Tall el-Hammam

A Very Large Tell on the Jordan Disk

Tall el-Hammam sits about 12.6 km north-east of the Dead Sea and 11.7 km east of the Jordan River, on the eastern edge of the roughly circular alluvial plain north of the sea. The Tall al-Hammam Excavation Project has worked it since the winter of 2005/2006 as a joint undertaking of Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque and the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, directed by S. Collins, with a five-year joint scientific agreement signed in the third season. The excavation's own preliminary report for the first four seasons was published in the Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan in 2009, and its report volumes are published by Penn State Press.

The scale is not in dispute and it is genuinely impressive. The excavators put the tall proper at about 36 hectares, with a general settlement footprint well over 100 acres, and describe it as certainly one of the largest and possibly the largest Bronze Age site in Jordan. Their surveyed grid runs to more than twelve thousand squares over 43 hectares.

The occupation sequence is what the argument turns on. There is surface material suggesting a Chalcolithic presence, though the excavators are careful to say none had been confirmed in an excavated context through the fourth season. Then Early Bronze, Intermediate Bronze and Middle Bronze occupation; a fiery Middle Bronze II destruction, with a Middle Bronze house buried under about a metre of destruction matrix full of dark ash, broken mudbrick, potsherds and badly burnt roofing daub; and then, in the excavators' words, an occupational hiatus of at least five centuries, with no Late Bronze sherds evident. The site was resettled toward the end of Iron Age I and grew into a substantial Iron Age II city whose wall was laid directly over the Middle Bronze rampart.

The Case for Sodom, Stated as Its Excavator States It

S. Collins has published the identification with Sodom in Biblical Archaeology Review in 2013 and at book length, and the excavation project's own website is titled Digging for Sodom, so there is no mystery about what it is looking for. His argument is primarily geographical, and it is stronger than a reader who has only heard it mocked would expect. Genesis 13:10-12 puts Lot in the plain of the Jordan, well watered everywhere, and has him move his tent as far as Sodom. The Hebrew word behind "plain" there is kikkar, a disk or a round thing, and the alluvial fan north of the Dead Sea is in fact a roughly circular plain, well watered, immediately east of the Jordan. On that reading the text points north, not south, and the largest Bronze Age city on that plain is a reasonable place to start looking.

The second half of the case is the destruction and the gap. A large Middle Bronze city burned, and then nobody lived there for several centuries. That is the shape of Genesis 19 as a reader would picture it, and if the excavators are right about the length of the abandonment it is an unusual thing to find.

What the site shows at its own weight is this: a very large Bronze Age city on the Jordan plain burned at the end of the Middle Bronze Age and was not reoccupied for a long time. That is a real archaeological result and it is worth knowing on its own, whatever the place was called. It is not the same as having found Sodom, and the next section is why.

Two Arguments Against, and a Retracted Paper

The identification is disputed, and — this matters — it is disputed hardest by scholars who share the excavator's confidence in Scripture rather than by people trying to embarrass it. B. G. Wood argued in Bible and Spade in 2007 that the evidence points instead to Bab edh-Dhra, south of the Dead Sea, near Numeira; those two southern sites were excavated by W. E. Rast and R. T. Schaub from the 1970s and were the traditional candidates long before this dig began. E. H. Merrill of Dallas Theological Seminary published a chronological rebuttal whose conclusion is blunt: "both archaeological and biblical chronological data rule out Hammam as a candidate for patriarchal Sodom," and it closes, "text has had to be distorted in order to allow tall to triumph. The price is simply too high to pay!" The chronology is the sharp end — a Middle Bronze II destruction around 1650 BC sits centuries away from where the biblical reckoning puts Abraham, and closing that gap means moving the patriarchs. S. Collins has answered Merrill in print, and a reader should know the exchange exists rather than only one half of it.

Others press the text rather than the dates. B. Schlegel argues that Genesis 13 does not confine Sodom to the Jordan kikkar, and that Genesis 14:3 puts the battle in the valley of Siddim, which the text identifies with the Salt Sea — which points south. T. Bolen has published a list of objections along the same lines. S. Turpin adds that the prophets expect Sodom to stay uninhabited, which sits awkwardly beside a large Iron Age II city on the same mound. From outside the evangelical conversation entirely, M. M. Kersel, M. S. Chesson and A. Hill wrote in SAPIENS that "the vast majority of archaeologists working in the region do not believe that Tall el-Hammam — or the sites of Bâb adh-Dhrâʿ and Numayra, both traditionally associated with Sodom and Gomorrah — can be (or even should be) equated with these mythical biblical cities," and their methodological objection is the one worth hearing: that the project reverses the normal order, "attempting to confirm a previously held belief." R. Mullins, who chairs biblical studies at Azusa Pacific University and is listed on the excavation's own website as a ceramic consultant, put the same point without the edge, and his sentence is worth having whole because the second half of it is the concession: "In my opinion, this is an example of evidence being marshaled to support the identification of the site as Sodom, as opposed to letting the site speak for itself and then—if the evidence supports it—put forth a proposal of it as Sodom." He also noted that Genesis 18:16 has Abraham looking toward Sodom from Mamre, and "one cannot see Hammam from the Hebron area." His conclusion, in two sentences that Govier separates with a line of his own: "There is no question that this is an amazing site" — and "they are going to have to put forth more evidence that it's Sodom."

The second dispute is a case study in what happens when archaeology is announced by press release. In September 2021 Scientific Reports published a paper by T. E. Bunch, M. A. LeCompte, A. West, P. J. Silvia and seventeen others arguing that a Tunguska-sized airburst destroyed the city around 1650 BC, with shocked quartz, temperatures over 2000 °C and a regional abandonment; the paper hedged that the Sodom question was beyond its scope while suggesting an eyewitness memory of the event became the biblical account. It should be said clearly that S. Collins was not an author of that paper. Criticism arrived within weeks. S. J. Jaret and R. Scott Harris published a Matters Arising in the same journal in March 2022 finding no mineralogic or geochemical evidence of impact, and noting that much of the melt glass was "closely associated with pottery; many specimens are pieces of remelted ceramics like one might find in spoils and dumps." An author correction followed in February 2022, after E. Bik identified image problems on PubPeer; the journal posted an editor's note in February 2023; and a second author correction appeared in May 2023. In April 2025 M. Boslough and A. Bruno published a second Matters Arising arguing that "a Tunguska sized airburst cannot possibly generate the claimed temperature or wind speed effects on the ground from an air blast over the distances suggested by Bunch et al." Two days later, on 24 April 2025, the editors retracted the paper, writing that "the Editors no longer have confidence that the conclusions presented are reliable."

The retraction is not the end of it, and reporting it as though it were would be its own kind of dishonesty. The notice records that eleven of the twenty-one authors — M. A. LeCompte, T. D. Burleigh, R. E. Hermes, W. S. Wolbach, G. Kletetschka, T. Witwer, G. A. Howard, C. R. Moore, J. P. Kennett, A. West and P. J. Silvia — disagree with the retraction; nine did not answer the editors; T. E. Bunch had died. Not one author is recorded as agreeing with it. The corresponding author's response was that "Obviously, I and the other coauthors strongly disagree with the retraction," that "a small but vocal group of scientists has actively sought to stifle discussion on the Tall el-Hammam airburst," and that of the critics, "We are simply going around them so that the debate about these extremely dangerous airbursts can continue." They did exactly that: an expanded version, this time with S. Collins among the authors, appeared in 2025 in Airbursts and Cratering Impacts, a journal in which this research group regularly publishes. A published defence of the original paper's peer review had already appeared in Research Ethics in 2022. A retracted paper whose authors contest the retraction is a different object from one whose authors accept it, and a reader deserves both facts.

So where does this leave a reader. The tell is real, large, and was destroyed by fire at the end of the Middle Bronze Age; that much is excavated and reported. Whether it is Sodom is contested, most sharply by scholars who take Genesis as history. Whether a meteor did it is a claim that failed peer review twice over and is still being pressed by its authors in another venue. None of those three sentences settles either of the others, and an article that ran them together would be doing the thing this section exists to name.

Scripture references

• Genesis 13:10-12 — Lot chooses the plain of the Jordan — the kikkar, the geographical heart of the northern case
• Genesis 14:2-3 — The five kings and the Valley of Siddim, "also called the Salt Sea" — the verse the southern case leans on
• Genesis 19:24-25 — Sulfur and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah; the cities and the whole plain overthrown
• Genesis 19:28 — Abraham sees the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace
• Luke 17:28-29 — Jesus recalls the day Lot went out of Sodom
• 2 Peter 2:6 — Sodom and Gomorrah turned to ashes as an example

Sources

• Holding institutionS. Collins, K. Hamdan and G. A. Byers, "Tall al-Ḥammām: Preliminary Report on Four Seasons of Excavation (2006-2009)" — The Tall al-Hammam Excavation Project and the Department of Antiquities of Jordan · Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 53 (2009), 385-414, published by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and freely readable. The excavation's own report, and the source of every figure in this article for the site's size, its phases, the destruction matrix and the five-century hiatusSupports: The excavation, its auspices, the site's size and its occupation sequence
• ScholarshipT. E. Bunch, M. A. LeCompte, A. West, P. J. Silvia et al., "A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea" — RETRACTED — Twenty-one authors; corresponding author Allen West, Comet Research Group · Scientific Reports 11, article 18632, published 20 September 2021; retracted 24 April 2025. Cited so a reader can read the claim in its authors' own words rather than take this article's summary of it. S. Collins was not among its authorsSupports: The airburst claim as its authors made it
• ScholarshipRetraction Note: "A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea" — The Editors, Scientific Reports · Scientific Reports 15, article 14291, published 24 April 2025. The source of the editors' wording quoted here, and of the list of eleven authors who disagree with the retraction, nine who did not respond, and one deceased. Open access, and also mirrored at PubMed Central as PMC12022329Supports: The retraction, its stated grounds, and the authors' recorded dissent from it
• ScholarshipS. J. Jaret and R. Scott Harris, "No mineralogic or geochemical evidence of impact at Tall el-Hammam" — Steven J. Jaret, American Museum of Natural History, and R. Scott Harris, Fernbank Science Center · Scientific Reports 12, article 5189, published 25 March 2022, as a Matters Arising. Open access. The mineralogical critique, and the source of the remelted-ceramics observation quoted hereSupports: The first published critique, on the mineralogy and geochemistry
• ScholarshipM. Boslough and A. Bruno, "Misunderstandings about the Tunguska event, shock wave physics, and airbursts have resulted in misinterpretations of evidence at Tall el-Hammam" — Mark Boslough, University of New Mexico, and Andy Bruno, Indiana University · Scientific Reports 15, article 13869, published 22 April 2025, as a Matters Arising — two days before the retraction. Open access. The physics critique, and the source of the sentence quoted hereSupports: The second published critique, on the Tunguska comparison and shock-wave physics
• ScholarshipJ. L. Powell, "Peer review and the pillar of salt: a case study" — James Lawrence Powell · Research Ethics 19:1 (2023), 78-89, published online 1 November 2022. A peer-reviewed defence of the airburst paper and its review process, cited here so the proponents' side is represented by published scholarship and not only by an interviewSupports: The published defence of the airburst paper
• ScholarshipM. A. LeCompte, S. Collins, P. J. Silvia et al., "A Tunguska Sized Airburst Destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age City in the Jordan Valley Near the Dead Sea (Expanded)" — Fourteen authors, including S. Collins · Airbursts and Cratering Impacts 3 (2025). The expanded re-publication of the retracted paper, in a journal where this research group regularly publishes. Listed so a reader knows the claim is still being pressed and whereSupports: That the authors republished rather than withdrew the claim
• ReferenceS. Collins, "Where Is Sodom?" — Steven Collins, Trinity Southwest University · Biblical Archaeology Review 39:2 (March/April 2013), summarised on the Biblical Archaeology Society's own site. The excavator's statement of the identification, cited so a reader can weigh his case rather than only the objections to it. He has also argued it at book length, and replied to E. H. Merrill in the Biblical Research Bulletin, his university's own journalSupports: The Sodom identification as its excavator argues it
• ReferenceB. Schlegel, "Biblical Problems with Locating Sodom at Tall el-Hammam" — Bill Schlegel, author of the Satellite Bible Atlas · BiblePlaces, 4 January 2012, freely readable. The argument from Genesis 13 and 14 that this article summarisesSupports: The textual objection to the northern identification
• ReferenceT. Bolen, "Arguments Against Locating Sodom at Tall el-Hammam" — Todd Bolen, The Master's University · BiblePlaces, February 2013, freely readable; also republished by the Biblical Archaeology SocietySupports: A second published list of objections along the same lines
• ReferenceS. Turpin, "Biblical Problems with Identifying Tall el-Hammam as Sodom" — Simon Turpin, Answers in Genesis · Answers Research Journal 14 (2021), 45-61, published 10 March 2021, freely readable. The prophets-and-chronology objection quoted here. A young-earth creationist journal, which is worth saying plainly: it is a partisan venue, and it is cited because the argument is checkable, not because the venue is neutralSupports: The objection from the prophets' expectation and from the chronology
• ReferenceB. G. Wood, "Locating Sodom: A Critique of the Northern Proposal" — Bryant G. Wood, Associates for Biblical Research · Bible and Spade 20:3 (Summer 2007), 78-84, freely readable. The case for the southern candidates, argued from within the same evangelical scholarly community as the excavationSupports: The evangelical case against the northern identification
• ReferenceE. H. Merrill, "Texts, Talls, and Old Testament Chronology: Tall Hammam as a Case Study" — Eugene H. Merrill, Dallas Theological Seminary · Freely readable in full. The chronological objection, and the source of both sentences quoted here. It appeared in Artifax in 2012; the volume and page numbers in circulation could not be confirmed and are therefore not givenSupports: The chronological objection to the identification
• ReferenceM. M. Kersel, M. S. Chesson and A. Hill, "When Biblically Inspired Pseudoscience and Clickbait Cause Looting" — Morag M. Kersel, Meredith S. Chesson and Austin Hill · SAPIENS, 15 December 2021, updated 6 May 2025. Three archaeologists who work in the region, and the source of both passages quoted here. Chesson is a co-editor of the final report on Numayra, one of the southern candidatesSupports: The mainstream archaeological objection, and the methodological one
• ReferenceG. Govier, "Sodom Destroyed by Meteor, Scientists Say. Biblical Archaeologists Not Convinced." — Gordon Govier, Christianity Today · 24 September 2021 — four days after the airburst paper appeared. The source of R. Mullins's two quoted statements, and it also carries responses from S. Ortiz and A. MaeirSupports: The response of biblical archaeologists to the airburst paper at the time
• ReferenceE. Kincaid, "Sodom comet paper to be retracted two years after editor's note acknowledging concerns" — Ellie Kincaid, Retraction Watch · 23 April 2025, updated 24 April. The source of the corresponding author's two quoted sentences, and of the February 2023 editor's note and the PubPeer image findingsSupports: The timeline of the retraction and the authors' response to it
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Tall el-Hammam

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Tall el-Hammam
• The Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project's own site

Reflect

The paper was announced worldwide in a week and unravelled over four years, and almost nobody read the second story. What have you believed since the headline that you never went back and checked?