Tall el-Hammam and the Search for Sodom

Tall el-Hammam lies on the plain east of the Jordan River, about 8 miles (13 km) northeast of the Dead Sea. Since 2005 a team led by Steven Collins, then of Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque and later also of Veritas International University, has excavated it under Jordan’s Department of Antiquities. In the Middle Bronze Age it was one of the largest cities in the southern Levant, with massive fortifications. It ended in a violent destruction followed by centuries of near-abandonment.

Collins argues that it is Sodom. Genesis 13:10–12 says Lot looked out from near Bethel over “all the plain of Jordan” (the kikkar) and settled among its cities. Collins reads the kikkar as the round plain north of the Dead Sea, where Tall el-Hammam is the dominant site. Most earlier proposals put Sodom southeast of the Dead Sea, at sites such as Bab edh-Dhra. Some of the strongest objections come from other evangelical scholars, such as Bryant Wood and Eugene Merrill, who place Sodom south of the Dead Sea and centuries earlier. Many critical scholars read the Sodom story as a traditional account of the Dead Sea’s barren landscape and doubt it points to one site.

In 2021 a team of scientists that included Phillip Silvia of the excavation project published a paper in Scientific Reports arguing that a cosmic airburst destroyed the city, citing melted pottery and mudbrick, shocked quartz and scattered human remains. Genesis 19:24–28 describes fire and brimstone falling on the cities, so the claim drew wide attention. Other scientists challenged the evidence and the paper’s images. The authors corrected altered images in 2022 and a misused figure in 2023, and the journal added an editor’s note of concern in February 2023. In April 2025 Scientific Reports retracted the paper, saying it no longer had confidence in its conclusions; most of the authors disagreed with the retraction.