In the latter days of Abraham’s life, according to the Bible, fire and brimstone rained down on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, destroying them completely.  From a vantage point in Hebron, a long distance away,  Abraham saw the smoke rising from the conflagration.

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 is one of the most memorable accounts in the Bible, representing divine wrath and punishment for persistent human sin and wickedness.  Thus they are sometimes called the “sin cities” of the Bible.

From various biblical references it is quite clear that Sodom and Gomorrah are somewhere near the Dead Sea.  Since the 1920s, the traditional view of biblical archeologists is that the two cities were quite likely located near the southeastern coast of the Dead Sea.

Archeologist Stephen Collins has caused quite a stir in the scholarly community by advancing a rival location for biblical Sodom.  He places Sodom at the northeastern end of the Dead Sea.

In a way his thesis is not original.  Many biblical scholars through the centuries thought Sodom must be roughly where Collins said it was.  But their views were entirely based on the biblical account; they lacked archeological support.  That’s where Collins came in.

Collins went back to the biblical text. There he found a problem even more serious than any radiocarbon dating mismatch.  He found a mismatch between the two locations and the text itself.

The Bible says in Genesis 13:8-12 that when friction developed between Abraham and his nephew Lot, on account of their large herds grazing the same lands in the region of Bethel and Ai, Abraham proposed that he and Lot take their herds different ways.

Lot, we read, “saw that the whole plain of the Jordan toward Zoar was well watered, like the garden of the Lord” and so he went east, in that direction, “as far as Sodom.”

Collins realized that from Abraham and Lot’s vantage point, the only visible plain was at the northern end of the Dead Sea—that is the plain that is fertile and “well-watered,” then as it is today—and if Lot went east in that direction, it must mean that Sodom was located at the northeastern end of the Sea, not the southeastern coast, as the traditional view held.  Collins excavated at a site called Tal el-Hammam, where he believes he has found biblical Sodom.

In Tall el-Hammam, Collins found thick layers of destruction, with collapsed walls, burned debris, and even skeletal remains, all inside a three-foot thick layer of ash.

Quite clearly this ancient city was thoroughly incinerated, and other adjacent cities around it have a similar archeological profile, showing that they too endured a similar fate.

Soon, however, Collins and his team encountered a serious problem.  They found pottery in the ruins that was covered or glazed with a greenish, glass-like surface.  Collins was dismayed.

As a pottery expert, he knew right away that glazing techiques did not exist in 2,000 BC and that glazed pottery largely begins with the Islamic period which is around the seventh century AD.

Finding glazed pottery among 4,000 year old charred ruins is similar to finding human bones among the skeletons of the dinosaurs.

If evolution is correct, those human bones could not have existed when dinosaurs roamed the earth.  So too with the glazed pottery.  This is the type of anomaly that overturns the whole theory.  Collins considered that perhaps his thesis had been refuted.

Just to be sure, Collins sent pottery fragments or shards to be tested at the U.S. Geological Survey lab in New Mexico.  He was astounded to hear from the geochemists there that what they were testing was not glazed pottery at all.

Rather, it was a substance called “trinitite.”  Trinitite is not the name for a glaze applied to pottery; rather, it is the name for the pottery itself when it is subjected to extreme heat—the type of heat that occurs in a meteoric or nuclear explosion.

Scientists in New Mexico first encountered trinitite in the aftermath of the nuclear tests in the desert in the 1940s.

Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Lab, gave the first nuclear test the code name Trinity, and the heat from that blast was so intense that it melted the sand, turning it into green glass.  Trinitite!

Collins now realized that what happened over Tel el-Hammam was a meteor or asteroid explosion.

The explosion was not the result of impact with the earth, but had occurred in the sky within the earth’s atmosphere, generating heat that is estimated to be the equivalent of a thousand Hiroshima bombs.

That is what wiped out a thriving city and that is what created the trinitite.  Notice how closely this scenario matches the biblical account of fire and brimstone “raining” on Sodom and Gomorrah.

This article is adapted from Dinesh D’Souza’s new book The Stones Cry Out, which will be published on October 13 by Charisma Books. 

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/09/stones-cry-search-sodom-gomorrah/