something real? In this episode, we descend into one of the oldest and most controversial stories in the Bible. A tale of sin, salt, and catastrophe.

The echoes of a forbidden history that still shapes the world today. We're joined by investigative historian, journalist and author, Tony McMahon. It begins, as many ancient warnings do, with visiting. To modern readers, the scene is troubling. To ancient ones, it was a symbol of how far a society could fall. The story of the destruction of Sodom and Gawarra is really kind of disturbing tale. So it begins with two angels disguised as men who come down to visit the house of a man called Lot in Sodom.

And for whatever reason, the men of the men of the men of the people who come down to visit the house of a man called Lot in Sodom. the city surround the house and these wicked men want to abuse the angels. Lot tries to fend them off, but in the end there's nothing that could be done to basically mollify this mob. The scene is brutal, a mob outside a home, a righteous man trapped inside offering sanctuary. Two strangers, divine beings threatened by a city that has abandoned all decency and then the judgment. The angels do get Lot and his family out of the house to protect them and then God basically sets about the comprehensive destruction of the city and these people who have dared to try and assault his angels. He sends fire, he sends sulfur down on Sodom and Gomorrah and all

the surrounding area. What happened in Sodom wasn't just an act of violence. It was, according to tradition, an affront to the cosmic order. Not only had the city broken moral codes, it had dared to attack the messengers of God himself.

So Lot and his family basically are told to flee to the mountains to a nearby town called Zoar. But they have a specific instruction they're told not to look back as Sodom, their hometown, is being destroyed. But Lot's wife cannot resist temptation, her curiosity, and she looks back and is instantly turned into a pillar of salt. In a single glance, the past catches up with her. In the ancient world,

salt symbolized ruin, lifelessness, desolation. To be turned into a pillar of salt wasn't just punishment. It was transformation into a monument of what should not be. And this is kind of an echoing of the sin of Eve, that curiosity, that the desire for knowledge you shouldn't have will lead to your punishment. God has said, do not look back while I'm raining down fire on Sodom. Lot's wife clearly cannot resist having one little peep, and that's her end.

She's turned into this pillar of salt. Through thousands of years, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has echoed through theology, literature, and law. But while the destruction is clear, the reason behind it is far more contested. There's a lot about the story of Solomon Gamora that makes us feel very uneasy. I mean, this is a story really from another epoch, another time. And one of the questions that's divided theologians is, what exactly is being punished here? So we have the story of these two angels that come down as men, and they go to Lot's house, and they are then threatened.

But what are they being threatened by? Well, it's pretty closely implied that they are to be assaulted in a particularly brutal manner. But what exactly is the city of Sodom being punished for? A lot of people believe that actually what's being punished is the crime of not showing hospitality to visitors. Now that may sound rather odd to us, but in the ancient world, being hospitable to visitors to guests was extremely important. People who came into your home, into your community, into your city, where to be treated respectfully and where to be made to feel at home, basically, to be protected. That was the mark of a decent society. And what the people of Sodom have done is they have treated the angels inhospitably. They have treated them with contempt.

They have made them scared. They have made them fear for their own safety. And that is the crime, this crime against hospitality, which is being punished by God. That sounds very odd to us, but there are many scholars who believe that is the reason that Sodom was basically completely incinerated. In ancient Mesopotamia, hospitality was sacred. To harm a guest, especially one under your roof, was a social and spiritual betrayal. The idea that the people of Sodom violated this duty would have marked them not just as sinners,

but as something worse. Inhuman. We continue the story after the break. To understand how Sodom and Gomorrah may have truly met their age, we need to look not to the heavens, but beneath the ground. Tony McMahon explains more. In terms of locating Sodom and Gomorrah, some scholars have looked at the history of seismic activity in the area

because this is a region with significant seismic activity, and there have been cities devastated, even in the Roman period and the medieval period, by earthquakes. So it's possible that Sodom and God, Gamora were basically destroyed by an earthquake. The idea may seem simple, but in a world where natural disasters were seen as the will of the gods, an earthquake that reduced entire cities to rubble, could easily be remembered, not as geology, but as judgment.

Some people have placed that event around 1900 BCE, because what you have in the Dead Sea area is basically the African Rift System. And earthquakes have actually changed the nature of certain parts of region from fertile to infertile and of course creation of the Dead Sea, which is a salty sea, is evidence of that. The East African Rift System is one of the largest fault lines on the planet, a colossal tear in the Earth's crust

that stretches some 4,000 miles. from Jordan in southwestern Asia, down through to Ethiopia, Kenya, and down into Mozambique. But its northern extension, known as the Jordan Rift Valley, cuts directly through the heart of the biblical lands. Here, two massive tectonic plates, the African and Arabian, grinds slowly against each other. And when they shift, the result is often violent. Earthquakes, subsidens. and the reshaping of entire landscapes. Now, the Dead Sea, of course, is another part of the story because we have the reference to Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt.

And having swum in the Dead Sea myself and got Dead Sea water in my eyes, I can tell you that it is incredibly salty. And of course, you have this amazing thing where you can float in the Dead Sea. I mean, it's the most bizarre sensation because of the amount of salt. If there is one image from the story of Sodom that has captivated artists, theologians, and skeptics alike, it is the fate of Lot's wife. One glance back at the burning city, and she becomes a pillar of salt. The Dead Sea, also known in ancient texts as the Salt Sea, is one of the saltiest bodies of water on earth. Its shores are lined with jagged salt formations, wind-carved and bowed.

stone white. Stand there at sunrise and you'll see statues sculpted by nature, shapes eerily human in outline. But that association of salt confirms in the view of many scholars that Solomon Cabaret were essentially next to the Dead Sea and the Valley of Sidim, the Salt Sea, Dead Sea all seems to concur with that. The story of Lot's White, isn't just a moral footnote. It may be a fossilized memory of a landscape marked by collapse, by evaporation, by stillness, a land where nothing grows, where bodies float, and where even now the past lingers in crystalline silence. But as one theory settles, another emerges. So there are other theories as well that it could be

related to the flood that is spoken about in the Bible and in other mythologies in the area that this may have been a flood that devastated the city, but there's pretty much an explicit reference to fire and brimstone which suggests seismic activity. Of course, some people have then alighted on volcanoes, does it place the cities next a volcano? But I think on balance, we're looking at two cities destroyed by earthquakes because this is something that's happened a lot in the in the area. We know historically of cities that have been toppled by earthquakes, so it kind of figures with what we know historically. So my guess is that Solomon Gomorrah were two cities that basically were flattened by earthquakes. But

that was then turned into a story of divine wrath against wickedness. Not everybody's convinced about an earthquake causing the destruction of Solomon Gomorrah because this reference to fire and brimstone raining down from the skies. Now, there's no volcanoes that fit the bill in the area. So how do you explain this idea of fire raining down from the skies? If there aren't any volcanoes in the area, is it possible that the believed location of Sodom and Gomorrah is different to what most archaeologists and historians believe? Among archaeologists there is one guy, Stephen Collins, who believes that he's a lot of

he has found the site of Sodom Gomer. Now, he believes it's unlikely that they were fictional, that these were incredibly rich cities, and they're described in the Bible because they were such powerful cities. Now, he thinks that there are clues in Genesis that point to the real location of Sodom and Gammar, but he doesn't agree with what most archaeologists,

most historians have said, that it's of where its current location is. He believes that the cities were not in the southern Dead Sea region. He thinks that that just does not concur with the facts as laid out in Genesis. What he believes is that the cities were to the north of the Dead Sea. And so he's focused his research around the Jordan River Valley, about eight miles north of the Dead Sea. And he thinks that the clues are there in the Bible that support that location.

So he conducted a series of digs at a place called Tal el Hammam with permission of the Kingdom of Jordan. And what he found was a series of urban settlements of cities that existed at the time of the Bronze Age and show an incredible amount of wealth. He says that this was a massive metropolitan city area. So he's convinced that the site of these two cities was to the north of the Dead Sea, not to the south, as is the consensus among many historians. What if the fire and brimstone weren't metaphor at all, but literal flames raining from the sky? Not everybody's satisfied with the earthquake account,

especially the kind of reference to fire and brimstone raining down. But the volcano theory doesn't satisfy either because there's just no volcanoes in the area that fit the bill. So what else could it have been? Where could this fire and brimstone have come from? Go back to the year 1650 BCE, there's this enormous cosmic air burst that destroys the city of Tal el Hamam in the Jordan Valley. Now people would have told stories about that for centuries because it's so unusual, so weird,

people wouldn't have understood what had happened. It would have seemed like the finger of God had basically descended from the skies to destroy the city. So could it be that Solomon Gomorrah were basically destroyed by an event that was almost like the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off in the sky? And that utterly destroyed the city of Tal al-Hamam. But this, of course, then became Sodom and Gomorrah. And remember when something like this happened in the ancient world, It was always this idea that we've done something wrong, we've been wicked, we've been naughty. This is why God has basically wreaked this devastation.

Something happened in the ancient Near East, of that there is little doubt. Whether it was an earthquake, a cosmic airburst, or a combination of both, the destruction was real. Entire cities were levelled. The land was scorched. Survivors, if there were any, would have been. fled in terror, clutching only fragments of what they'd witnessed. And as those memories passed down through generations, the explanation would come not from science, but from story.

I think there's little doubt that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is rooted in something, I suspect, a natural causation that happened to one or two or more cities in that area of the Middle East. You know, whether or not it was a meteor strike or whether it was an earthquake or some other cause. And it's something that then acquired a religious flavor because that's how people interpreted events, particularly events that came out of the sky. You know, eclipses, meteor strikes, thunder. These were all signs of God being unhappy. Ancient peoples didn't have seismographs or telescopes.

But they knew fear and they knew destruction. When fire fell from the sky, they turned to the only framework they had, divine will. So if something like a cosmic burst in the sky destroyed Solomon Kamara, then it was because God was unhappy. What was he unhappy about? Well, he was unhappy normally because people were being evil. They were not obeying his laws. This story then grows up.

I think around a naturally occurring incident of the cities being evil and of these angels being mistreated. But nevertheless, in of its own self, it's an intriguing story. I mean, who can forget Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt? I mean, how on earth they came up with that imagery. But it's something that's enchanted artists ever since who've depicted it. Sodom and Gomorrah may never be found, but their legacy endures in scripture, in art, in language itself. The words Sodom has passed into modern speech as a symbol of depravity. But beneath the morality, beneath the myth, there may lie the memory of something terrifying and real.

Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out Where Did Everyone Go,

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