How many of you heard that Sodom and Gomorrah have been rediscovered? I'm a tiny bit embarrassed to admit that somehow, someway I missed this incredible event. (In my defense, I have been a bit preoccupied lately.)
What is so fascinating about this discovery is that once again, the biblical record has been proven accurate. I stumbled across some research on Sodom and Gomorrah several days ago, and I've just begun to scratch the surface on this biblical disaster zone. Still, even that little bit of reading has left me amazed and completely in awe (even more so than I usually am) of Jehovah God. He said He destroyed these cities with fire and brimstone . . . and that's exactly what the ruins show (if you can call the vaporized ghost cities standing along the shore of the Dead Sea ruins).
Scattered everywhere around these powdered walls (that literally crumble in your hand) are thousands of small, crystallized balls of sulfur. For years archaeologists argued that a comet must have hit Sodom and Gomorrah (I'm not kidding) or an earthquake (because the cities sit directly on a fault line). But the truth is now glaringly apparent that a disaster of extraordinary proportions occurred there, since the crystallized balls of sulfur scattered everywhere have never been found anywhere else on planet earth.
There's nothing like the Divine sense of humor.
An early record of these cities is provided by Josephus in his Wars of the Jews, Book IV, Chapter VIII: “Now this country is then so sadly burnt up, that nobody cares to come at it;... It was of old a most happy land, both for the fruits it bore and the riches of its cities, although it be now all burnt up. It is related how for the impiety of its inhabitants, it was burnt by lightning; in consequence of which there are still the remainders of that divine fire; and the traces (or shadows) of the five cities are still to be seen . . . .”
And in 1928, Dr. Melvin Kyle wrote, “...a region on which brimstone was rained will show brimstone. Well, it does; we picked up pure sulfur, in pieces as big as the end of my thumb. It is mixed with the marl of the mountains on the west side of the sea, and now is to be found scattered along the shore of the sea even on the east side, some four or five miles distant from the ledge that contains the stratum. It has somehow scattered far and wide over this plain.” (Melvin Kyle, Explorations at Sodom, 52-53.)
You can see some interesting pictures here: http://www.arkdiscovery.com/sodom_&_gomorrah.htm
You can read more about this discovery here: http://www.johnankerberg.org/Articles/_PDFArchives/science/SC3W1003.pdf
I just love Biblical Archaeology. . . .