Sodom's howe

That Sodom story is getting more evidence attached to it; UC Santa Barbara has endorsed Tell al-Hammam [h/t WrathOfGnon]. Which means "the hill of the bath", I think; Tell being Arabic for a mound in the middle of nowhere that probably has a ruin under it. Like Aslan's Howe.

I always suspected the "sodomy" meme came about because the Dead Sea is a place for medicinal baths. Women learn pretty quickly that they shouldn't bathe with men about, especially in the Jordan Valley (cf. lately, Alrawabi School For Girls). So whatever towns were around as of the Middle Bronze Age II horizon, they attracted a certain... clientele.

MBA-II is being dated to the mid seventeenth century BC currently, but, you know - mileage, variant, yours, etc. The paper isn't doing great at this, confusing "1650 BCE" with 1650-year-old. Derrp. Anyway: before IntCal20 Thera, but not all that long before. Either a generation after Tel Kabri or else Tel Kabri needs recalibration.

Our man here is James Kennett, blaming a cosmic strike. Kennett is also big on the comet theory for the Dryas. Martin Sweatman isn't cited, which I must register as an omission.

They do get earthquakes in the lower Jordan and Dead Sea area. Relevant to my preferred field, an infamous one hit Jericho under Mu'awiya. At Bathhouse City, Kennett marks two violent trem[bl]ors at 3300 BC and 2100 BC. But whatever fires happened then, didn't rise to the MBA-II temperature.

War happens in the Jordan area as well. War happened to "Tel Sultan IIIc2", Early Bronze IIIB; these guys cite moar woar 1950-1800 BCE, which (since "Sultan IIId" was a village) will map to the Middle Bronze "Sultan IV" which Egypt probably named "Ruha" and is generally agreed to be true Jericho. In fact, after the mid-1600s destruction - which the locals rebuilt - the Eighteenth Dynasty would level Ruha and keep it leveled (pdf). War would certainly happen in the later Iron Age: the new city built upon that old Bathhouse tell got whacked in the late 800s BC. War just wasn't happening around here in the MBA-II, when Bathhouse was the hegemon.

Since this is the lower Jordan, any impact here would boil that part of the Dead Sea and scatter salt all over the place. As a result, no more habitation in the area for hundreds of years. Not only Sodom but also Jericho - says Kennett - could have been affected in this blast (although Jericho was not melted, it did suffer much damage, as Kennett relates from Kenyon), with the ensuing centuries causing confusion in the earliest Biblical compilers.

We'd like to have an archive but millions of mudbricks are missing - not eroded, because eroded mudbricks can be found downstream and/or downwind. Given that MBA literature was clay tablets... sigh.

On topic, here is what bolides look like on their way down. As Kennett notes, we need to keep watch for stuff like this.

COLD WATER 10/2: Colavito spergs out... again. This time he commends skepticism on basis of... sorry man, ad-hominem: Scientific Reports lacks rigour, the Dryas connection is weak because Dryas-impact hypothesis is unproven, and too many authors are Christians. To that I must point out that the paper's results - if true - refute the Book of Joshua, which linked Jericho's fall to that book's hero. If these researchers are fundamentalists they are of a far more fair-minded stripe than those posting at (say) PJMedia.

WELL SO MUCH FOR THAT 2/29/2024: Richard Carrier offers the debunking.