October 4, 2016 Show with Dr. Steven Collins on “Discovering the City of Sodom: The Fascinating, True Account of the Discovery of the Old Testament’s Most Infamous City”

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Now here's our host Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this fourth day of October 2016.

I'm so excited to have a guest on today who was on the old Iron Sharpens Iron program over probably a decade ago and I'm delighted that he is returning now to once again address a subject that is absolutely fascinating to me and I am sure will be fascinating to many of you.

He's going to be discussing his discovery of the city of Sodom and his book is also something we're going to be addressing, also titled

Discovering the City of Sodom, the Fascinating True Account of the Discovery of the

Old Testament's Most Infamous City. If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Dr.

Stephen Collins, our email address is chrisarntzen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com,

and please give us your first name, city and state and country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. Dr. Collins is also Dean of the College of Archaeology and Biblical History at Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr. Stephen Collins. It's great to be back with you,

Chris. It's also, after hearing you say I was on the air with you 10 years ago, that I'm still alive.

Well, is it because other archaeologists have threatened your life or something? Yeah, it may not be as dangerous as what the

Indiana Jones movies depict, but you know, it does get a little dicey every once in a while. Well, I can imagine.

Before I even go into this fascinating discovery that you have chronicled in your book that you co -authored with a friend of mine,

Dr. Latancy Scott, who has been on this program as well. In fact, he was on very recently. Before we even get into that,

I want to know something just briefly about your upbringing, the religious background of your family, and how you came to faith in Jesus Christ.

Well, Chris, I grew up in a Christian family. It's a great thing that my dad and mom became

Christians just before I was born. So by the time

I came along, they had made commitments to Christ and had begun to go to church.

So I was fortunate enough to be growing up in a Christian home.

Of course, as a rebellious young teen,

I didn't pay much attention to the Bible or anything else. Then I got into high school.

Actually, for some reason, I don't think this is on most high school curricula, but my high school offered a course in archaeology, and I took that as an elective.

It just turned me on and fascinated me to no end. So I was able to literally take that and run with it and go with it into college.

And frankly, between my junior years,

I almost ran from the faith. I really had a faith crisis dealing with mainly human evolution.

I was majoring in anthropology. I was doing those kinds of things, and I had absolutely nothing else in my life going on pretty much except school.

And I was involved in some ministry, but I was very much focused on my studies, and that was pretty much moving me away from the

Bible. But then, between my junior and senior year,

I began to study particularly some of the stories about Noah in the

Bible and some of the passages that have to do with the jumping -off point from the ark and where Noah and his sons originated from.

I was learning in anthropology that that particular area around the mountains of Urartu was the jumping -off point not only for Noah, but anthropologically it was also the epicenter of human population expansion.

And I thought, hmm, that's interesting. How could an old document such as the Bible accurately peg what only modern anthropologists actually know about human origins or human population distribution?

And that began to put me on a track of looking seriously at the

Bible from a historical point of view. And over the next year, I came to reject evolutionary theory, and I came to reject the general higher critical view of the

Bible that was being espoused and is still taught in most of the graduate schools and seminaries around the world.

So, you know, I became, you know, I came to the Bible as a real critic early on when

I began to study it. My first reaction was to reject it once I got into it deeply.

But ultimately and finally, I began to see that in the final analysis, when real scientific rigor was put to the

Bible, it could hold up to any standard of scientific analysis.

And I began to move in the direction of the Bible, and I've been going that way ever since. Well, praise God for that.

I'm so thankful for God's leading you in that journey away from disbelief and also away from the more liberal understandings of biblical history, and in fact, liberal denials of biblical history, and that you came to the truth.

And I just immediately got transported back in time to my own college years. I had an anthropology course as well.

And I can remember our stuffy British professor, who was an atheist, making comments, mocking

Christianity and religion in general. And I can still remember him opening up a

Norwegian newspaper, and he was trying to show the differences between political correctness in Norway and in America.

And he said, you know, this is an article or an advertisement that you could never see in an American newspaper.

And he translated the Norwegian ad for a travel agency, which said, come visit

Italy before the Italians destroy it. And no offense to my

Italian listeners, that was my anthropology professor bringing that up. But I have one of the reasons that this story, or should

I say this interview is of such deep fascination to me, is from my earliest memories of childhood, there are at least four things that I wanted to be when

I was a little kid. I wanted to be a geologist. I wanted to be a paleontologist due to my great love and fascination for dinosaurs.

I wanted to be an archaeologist. And I wanted to be an artist. And I can remember my mother encouraging me, saying, you can do all of those things.

In fact, you could draw the things that you discover and that kind of thing. And so of course, I became a radio talk host.

But so you'd be amazed at how many people, how many graduate students

I get and doctoral students who come to us at TSU and say, you know,

I always wanted to be an archaeologist when I was a kid. But my parents talked me out of it, because they said there was no money in it.

So I went off and got a career and made money. And now that I'm close to retirement, or I'm in retirement,

I'm going to go back and get a master's and a doctorate in archaeology, because that's what I always wanted to do.

Now I have the money to do it. So I'm going to get into it. It's amazing how many people we have that do that.

Praise God, praise God for that. So here you are an archaeologist.

And tell us about the common belief when you first became an archaeologist, the common belief by your peers about the city of Sodom.

For those who actually believe that it existed at all, I'm talking about the more biblical oriented archaeologists.

Was it an entirely different location from where you now are convinced it is?

There are three basic views on Sodom. The first one is that most archaeologists and Near Eastern scholars today, and I would say that has really picked up steam in the last 35 years or so, most scholars don't believe that Sodom and Gomorrah existed at all.

So to them, these are mythical locations. They have no connection to the real world, to the actual physical geography of the

Near East. So they would just dismiss it altogether. In fact, whenever I see William Deaver, Dr.

Bill Deaver, Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at the University of Arizona, and a great archaeologist, and I've had him out to Albuquerque to speak to my students many times, but he still says to me whenever I see him at ASOR or some of the other professional meetings, are you still looking for those mythical cities?

And so I still get that from people. So there is that large majority of professional archaeologists who just simply don't believe that they ever existed at all.

So that's one view. Another view is that they may have existed as piles of ruins that gave rise to etiological legends or stories spun by ancient

Israelites to explain the existence of piles of ruins. And so they picked a pile of ruins in the southern

Jordan Valley that was rather dramatic with a lot of other piles of uninhabited ruins around them.

And some ancient Israelite priests or priests spun legends about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah trying to explain how those particular cities came to be ruined and burned piles as they saw them.

So that's a second view. So that view is sort of given to me by some of my colleagues like Ami Mazar and Israel Finkelstein and other

Israeli archaeologists particularly, who would say, well, in discovering the

Sodom that you believe you've discovered, we think you have at least, based on the geography, discovered the pile of ruins upon which the etiological legend is based.

And so they would say, I've discovered literary Sodom. So that's kind of the second view. So one view is never existed at all.

Second view, sort of the middle of the road view, is it never really existed or happened like the

Bible describes it, but it was based on an actual geographical location, a pile of ruins that ancient people tried to explain by concocting the story of the destruction of Sodom.

The other view that I run into frequently is the far right -wing fundamentalist view that these cities actually exist in the southern

Dead Sea area, because they were identified by a very famous and powerful archaeologist and Near Eastern scholar back in the 20th century,

W .F. Albright, who was, because he was a great scholar and took the

Bible seriously and was one of the great founding archaeologists of biblical archaeology, he was beloved by all the evangelicals and the fundamentalist scholars who tied themselves to him and his views.

Well, he spun the idea that Sodom—by the way, he failed to analyze the biblical text, and that was his downfall on this view, but nobody paid attention to that.

Which makes it strange that fundamentalists would find him appealing if he didn't. Yeah, but what he said was is that Sodom must be either in the

Dead Sea area in the south, or it's under the waters at the shallow end, the south shallow end of the

Dead Sea. And by the way, if you pick up a modern, a very recent—I'm talking about publication within the last 10 years, even the last two or three years—you pick up an average

Bible encyclopedia or a Bible dictionary and you read about Sodom and Gomorrah and the location of Sodom and Gomorrah, they will still mention

Albright and defer to W .F. Albright, even though he hasn't been accepted by the archaeological community for 20 years.

So, you know, Christian scholars and Bible scholars tend to really, when it comes to archaeology, tend to fall back on very, very old material.

Frankly, if it's more than 20 years old in archaeology, and it has to do with the

Bible, it probably won't hold up to scrutiny today. And because views have changed, better evidence has come along, different things have happened in the meantime.

But those are the three basic views, and I would say other than the view that Sodom is exactly where the

Bible says it should be, north of the Dead Sea on the east side of the Jordan River. Yeah, in fact, I probably should have initially already had you explain—sometimes

I take it for granted that all my listeners are greatly familiar with the subjects that I'm speaking, and I forget that I have non -Christians listening very often, more often than I realized to begin with.

And I have new believers in Christ who are listening, and they may have heard of Sodom and Gomorrah, as most even completely biblically illiterate people have heard of it and have some kind of a notion, typically, of what that story is about, even if it's a very vague one.

But if you could explain briefly a summary of the historical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from the

Old Testament. Yeah, absolutely. Before I do that, though, let me tell the listeners where they can solve all their issues about Sodom and Gomorrah, and that's the book you mentioned by Latane Scott and I, Discovering the

City of Sodom. And by the way, that book was published by Simon & Schuster, one of the major secular publishers on the planet, and their

Howard Book Division published that book, and so people ought to go on Amazon and grab that thing.

Yes, they definitely should. And that'll really get them some details. I think it's written, you know,

I provided all the technical details and all of that, and Latane made it readable. So thanks to Dr.

Latane Scott, she made it fun reading for anybody. Yeah, she's definitely a gifted sister in Christ, that's for certain.

Absolutely. And brilliant. There's a lot of technical detail in there as well. So it's a good book for scholars, it's a good book for lay readers as well.

But anyway, we got into this thing, and let me go back to 1996.

Boy, that makes you feel old when you say back in the previous century. I was leading a group,

I do a tour every year of Israel and Jordan, and I was leading a group of Bible tourists to the site of Sodom and Gomorrah in the next day or so.

And I was staying down in Beersheba in Israel, in the south, and we're getting ready to cross the southern border, come up and go to Sodom and Gomorrah, which at the time

I accepted as being at the south end of the Dead Sea, the traditional sites of Babadran, Numera, two very ancient sites that are there in the southern

Dead Sea area that had traditionally been identified by many scholars, many evangelical scholars anyway, as Sodom and Gomorrah.

And so I had that on my list. I hadn't ever got into that subject. I had excavated many sites in Israel.

I was involved in an excavation at the time. We just started up an excavation in the

West Bank that year. I wasn't looking for anything, but I thought I would just kind of brush up on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah the day before I actually took people over there to Jordan to see it.

And I read the passages from Genesis 13 through 19, looking for geographical indicators as to the location of Sodom, just to kind of freshen up on the story.

And I read it through that night. And when I got through, I thought, man,

I must be sleepy or something because I don't see anything in these texts that would locate

Sodom in the area where I'm about to take a bunch of tourists and tell them Sodom existed. So I read it again and again and again.

About four times that night, I read through that passage specifically looking at what the

Bible said about Sodom's location. And when I got through that night, I thought, boy, not only is there absolutely no evidence, nothing in these primary texts of Genesis to locate

Sodom toward the south into the Dead Sea, but everything in there would locate Sodom toward the north into the

Dead Sea to the Jordan River. And so I kind of logged that back in my mind.

And by the way, I reached over on my itinerary and put question marks by my Sodom and Gomorrah that I had on the itinerary, because I really was doubtful at that point, because I like to take people to authentic sites.

I don't like to take them to, you know, phony or just traditional or religious sites.

So when I took the people over there the next day or so, I had to say, now,

I'm not so sure about this, but these are the traditional sites of Sodom and Gomorrah. But I have my doubts.

And so I just kind of logged it in the back of my head. Well, we shut down our excavation in the

West Bank in 2000, about five years later, when things were getting a little bit dicey with the

Intifada. And when we did that, the next year,

I was thinking, man, what are we going to do now? I'm not, I'm not excavating this summer. I got to figure something out.

And then my mind went back to Sodom and Gomorrah. And so I decided to put in to read a paper at the

Near East Archaeological Society that fall. This was in the winter of January, February of 2001.

And I thought, man, if I don't put in for a paper, I won't research it, you know, and I won't,

I won't write the paper. I won't write the piece on it. So I forced myself into the situation.

So I put in for a paper. And so I was scheduled to present in November. So between January and November, I had to write and research.

And so we did the writing and research. And once I had written it, spent several months working on that. And by the way,

Chris, I didn't care where Sodom was. It absolutely did not matter to me.

In fact, in fact, I was on a part of a documentary done back in the mid 90s.

Where I am talking about Sodom and Gomorrah in the south. So I believe that it was in the south because I had never researched it myself in detail.

I just accepted along with so many other people, that that's where they were located. And so I didn't really care other than I had now started reading the text critically.

And now I was in a position to say, I want to find out where it is.

Because it's really bothering me that the text seems to be so diametrically opposed to the actual southern location.

So I decided to write the paper,

I did the research, and the research came out. It was a wonderful thing to do it.

Because I went back and I analyzed from the Hebrew text, every word, every phrase, every sentence of every relevant passage, particularly the primary sources in the book of Genesis, relative location of Sodom.

And I did it fresh. I did it without researching anything or anybody else. I went straight and completely from the biblical text.

And based on that study of the biblical text, I came up with a very detailed map.

Because I knew the geography there. I've been studying the geography and traveling and walking the geography of the Holy Land for 20 years.

And I knew it well. And so I was able to track the biblical geography and I had a map of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admon, Zeboim, where they were on the trade routes, where they should be according to the biblical text.

And then we had to get on the plane and go over there and look at it on the ground. And because what

I was seeing in the Bible maps and the archaeological maps published in Europe, Israel, United States, whatever publication it was, nobody had anything on that side of the river.

They had Jericho on the west side of the river, north of the Dead Sea. On the east side of the river, north of the Dead Sea, they had nothing.

And I thought that was kind of bizarre because that's where Sodom and Gomorrah, Admon, Zeboim, a whole civilization should have been there, but nobody ever had anything on the map.

That was a little concerning to me that no archaeologist or no

Bible scholar had ever put a single dot with a name on it on that side of the river.

And so when we got to Jordan, we started, we went to the library in Acre and Admon and the

Department of Antiquities, and we started researching reports and survey reports. And all of a sudden, within two days, we had 14 major archaeological sites on our hands, exactly where the

Bible says Sodom and Gomorrah should be. Wow. And it was pretty easy to find which one should be

Sodom, because if I just can summarize hundreds of pages of research here, the

Bible tells us that Sodom was the largest city on the east side of the

Jordan River, just north of the Dead Sea, in the Bronze Age. I mean, those are the sort of the nuts and bolts of it.

And you remember that when Lot and Abraham were hanging out at Bethel and Ai, remember they came up from the

Negev and they worked their way back up to Bethel and Ai, which is about 10 miles north of Jerusalem and about 14 miles west northwest of Jericho.

They were standing there north of the Dead Sea, up on the high scarp, overlooking the valley.

And it said, And so we conclude, based on several analyses of the text, that Sodom was the largest, was the anchor city of a city -state on the east side of the

Jordan River, north of the Dead Sea, directly east of Bethel and Ai, because that's the direction

Lot traveled to get to Sodom. And nobody ever had anything there.

Except, let me say, most of the 19th century explorer scholars, and I subsequently later went back and looked at that, they had it in the right place because I found out that many of them did exactly the same analysis that I did of Genesis 13, 1 through 12, in particular.

And they put Sodom in the same place, and I began to look at maps from the 1870s and 1880s from explorer scholars like Condor and Wilson and Thompson and others, who spent literally careers in the

Holy Land following the biblical geography. They actually put it in the right place, and that was amazing to me.

But I had never seen that until after I'd done my research, but it was a nice confirmation. But what

I did was, we took this blank map, or we took this map to Jordan that we had drawn from the biblical text, and these other maps from other publications that had just a blank there, we took it to Jordan, and all of a sudden we began to fill it in with real cities.

And it turns out that the largest, and as I said, the

Bible's clear, the largest city on the eastern Jordan disk north of the

Dead Sea is Sodom. By the way, that's the only set of cities.

Sodom, Gomorrah, and the associated towns are the only sites listed in the

Bible in that location. Isn't that amazing? Oh, yeah. No other cities and towns are listed there.

Now, Moses and Joshua found Abel Shittim, but it's just a place, not a town or city, and Abel Shittim and Beit Yeshimoth and so on, but specifically as cities, the only cities the

Bible mentions as being on the eastern Jordan disk north of the Dead Sea, east of the Jordan River, are

Sodom and Gomorrah and the other associated cities. So when we got there and looked on the ground and began to go from archaeological site to archaeological site, not only did we have now too many sites to look at, we had at least 14 archaeological sites that had surveyed pottery from the

Bronze Age, but we also ran into one particular one that was listed in the surveys as the largest archaeological site in the

Jordan Valley period. And in that 60 -mile or so stretch of the

Jordan Valley, there are a lot of archaeological sites. There are a lot of big tells, a lot of big ruin mounds, but this was the biggest of all.

And when I saw it, I saw how big it was, but we didn't realize how huge the thing was until we actually started to excavate it a few years later.

Let me give people some examples. In fact, why don't you give the examples right after we return from our first station break?

Okay, we'll do that. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Dr. Stephen Collins, again, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with archaeologist

Dr. Stephen Collins. I'm Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and here's one of my favorite guests,

Todd Friel, to tell you about a conference he and I are going to. Hello, this is Todd Friel, host of Wretched Radio and Wretched TV, and occasional guest on Chris's show,

Iron Criticizing Iron. I think that's what it's called.

Hoping that you can join Chris and me at the G3 Conference in Atlanta, my new hometown.

It is going to be a bang -up conference called the G3 Conference, celebrating the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation with Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Votie Baucom, Conrad and Bayway, Phil Johnson, James White, and a bunch of other people.

We hope to see you there. Learn more at g3conference .com, g3conference .com.

Ha ha ha! Thanks, Todd, I think. See you at the Iron Sharpens Iron Exhibitor's Booth.

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Hospital for wounded souls where one can find compassionate people in healing. We're a diverse family of all ages, enthusiastically serving our

Lord Jesus Christ in fellowship, play, and together. Hi, I'm Pastor Bob Walderman and I invite you to come and join us here at Linbrook Baptist Church and see all that a church can be.

Call Linbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402, that's 516 -599 -9402, or visit linbrookbaptist .org,

that's linbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is archaeologist

Dr. Stephen Collins. We are discussing his book, Discovering the City of Sodom, the fascinating true account of the discovery of the

Old Testament's most infamous city. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

chrisarnzen at gmail .com. We do have some of you waiting patiently to have your questions asked and we will get to you as soon as possible, but for those of you unfamiliar with these cities in the

Old Testament, they are most well known for being destroyed by fire by God, for their homosexuality, and also for their greed, gluttony, and lack of compassion towards the poor.

It seems that there's a certain group of people that likes to forget one aspect of that destruction, and some of our more conservative

Bible -believing Christians like to forget about the other reasons outside of homosexuality why the cities were destroyed, but they were multifaceted reasons and they were all involving the rebellion of wicked men.

And of course, Lot and his family were delivered by angels from the city, but unfortunately

Lot's wife turned to look back at the city in flames and she was turned into a pillar of salt.

But our guest today is convinced that he has found the actual location of Sodom, and you were discussing one of the major sites that you discovered that was leading you closer to the actual location.

Exactly. Just a quick backup. People should refer to Genesis 13, chapter 13, verses 1 through 12, because those particular verses constitute the only passage in the

Bible specifically written by the author to take us to the location of Sodom.

Okay, great. There are no other. This is the geographical map to the location of Sodom.

All of the passages have to fall under this particular passage when we're interpreting the text relative to the location of these cities.

So that being said, the Bible is very clear that the largest city on the eastern side of the

Jordan River during the time of Abraham is Sodom. And so logically, if you wanted to find

Sodom, you would go to that location north of the Dead Sea, east of the Jordan River, across from Jericho, and you would go to that location and look for the largest

Bronze Age city in that area. Middle Bronze Age, by the way, not Late Bronze Age, that would be the time of Moses, but Middle Bronze Age, which would be the time of Abraham.

And so that seems easy enough, and in fact, it was not difficult at all, because when we found

Tal El Hamam, which is the largest archaeological site in the Jordan Valley, we now know it, in addition to that, we now know it as the largest continuously occupied

Bronze Age city in the southern Levant. How's that? There is no larger continuously occupied city in the

Bronze Age in either Israel or Jordan. Let me give you some size comparisons.

Jerusalem, in the Middle Bronze II period, is about 8 to 10 acres.

Jericho, in the same period, is about the same size, about 8 to 10 acres, maybe 11 acres.

Sodom, Tal El Hamam, is 62 acres inside the city wall, with a lot of the city outside the city wall up to 100 or more acres.

Now, that's incredible. It is continuously occupied from the

Chalcolithic period, that is the Copper Stone Age, all the way through until its destruction in the

Middle Bronze Age. It was a continuously occupied thriving city for almost 3 ,000 years.

It's amazing the history of this city, which, by the way, is why it is now known, our excavation of Sodom, is now known as one of the most important archaeological components of understanding the entire history of the

Middle East, of the southern Levant, which is why

I now routinely get asked to come and present at major conferences. I was just invited to come present recently at the

International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East in Vienna, Austria.

So I just did that. And so, just archaeologically, not even considering the biblical components of this thing, archaeologically,

Tal El Hamam is now considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries of recent times, because it's answering a lot of questions about the period, and it is the anchor city.

Isn't it interesting to think of Sodom in the Bible as being the anchor city for the entire region, for the entire

Bronze Age? Nothing else can claim that. In fact, when you realize that Jerusalem did not even exist between 2500

BC and about 1900 or 1850 BC, didn't exist, was not occupied, nobody was there.

Yet Sodom itself was occupied all during that period, even at the collapse, when all the other cities in the

Near East collapsed around 2500 BC due to a major climate change, Sodom survived, because it was watered like Egypt, according to Genesis 13, and hence the

Jordan River. And hence the reason why God was so angry at their greed and lack of compassion to the poor, because they obviously were people who were very affluent and enjoying life.

They had watched the other cities around them toward the end of the early Bronze Age crash and burn.

They were pretty much the only city left standing in that part of the world, and so they looked around and thought of themselves as indestructible.

They thought of themselves as wealthy, and of course, if you go to Ezekiel chapter 16, you get from God's mouth to our ear the reason why

God destroyed Sodom. You know, he said, because you are wealthy, arrogant, overfed, and discompassionate, you do not take care of the widows and the orphans, and because you did detestable things in my sight, therefore

I destroyed you. And we know for other reasons in areas that those detestable things involved homosexuality.

Yeah, you know, the homosexual issue is an interesting one. Let's grab that down the road here a little bit.

I'll just talk about that, because there's some really interesting things going on that we now know archaeologically from this site that we can confirm that there was a culture there that was rather dramatic in that regard.

Yeah, I remember one of the documentaries I saw on television, you were indicating that and showing some of the artifacts you found.

Yeah, there's a connection, and I think it continues to be confirmed, there's a connection to the

Minoan civilization on Crete. Yes, and the Pederasty. That's an interesting link.

Yes, and well, you know, we might as well take a couple of questions, if you don't mind, from our listeners.

I'm up for that. We have Shane in Hoover, Alabama. He asks, why do we hear so much about Sodom, but we tend to forget about Gomorrah?

Where is that city? Has it been found too? The answer is, we believe, yes.

Sodom, of course, is sort of that no -brainer one, because it's so big. It's 10 or 15 times bigger than any other city in the region.

So, the dominance of Sodom was pretty easy to identify on the ground, geographically and archaeologically.

Gomorrah, though, is a site, we believe, called Tel Kafrin, which is a 20 -minute walk, just a little over a kilometer to the northwest of Tel Hamam, on the ancient trade route.

As you go north, Sodom was the southernmost city of that group, because the Bible always lists the transjordan sites in south -to -north order, as you would come up from Egypt, as Moses would have encountered them, or Abraham would have encountered them coming up from Egypt to the north in the transjordan.

So, Sodom would be the southernmost. As you move north on that same trade route, you'd come to Gomorrah, and then you move further north, you come to Adma, and then its satellites, the

Zeboim, which is plural, by the way, which means you have two little cities. And we found that as well.

We know where all of them are, by the way. So, you go Tel Hamam, the big, massive site, with its great fortifications, and city gates, and palaces, and temples, and just a massive site.

Then you go one kilometer to the north, and you hit Gomorrah, which has the same occupational profile, was destroyed at the same time.

Then you go six kilometers to the northeast, you come to Tel Nimrin, which is another site of the same occupational profile, destroyed in the

Middle Bronze Age by a great catastrophe. And then just one kilometer from there, you get the

Zeboim. Zeboim means the little gazelles, the little twin gazelles that live up in the rocks at the edge of the

Kikar, and that's where they are, right on the edge of the Kikar as you begin to mount up into the hills.

They're located right there, exactly where the Bible says they should be. So not only did we find them, but we found them in exactly the order that you would predict from the biblical text, moving up from the south to the north,

Sodom being the great anchor city, and moving to the north, we find the others. In two exact configurations, two doublets, we might say,

Sodom, Gomorrah, and Mezeboim, in two separate doublets, separated by about six kilometers, and each one of the doublets only being about a kilometer apart.

So it's so amazing that you look at this, and in fact what

I say to my archaeological colleagues now is, you guys have ignored the Bible, didn't take the biblical text seriously regarding the cities of the plain, and therefore you have nothing on your map.

You didn't pay attention to the area, you didn't consider it seriously.

But we did, and we found that as the Bible states, this area is populated by one of the greatest civilizations ever to rise in that part of the world.

And it existed there for almost 3 ,000 years, and it was instantly snuffed out by what?

By a cosmic airburst event, fire out of the sky, exactly as the

Bible describes. That particular airburst event destroyed 500 square kilometers, and no city or town existed on that piece of real estate for the next 700 years.

That's pretty dramatic. Yeah, I mean, what in our modern understanding of those kinds of events could have scientifically caused a catastrophe of that magnitude?

Would it be something like an atomic bomb? Let's not think bombs, because I give lectures on this around the country, around the world, all the time, and invariably

I get people running away saying, if I mention nuclear, right, that it's similar to a nuclear explosion, or it has temperatures in excess of a nuclear explosion, people go away saying, oh,

Dr. Collins is saying that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by nuclear bombs.

I mean, literally they do that, and it drives me crazy, and they get all over the internet with that crazy stuff, but there are two analogous events that people can go to and check out and read about on the internet, or in other sources, scientific sources.

Lots of this is in journals like Science and other places, but two events.

In Siberia, in a place called Tunguska, in 1908, there was a meteoritic explosion over the

Siberian forest that toasted 2 ,500 square kilometers of Siberian forest, just toasted it.

What is an airburst? I use that term, airburst. An airburst, or a meteoritic airburst, could be called a bolide airburst, cosmic explosion.

What it is, is a meteoritic object, an asteroid fragment or a comet fragment that comes into the atmosphere that is large enough to create enough heat in its entry, but not large enough to strike the surface.

It burns up as it comes in, all of the weight of it burns up, but what's left is the superheated plasma.

It bursts upon the surface, and it destroys whatever it hits. That's what happened in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908.

We're talking about temperatures in excess of 15 ,000 to 20 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit for a microsecond.

It would just literally lay waste everything within the sphere of its impact, and that's what happened in Tunguska in 1908.

What caused that in 1908? It ranges from an asteroid fragment, maybe the size of a football field, to a comet fragment, a big dirty ice ball fragment that came in and exploded.

No fragments have ever been found. You only see the residual result.

It doesn't leave a crater, it just destroys everything on the ground. The second one of these, which was interesting because this happened in the same month that our book,

Discovering the City of Sodom, came out in 2013. In fact, I called Latane Scott, the co -author, and I said,

Latane, does Simon and Schuster have connections or what? Because in 2013, streaking through the air over Chelyabinsk, Russia, was another cosmic airburst event.

Now, this one was small enough where it did not impact anything on the ground particularly.

It were injured by shattered glass, things like that. There were some roofs collapsed, there was some architectural damage across the area, but this thing exploded in the air.

The fireball was seen by hundreds and hundreds of cameras and dash cams and security cameras, and a few people got it on their cell phones.

This thing streaking across the sky, exploding. It exploded with a force 10 times greater than the

Hiroshima atomic bomb. But it did so high enough over the ground where all it did was shatter a lot of windows.

And a few people had minor second -degree sunburn on their skin.

But it was a significant thing because even though it was smaller than Tunguska, it didn't destroy anything massively on the ground.

It was a great demonstration of what an airburst event was all about. We had just written it in the book and it was just then being published.

And so it gave people sort of a connection to be able to see it. You can go on and look up the Chelyabinsk airburst event and literally see all of these videos of this thing coming in and exploding.

Now, what's interesting is, had the Chelyabinsk meteoritic explosion been the size of the

Tunguska explosion in 1908, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the whole area would have been destroyed completely, utterly obliterated.

So lucky for them, it was a small object, a fairly small object, maybe the size of a house.

But look at the force that it explodes with. When this stuff comes in, it's moving at, depending upon whether it's an asteroid, asteroids kind of float in at 6 ,000, 7 ,000, 8 ,000 miles an hour.

They're really moving fairly slow, but they still burn up. Comets, however, comet fragments come in at about 50 ,000, 60 ,000, 70 ,000 miles an hour.

So from the time they hit the upper atmosphere to the time that they would impact or explode, it's just a second or fraction of a second.

Because that little atmosphere that it comes through around the Earth is just a very small, thin envelope compared to the size of the

Earth. The speed of these things is incredible. Well, what's interesting is the archaeological evidence on the ground at Tal Hamam, in the ash layer, in the destruction layer, and across the whole area, the fact that civilization was wiped out there, snuffed out in an instant, and didn't return.

They couldn't even do agriculture there for 700 years because the explosion so denuded and destroyed the surface soil, agricultural soil, that it took 700 years for the area to get soil again.

It had to go through the whole soil development process, which takes several hundred years.

It's just an amazing thing to look at. But we now have evidence, not only of the airburst, which leaves some very specific signatures, but we have evidence of the directionality.

We suspect, because of the destruction pattern across the city, that it actually came in shallow in the atmosphere from the southwest.

And so, all of this is being researched, all of this is being eventually published in secular journals, because scientists that are interested in airburst events are now very, very interested in the phenomenon that destroyed this particular civilization, because it will literally be the only time that such an cosmic airburst event has come in over a highly populated area.

Wow. And they're really interested in that. And so, this is being, I'm sure, by unbelievers being regulated to just a coincidence that this was the biblical site of Sodom and Gomorrah?

Yeah, I mean, you know, exactly, Chris. What I normally tell people is that by the time this is all said and done, all this research sort of wraps around and all is published over the next few years, but even some of it now, as it's known, you know, in the scientific community, that hasn't been published, but just what's being known, what we say is this.

There is no doubt that these cities existed. They're exactly where the Bible says they should be.

So, these cities exist at the same time, in the right time, the right place, with all the right stuff, as the

Bible describes the cities of the plain Sodom and Gomorrah. Not only that, but these cities did exist, and they were destroyed by a cosmic airburst explosion, literally fire and burning stone.

By the way, the phrase in the Bible that's translated, or the word that's translated, sulfur, or brimstone, in some of the bad

English translations, really should, literally, and it's Akkadian root, and by the way, you go back to that part, that original story was not ever recorded in Hebrew.

Hebrew, as we know it from the text of the Bible now, is from the Iron Age.

It's a much later development. These texts were copied and copied and copied, and the text was linguistically contemporized as it moves forward in time, because language changes over time.

So, it has to be kept up to put it in the contemporary language so that people can read it.

But in Abraham's time, what was the lingua franca? What was the spoken language? What would these stories in Abraham's time originally have been recorded in?

Well, it would have been Akkadian. And in Akkadian, that particular word, gopreet, actually means burning stone.

And by the way, when the Quran picks up on the story, the

Sodom and Gomorrah stories found the Quran 15 times. But it talks about the cities being destroyed by burning stones, thrown by God out of the heavens to destroy the evil cities.

And so, of course, where does that story come from? It's being lifted out of the Bible. It's being lifted out of the ancient

Hebrew. And so, we're talking about God destroying, go to Genesis 19, that God destroyed the cities with fire and burning stones out of the heavens.

And so, this is what we've got. And we have evidence of it on the ground.

And all of this is going to come out as factual. In other words, we do have the cities.

We do have the destruction. These are just realities, scientific facts of a civilization that was snuffed out in an instant by cosmic airbursts.

Now, the liberal non -believing community will say, oh, it's perfect.

It's a coincidence. In other words, there was a great cosmic impact that occurred. And local people, and eventually

Israelites got a hold of it, but local people picked up on the idea and wrote stories around it that these great cities were destroyed.

And they probably blamed it on their own deities. And the Israelites came in and picked up on the story and attributed the destruction of the cities of the plain to Yahweh.

And so, I say, great, good. If the event happened, of course, people would pick up on it and may even record it.

And that would find its way into the Bible. So, by the way, that's the minimal belief that you could hold based on the science.

Yeah. We have to go to another break. They existed. They were destroyed by this cosmic fire out of the heavens.

Now, on the other side, you say, if you look at the Bible and you believe the Bible is the word of God and there are good reasons to believe that, then you say, ah, this is not a mere coincidence or an event that happened in history that gave rise to legends.

Yeah, this is where we have to pick up when we return. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Dr.

Stephen Collins, we do still have some of you waiting, and I thank you for your patience. But if you'd like to join them with a question of your own on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with archaeologist Dr.

Stephen Collins, discoverer of the city of Sodom. I'm James White of Alpha Omega Ministries.

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with one hour to go, is archaeologist

Dr. Stephen Collins, who is also the Dean over at Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the

Dean of Archaeology and Biblical History, that is. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Dr.

Collins, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

and we are discussing his book, Discovering the City of Sodom, the fascinating true account of the discovery of the

Old Testament's most infamous city, published by Simon and Schuster. And before the break, you were comparing a liberal skeptic's reaction to the discovery of this geological evidence, basically, of the major catastrophe there in the same site where Sodom and Gomorrah exists, or existed,

I should say, and how a Biblical, Bible -believing Christian would react to this.

Yes, you could have two views of this. And what we're talking about is the fact that the cities existed.

The cities the Bible predicts to exist on that particular piece of real estate, north and east of the

Dead Sea, those cities actually do exist. They exist in the exact configuration that the

Bible suggests. So that the cities, in fact, are there. They are there in the right time frame that the

Bible describes. On the other hand, we have the destruction of those cities that we are now confirming scientifically.

These cities were snuffed out by a cosmic airburst event that exploded over the area in the time of Abraham, and wiped out an entire civilization that had existed and thrived on that particular real estate for almost 3 ,000 years, consistently without a break.

When nobody else went down, I'm sorry, when everybody else in the area went down a few hundred years earlier at the end of the early

Bronze Age, they thrived. When civilization came back up in the area, and everybody continued to live on into the late

Bronze Age, these particular cities in a very specific targeted area, they went down.

They were totally destroyed instantly, and nothing grew there hardly, or lived there, and certainly no towns or villages for the next 700 years.

So all of that, those are all archaeological facts. We have the cities, we have the termination in the right place in the

Bronze Age as the Bible describes, and we have the airburst event that destroyed them. All of that's confirmable in the archaeological record.

Is this a coincidence? Is this an etiological legend or a legend that grew up around a simple cosmic destruction of a location?

Or, as the Bible describes, is this an act of God, a targeted destruction of wicked cities that God scheduled for their demise because of their rebellion?

And so what we say is, take the evidence and put it on your own personal believable meter.

And, you know, from a biblical point of view, I trust the

Bible for a lot of different reasons. By the way, there are a couple of views of inerrancy.

There's what's called deductive inerrancy, and there's inductive inerrancy. Most Christians believe in deductive inerrancy.

In other words, there's some sort of doctrine of inerrancy where I have to believe that the Bible is inerrant no matter what. Because the

Bible says it's inerrant, so therefore I have to believe it's inerrant or I'm not a good believer. That's kind of how most people are.

I don't take that approach whatsoever. I find the Bible inerrant because I find after 30 or 40 years, well, 40 or 45 years now of studying the

Bible intensely as a historian, as an archaeologist, I find no errors in it. That's called inductive inerrancy.

I believe the Bible is inerrant because I can't find any errors in it. And so I don't need a theological inerrancy.

Now, it may exist, but as a Christian apologist as well, that's not very satisfying.

That doesn't hold up well in an argument. You know, the Mormons say the same thing about the

Book of Mormon. We believe the Book of Mormon. Everything in the Book of Mormon is true. Whatever contradicts the Book of Mormon is from the devil. You can't take that view with the

Bible, because the Bible is first and foremost a historical book. It's first and foremost a book of history, and secondarily, it is a book of salvation.

But if the history isn't true to begin with, how can you trust the rest of it? If you can't trust the tangible part of the

Bible, how can you trust the spiritual part of the Bible? Yes, well, at some point I hope to have a debate between presuppositionalists and evidentialists on my program about those kind of things that seem to still cause our brothers in Christ to grapple over differences there.

Always. So anyway, I mean, that's where we stand right now.

Now, the excavation is going to continue to go on, perhaps for many years to come.

We've been at it for 12 years. We just finished our 11th season, we're entering our 12th big season.

Right now we're prepping for it, and we'll be back in the field in January, February, and March. But now, you know, a lot of excavations don't last that long.

You can think of very famous excavations that haven't lasted nearly as long as that.

So we've been at this now, excavating for 11 years and going into our 12th season.

Yeah, when I first interviewed you, this was like in its infancy, and you hadn't even written the book yet.

Yeah. A lot of books, you know, now we have our first technical volume of Tal -el -Hammam excavations that came out, and that's a multi -volume series that'll eventually be published.

But we've got our first volume out now, published by Eisenbrauns, and that's very nice because, you know, it's always on the table at ASOR and, you know, other professional meetings.

People are requesting it now. I have scholars from all over the world, archaeologists, requesting copies of our publications.

Great. So it's very, very important that we do that. It just can't be done from a biblical side. It has to be done from a scientific side as well.

Right. We do have, oh, by the way, I forgot to mention to, I think I forgot to mention to our listener in Hoover, Alabama, Shane, you are getting a brand new free copy of Discovering the

City of Sodom by Dr. Stephen Collins and Dr. Latane C. Scott, shipped to you if you give us your mailing address as our way of saying thanks for you submitting a question today.

And that's compliments of not only our guest, Dr. Stephen Collins, but also it will be shipped to you by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for BibleBookService .com, who ship out all of our winners' free

Bibles and books for submitting questions during our broadcast. And we thank Todd and Patty Jennings over at cvbbs .com

for being faithful supporters of Iron Sharpens Iron. We have Jeff in Clinton Township, Michigan, who says,

I purchased an archaeology study Bible a few years back, and it seemed as though many of the articles and notes were aimed at causing me to question, and at worst doubt, biblical truth.

I've since tossed it out. Would you recommend a similar resource for laypeople produced by those who uphold the inerrancy of Scripture?

I would say the answer to that question is get the archaeological study

Bible published by Zondervan. Okay. And the archaeological study

Bible by Zondervan Publishing. However, I will throw a little caveat in with that.

I personally examined that when it came out several years ago, and I found lots of factual errors and even photographic errors.

Well that's why I was not going to reveal who it was, but he threw out the Zondervan Bible. Oh, okay.

Yeah, let me say this. The world of archaeology, when it comes to the

Bible, the world of archaeology is extremely anti -Bible and dismissive of biblical truth.

Let me just say that. I can't think of a single Israeli archaeologist who believes that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Joshua were real people.

Hmm. I can think, well, maybe one. Maybe one or two out of hundreds. And that's just a fact.

So, you know, my discipline, archaeology, Near Eastern archaeology, is a very difficult place to be a

Bible believer. So in other words, that discipline's tough. Because archaeological evidence has to be interpreted.

And when you make discoveries, there are always two, three, four, five different possible interpretations of that archaeological data.

Two or three of them might support the Bible. Two or three of them may not support the Bible. If you don't support the

Bible in your own worldview, then you're going to pick the interpretations that don't support the

Bible. And you're not going to talk about the others. And on the

Bible side, we'll generally show the ones that do support the Bible, and we won't talk about the others.

And so whatever your worldview is, whatever your take on the Bible is, you can pick, in archaeology, you can pick and choose the interpretations of the evidence that flow with your own point of view.

And so you have to realize that. And here's the other thing. Never be afraid of people who disagree with you.

I have maintained over the years a very close, working relationship with my atheistic, anti -Bible colleagues.

That's why they invite me to come and present about Tal -Hamam and all the various professional venues.

Why? Because their science is good science. Their data collection is good.

I may not agree with their interpretations of their data. They may not agree with the interpretations of my data, but they also, because I'm willing to be in the community and do good science, they recognize that I do good science, that our team are great excavators, and that we're careful, and that we follow the right protocols of archaeology.

Now, our evidence, as I stated earlier, you know, we have very specific evidence on Sodom and the destruction of Sodom.

They can't deny that archaeological evidence, and they don't deny that archaeological evidence.

They will deny, however, that the Biblical story is the reason for it.

And so I'm assuming... It's two different points of view. And so we can't be dismissive, categorically, of...

I can't run away and never talk to those people again, because some of the data that they find, that they excavate, does support the

Bible. And even though they are uncomfortably might admit it, or maybe even never admit it, the fact is

I can use the data that they excavate in support of the Bible. And because we have two different points of view, they have their paradigm, their anti -Bible, atheistic paradigm, and I have mine.

And my interpretive framework is just as good as theirs. And they realize it, and so they come to me, and we can go face -to -face, and I can say to them, and they can say to me,

I don't agree with your theology, or lack thereof, I don't have your same worldview, but I do respect the science that you do.

I may not agree with your interpretations of that science, but I know that we can be on an equal footing on the science.

So it's not my job to convince the anti -Bible archaeologists that they're wrong.

My job is to convince the rest of the world that they're wrong. And that's a big difference, because they're not going to ever admit it.

I mean, maybe some miracle of God in their life or something like that. But short of that, they are never going to look at my evidence, they're never going to look at all the arguments that I can put forth in favor of Biblical credibility, they're never going to look at that and decide to respect the

Bible. But I can take that same evidence and show the world, and show skeptics who are not archaeologists, who have a clearer mind, who don't have a—they don't have a dog in that fight, necessarily.

And I can show them that the Bible is credible, and that when done correctly and reasonably, archaeology supports every word of the

Biblical text. So it's very clear that you can fill a void that appears to need to be filled, because the best archaeological study

Bible you could think of is one that you even admitted had a lot of serious flaws in it. Yeah, it did.

Yeah, it had a lot of flaws, and inexcusable flaws, by the way.

I have no idea why they didn't run that particular text editorially through me or several other conservatives in the archaeological community.

I don't know why they didn't do that. Not only could it have been a good volume, but it could have been an excellent volume.

And I don't know why the editors chose to do what they did with it. Well, perhaps— Anyway, I didn't—on the plus side,

I didn't find it all that bad, but I don't know where—I don't know any other source to really get that information out correctly, because frankly,

I disagree with most of my evangelical colleagues on things like the Pharaoh of the Exodus. I disagree with them.

Many of them—some of them on the far right disagree with me on the location of Sodom. Now that continues to puzzle me when you use the

Bible as your blueprint. It doesn't even seem to make sense to the far right would object.

Yeah, I don't understand the people that still don't accept our site as Sodom.

It has all the earmarks of Sodom. The only thing that could be better than what we've got at this point is a great big lit neon sign from the

Bronze Age that says, Welcome to Sodom. You know, that would be really cool.

I'd love to find that. But short of that happening, I mean, we have all the evidence.

We have the city. We have every feature of a great city from the time of Abraham.

We have evidence of its destruction. Massive—not only its destruction, but the entire region, the entire

Kikar, the Jordan was wiped out, and nobody built as much as a village there for the next 700 years.

It's absolutely perfect. It's exactly as the Bible describes it, and it couldn't be any better.

By the way, somebody might ask, Well, why do you reject the southern

Dead Sea sites as Sodom? Let me give you a simple answer to that question.

Every single site in the southern Dead Sea area that has been identified potentially as Sodom and Gomorrah are too early.

Babadrah is usually identified as Sodom. It was destroyed in 2500 BC. You can't hook that up with biblical

Sodom. It's hundreds and hundreds of years before Abraham was ever born. By the way, it's not a city.

It is a small, fortified town. It's only about 8 or 10 acres.

And by the way, Tal -el -Hammam in the north exists all during the time that Babadrah did, so why would

Lot go eastward, pass up the great city at Tal -el -Hammam, and then turn south and go down to some backwater, marginally existing village in the south?

It would make absolutely no sense. But the fact is, that city did not exist during the time of Abraham, neither did any of the other locations down there exist in the time of Abraham.

So they're in the wrong place, they're in the wrong time, and they don't have the right stuff.

And so, you know, three strikes and you're out, and that works in archaeology too.

By the way, Jeff, Clinton Township, thank you for the question. You are also getting a free copy of Discovering the

City of Sodom by Dr. Stephen Collins and Dr. Latane C. Scott, compliments of our guest, a beautiful hardback edition of that book, and it will be shipped out to you by Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, so keep your eyes open for a package from cvbbs .com.

Thanks a lot, Jeff, keep listening to the program and keep spreading the word about Iron Sharpens Iron in Michigan.

We do have RJ in Westchester County, New York, who says,

I wonder if you were insulted by the Don Verdeen movie that came out last year with Sam Rockwell portraying a charlatan archaeologist.

That's kind of funny because Dr. Collins and I were talking about that movie before we even went on the air, and Dr.

Collins has not seen it. I've seen half of it, I haven't seen the whole thing, but it actually relates to something that Dr.

Collins knows is a very serious problem in the field of archaeology, is charlatans in the area of biblical archaeology, correct?

Exactly. There is no shortage of pseudoscience and pseudo -archaeology in the area of biblical archaeology.

I could drop some names for you, but then I'd get sued. They wouldn't win the law, and they always threatened to sue me, but they would never win the lawsuit because whatever they claim would never hold up in a court of law.

But the thing is that some of these people are fleecing Christian churches by speaking there, by selling books, by doing all these sorts of things, passing themselves off as biblical archaeologists, which they are not.

They are not trained as archaeologists. They have no background in archaeology. One of them, he's now deceased.

I always say, thank God. What can

I say? No apologies needed, brother. You know, he claimed that this particular gentleman, by the way, every time

I speak, somebody comes up to me afterward and said, did you see this?

And they hand me one of his books or one of his videos, and they say, what do you think about this?

And my answer is very simple. I say, listen to me very carefully. And here's my answer to this person.

And I say, when it comes to archaeology in the Bible, nothing that this person has ever written, said, or thought is true, categorically.

Now, sometimes they get upset. Sometimes they yell at me and scream at me. Sometimes they go storming off.

But the fact of the matter is, is that the Christian public is terribly gullible when it comes to archaeology.

So if somebody comes to your church claiming to have discovered the crossing point of the

Red Sea, or chariot wheels in the Red Sea, or the location of Noah's Ark, or they discovered the

Ark of the Covenant under Gordon's Calvary near Jerusalem, or any of these kinds of things, they're a fraud.

They're a hoax. If they declare that they found

Mount Sinai in Arabia, Jebel El -Lawz, it's a hoax. It's nothing but a hoax.

So in other words, even those alleged... It doesn't fit the Bible. And of course, people aren't knowledgeable.

They don't know the geography. They don't know the archaeology. And they believe this sort of stuff. And by the way, when

I noticed that... And by the way, there's another group, actually two other groups that are picked up on this deceased individual stuff, made better versions of it, and now are still publicizing this stuff.

And one of these individuals is even now considered the archaeological consultant of one of the major Bible conferences of a very famous Christian speaker, notable speaker and radio host that I could name, but...

Well, you can name them if you want to. They're charlatans. They're charlatans. But people just need to watch out for this sort of stuff.

Now, one of... Gold of the Exodus. I think one of his videos or books is Gold of the Exodus, this kind of stuff.

This stuff... Now, either one of two things is true, Chris. Either they are so naive that they really believe that what they're putting out is true.

I mean, they are either so ignorant of archaeology and so naive that they would believe the stuff that they're saying that's so patently unbelievable to an archaeologist, or they know it's a hoax, and they say it anyway.

And so where does that leave us? Well, if you're not going to tell us on the air, then you have to tell me off the air who these people are.

I will tell you off the air. I don't mind saying it, but I don't want to get you in trouble. Oh, you're not going to get me in trouble.

I could care less about that. Anyway, but you have these people out there, and anytime someone claims to have found

Noah's Ark, found the Ark of the Covenant, found the crossing point of the Israelites on the Red Sea, if the same person claims all of those things, that's pretty amazing, isn't it?

Let me say this. True archaeologists, legitimate archaeologists, number one, do legitimate archaeology.

You've got to look at what someone's experience in the field is, and you need to look at, are they members of the professional societies?

Are they peer -reviewed? Do they interact with other archaeologists? Do they actually direct an excavation?

You have to look at this. It's very easy to tell the difference between someone who's a working archaeologist and someone who's a shyster, and so you just have to be careful, and listen carefully, and invite

Dr. Collins to come to your church and do it. We do that.

We do come to churches, and we not only talk about Sodom, but I'm going to a church in Florida soon.

Where? Because I'd like to let... I know a lot... And we're going to have an entire weekend of biblical archaeology.

It's going to be wonderful. Well, I have a lot of pastor friends in Florida. Whereabouts are you going? It's in the

Fort Myers area. Oh, wow. I know folks from Fort Myers. In fact, I interviewed somebody from Fort Myers a few weeks ago.

He's a 9 -11 hero, a United States Marine who rescued two police officers from underneath the rubble of one of the

World Trade Centers, David Carnes, Staff Sergeant David Carnes. He lives in Fort Myers, and he is depicted in the movie

World Trade Center, starring Nicolas Cage. But I have to ask you, because when

I was a teenager, I picked up the book that absolutely fascinated me. I wasn't even a believer at the time, or let me put it this way,

I don't believe I was born again at the time. Noah's Ark, I Touched It. Is that one of the things that you're thinking of or talking about?

Yeah. Let me say this. By the way, there isn't a single biblical archaeologist out there, or say,

I don't even like to say it that way. There isn't a single archaeologist who believes the

Bible, let's say it that way. There isn't a single archaeologist who takes the Bible seriously who would not love to have

Noah's Ark discovered. We would all love that. It would be archaeological headlines.

It would be fantastic. However, we have to understand that archaeology does not happen, real archaeology does not happen, unless something can be measured, excavated, analyzed, data can be collected, the scientific process can be duly applied to it over a reasonable period of time so that confirmations can be made of claims about the particular discovery.

So that's what has to happen. Let me say this. There is not one single scintilla of physical data relative to Noah's Ark that has entered the true realm of archaeology.

The word archaeology should not, cannot be applied to Noah's Ark until something is actually discovered.

It could be measured, it could be photographed, it could be published, it can be peer -reviewed, it can be criticized, it can be debated, and there is not one physical thing about Noah's Ark that is presently or in the past has been available to the scientific process.

And so I have never, I've read virtually everything out there, by the way, I have some colleagues who are involved in Noah's Ark research and they would admit

Noah's Ark is not subject to the scientific process at this point because nothing has ever been discovered that could be physically excavated.

And that's another area that a lot of hoaxes have been, Ron Wyatt who was,

I guess could be numbered among the charlatan archaeologists, claims to have discovered

Noah's Ark at a place in Turkey. And I even know some of the scientists, the legitimate scientists who were working with him on that who got duped.

And I called them when I saw one of those videos. I knew these guys and I called them and I said, what in the world are you doing?

He said, well, you know, I kind of got sucked into it and I'm in the video and I've, you know,

I've tried to tell them to cease and desist that video with my face and my name in it, but they're still showing it and they still show it.

But like Dr. John Baumgartner, you know, a geophysicist at the

Los Alamos Laboratories is a friend of mine. He got even sucked into that. Well, afterwards he admits that, you know,

I got caught up in it, but we were totally seeing what we wanted to see. And as a scientist, it didn't take me but a couple of days to realize what was happening.

And he bowed out of the whole project. So you have to be just really careful.

Good science lasts for years. It's well analyzed, it's well studied, it's peer reviewed, it's looked at by a lot of people.

And so, you know, you have to be legitimately part of the community. I hate to be bare of bad news about Noah's Ark, but it's just a fact.

Do I think Noah's Ark exists somewhere? Yeah, I do. But the Bible says that Noah's Ark landed on the mountains, plural of Ararat or Urartu, which is about 2 million square miles.

And so there's a whole lot of territory where Noah's Ark could be, but nobody knows where it is.

And I don't think anybody's found any evidence of it that is scientifically valid.

By the way, RJ in Westchester County, New York, give us your full mailing address and you have also won a free copy of Discovering the

City of Sodom by our guests Dr. Stephen Collins and Dr. Latane C. Scott and compliments of Dr.

Collins. It'll be shipped out to you by Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service in the very near future. So give us your full mailing address.

We have to go to our final break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air while there's still time,

I urge you to do it quickly. Send an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

We still have a few people waiting to have their questions asked and we hope to get to everybody that we can get to before the program is over if that's possible.

But we look forward to hearing from you and we will be right back, God willing, right after these messages.

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Bayway, Phil Johnson, Rosaria Butterfield, Todd Friel, and a host of other speakers who are dedicated to the pillars of what

G3 stands for, gospel, grace, and glory. For more details, go to g3conference .com.

That's g3conference .com. Thanks, James. Make sure you greet me at the

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Harvey Cedars, where Christ finds people and changes lives. Welcome back, this is

Chris Sarnes, and if you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes or so, and the next 20 minutes or so to come, our guest has been and will continue to be

Dr. Stephen Collins, biblical archaeologist who discovered the city of Sodom, at least he is very certain that he has, and we are discussing his book,

Discovering the City of Sodom, the fascinating true account of discovery of the Old Testament's most infamous city, published by Simon &

Schuster, and I urge you, if you cannot win a book today for free, go to cvbbs .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, one of our sponsors, cvbbs .com, and order the book through them.

We do have a listener, Tony with an I, Tony in South Carolina, who says,

I regret that your guests today and others in the past will not name names and warn the brethren, which we are commanded to do in Scripture.

If your denouncement of certain teachers can be backed up with Scripture, and it seems it can be, then please do your part to warn

God's people, the apostles, and especially Paul, named names. Well, you did name one name, didn't you?

I recall you did. Yeah, I think I slipped one in there, but let me just say, anybody that, by the way, all of these guys, almost all of them, claim that Mount Sinai is in Arabia, at a place called

Jebel el -Lawz, and anybody that claims that Sinai is in Arabia at Jebel el -Lawz,

I would be 99 % sure that they're amongst our hoaxters.

So just note that, and it's pretty easy to spot these people.

It's pretty easy to spot the legitimate archaeologists as well. If they're legitimate archaeologists, they're either a member of the

Near East Archaeological Society, which is the society of evangelical archaeologists, or they're a member of the

American Schools of Oriental Research, which is the society, professional society, for all archaeologists working in the

Middle and Near East. By the way, Tony, in South Carolina, please give us your full mailing address, because you have also won a beautiful hardcover copy of Discovering the

City of Sodom by Dr. Stephen Collins and Latane C. Scott, and we thank you for your comments, and keep spreading the word about our program in South Carolina.

There are some fascinating relics that tie the site that you discovered to a very believable realm of probability, tying it in with the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah.

And I know that when you give your lectures in churches, you typically don't bring this up in front of women and children in the audience, but you can feel free to discuss this today, and it involves, for lack of a better term, phallic symbols that you've discovered.

Yeah, we have one particular one that's pretty interesting.

By the way, when that particular life -size ceramic phallus was turned in amongst our other artifacts to the museum in Jordan, where we store our antiquities, it was all being checked in by one of the ladies there who's a scholar.

And it was interesting to see my Jordanian colleagues pass that one around her and completely bypass it.

I just thought that was an interesting moment. But we do have some signal artifacts from Tal -al -Hammam that, either stylistically or structurally, that is via architecture, tie our site to the

Minoan culture on Crete from the Bronze Age, from the early and middle Bronze Age.

And that particular thing connects us to the sexual culture of Minoan Crete as well.

In that particular society, it was customary in the upbringing of young boys that a boy, when he became 12 years old, was taken from his mother by what was called a ritual abduction, literally, would be taken and given into the custody of a 22 -year -old male, who would then raise him together for the next eight years and would introduce this young adolescent boy to all the features of manhood of that particular culture, which included learning how to fight, to be a warrior, to have all the cultural understanding of high society, and also to be introduced to the world of human sexuality.

Initially, in the first eight years, with a male, an older, called an erasmus, an older male partner.

This pederasty, as it's commonly called. It's called pederasty. If you look up pederasty in a dictionary, you're going to get kind of a trite little description.

But culturally, this was how ancient people, through the

Mediterranean region, particularly in Crete, the Mycenaeans and Greek, the

Athenians, the Spartans, this was how it was done throughout ancient cultures.

Even the samurai culture of Japan had this methodology. Even the

Romans practiced it. That's why you had so much older male with young male, sort of man -boy homosexuality in the

Roman world. It was because this is how men were raised into the male world, into the military.

By the way, these practices still go on throughout the Middle East today. Well, I have actually seen very convincing evidence that the brownshirts of the

Nazi Party were very, very much involved in that, including their leader, Ernst Röhm, who was eventually assassinated by Hitler.

But it is even very readily acknowledged in the homosexual community that Ernst Röhm was a promiscuous pederast and homosexual.

Yeah. Well, anyway, the biblical connection, I mean, it's pretty easy to see this connection in the archaeological record between Ptolema or Sodom and the

Minoan culture. And what's interesting about it is the biblical connection comes this way.

Everybody remembers the story, if you remember the story of Sodom. By the way, I was just reading

George Barna's book, the new one he just put out, America at the Crossroads. You're talking about, he has a chapter in there on biblical illiteracy.

That's not the name of it, but he's dealing with that. And he's amazing. One out of seven Christians today believes that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife.

That's kind of interesting. But that's why I say, if people have read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which some may not have even if they're

Christians, in there it talks about the angels or the messengers of God who had come from Abraham's tent.

Remember, they came down a hill, and Abraham was parked up near Hebron, and they came down towards Sodom and Gomorrah to warn

Lot and to take Lot and his family out of the city before this destruction would occur. And as soon as they were taken in,

Lot says, you're going to go to my house. And they say, no, we're going to spend the night here in the square, in the public town square.

And Lot said, no, you're not. Not in this town. You're coming with me.

And so he takes them to his house, and it says, while they were at his house, he said, the men from all over the city, including the older men and the younger men, came to the house and,

I won't say demanded, I will say made a cultural, traditional request for these young men to be brought out, and obviously brought into a pederastic relationship with the men of the city of Sodom.

Now, this was typically how this pederastic relationship on the island of Crete was inaugurated, by a ritual kidnapping.

In other words, done by permission. And Lot said, no, no, no, that's not going to happen this time around.

And of course, they got upset, and they tried to break into the house, and the angels blinded them, and so on.

And so the story goes. But that particular thing, when we first noticed that, it was amazing to me.

You're reading that, and all of a sudden you have this, especially if you've studied Cretan, the

Cretan culture, all of a sudden you have this connection, and you go, wow, now

I begin to understand what was going on there in the city of Sodom, why they came for these, and I always say, probably handsome young men.

In my mind, I just don't think, I can't imagine ugly angels, but I think of angels, you sort of get this idea that they're rather handsome, attractive individuals.

But evidently the men of the city, when these guys walked in, when these messengers walked in, they caught the eye of the men of Sodom, young and old.

And so they wanted to bring, sort of, and sort of this was sort of the welcome wagon of the city.

You know, come, and this is how we welcome our male visitors.

We invite you to come be a part of what we do. And by the way, let me say clearly here that that was not the reason, that instance was not the reason

God destroyed Sodom. Sodom was targeted for destruction before the angels ever showed up.

So why was God targeting Sodom and Gomorrah? Well, you know, Ezekiel 16 lists a whole bunch of things.

Number one, they were arrogant, overfed, wealthy. All of those things are listed, and homosexuality is never listed as one of the reasons why.

Just that they did terrible, they did sort of disgusting things in my sight, God says.

But what we now know, and I think we can clarify this, was that the pederasty, the pederastic culture of Sodom and Gomorrah was not your everyday homosexuality.

If God would have destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah merely for homosexuality, he would have had to destroy the entire, you know, old world.

You know, he would have to toast everything from Europe to Japan, simply because that sort of thing was going on in every culture.

There's never been a culture that wasn't a part of it. And so the commentary there's really not on homosexuality or garden -variety homosexuality as we think of it.

It was, if anything, a commentary on a cultural institution of pederasty, because these boys were brought into this thing not by their own will, but by the will of the culture.

In other words, whether they were homosexuals or not homosexuals, they had to enter manhood through this means of a sexual relationship with an older man.

And by the way, Plato and others talked about this relative to the

Minoan society, and they spoke against it, but it remained sort of the dominant way that things were done.

In other words, there was an institutional, a cultural institutional acceptance of it that was forced on everyone, and that was detestable to God.

That this is not to lessen the severity of the sin of homosexuality, this is just... No, not in the least.

But what was going on at Sodom was far more pervasive than simply that.

It was as if you and I or our sons were forced into that practice regardless.

Right. It's almost, well, not even almost, it's really rape in a sense.

Yeah, I mean, in a sense, yeah, it's literally making into the norm what is patently evil.

And it's interesting that Barry Lynn, who is a notorious liberal activist, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, he debated a very good friend of mine,

Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, on whether or not homosexuality was compatible with biblical

Christianity. And he was trying to make the point that, well, these men in Sodom and Gomorrah could not have been homosexuals because Lot offered his daughters to them, but the fact of the matter is they refused his offer.

They weren't satisfied with his offer. In fact, typically in Minoan pederastic culture, what would happen is at the end of that eight -year relationship, they would have a two -year cooling -off period in which they would either continue in that relationship, maybe for life, or they would have the option to marry and have children, to marry a woman and have children.

And many opted to go that direction. So, it was just something that was culturally there for everyone.

They had to do it. It was no option to it. And as a result, it's part of the whole picture.

So we can't say that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah specifically for that reason.

However, it is certainly part of the overall cultural picture of Sodom, in which not only did they do that, but by the way, on creed, orphans and widows would be typically placed into prostitution for the use of the population.

And so if this was also happening at Sodom, this was another part of the culture.

In other words, everything about the culture sexually was wrong. We have time for one brief question from Norseman, I believe that's how you pronounce it,

Suffolk County, Long Island, New York. He wants to know, do you have any idea what the men in Sodom were doing with these sculptures of penises?

Were these objects of worship, or were they used as sexual devices, or just decorations?

We do not know. Form follows function in archaeology, so we can imagine a lot of things.

But probably there were parts of figurines, like bric -a -brac, or statues, that had something to do with the sexual context of the place.

Right. Well, if you could, just in a minute, just summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners, brother.

Well, number one, the discovery of Sodom reinforces the idea, or the fact, that the

Bible is historically trustworthy. It must be read and understood in its historical context, and when it's done that way, it remains the best historical, geographical document we have preserved from the ancient world.

But it's not just that. If the Bible is true historically, which after all my 45 years of research demonstrates to me, if the

Bible is trustworthy historically, it is also trustworthy when it talks about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the projection of God into three -dimensional history,

God himself coming as human flesh. If the resurrection means that Jesus Christ is who he claims to be, that is

God in the flesh, then he knows all the answers to everything, and he has the answer to our lives, and to the subject of death, of sin and death, and by his crucifixion and resurrection from the dead, he declares that we could have eternal life by our faith in him.

That becomes the bottom line. Jesus has a claim on my life, your life, everybody's life, and the historicity of the

Bible reaffirms that to me day after day after day, that these stories are not myths and legends, and that even the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the greatest miracle ever, is a historical fact.

And we're out of time right there, I'm sorry, and the website that you can learn more about,

Dr. Collins, is TrinitySouthwest .com. TrinitySouthwest .com. I look forward to having you back on the program very soon,

Dr. Collins. Enjoyed it, Chris, thanks for having me. And I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater