Where was Sodom?

Question

Where was Sodom?

Accepted Answer

The site of Sodom is unknown. Genesis puts it among the cities of the plain by the Dead Sea, and three answers are given today: beneath or beside the shallow southern basin of the sea, at the Early Bronze Age towns on its south-eastern shore, or at Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan valley north of the sea. The map point stands in the valley of Siddim south of the Lisan peninsula, with the other cities of the plain beside it. The southern view is the old one. Genesis says the kings fought “in the vale of Siddim, which is the salt sea”, and Zoar, to which Lot fled, was a known town in Roman and Byzantine times at the south-eastern corner of the sea, today's es-Safi. The salt ridge on the south-western shore is still called Jebel Usdum, Mount Sodom; Josephus and Strabo both say that traces of the burnt cities could be seen by the sea. The excavations of Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira on the south-eastern shore, Early Bronze Age towns destroyed by fire in the third millennium BC, gave this view material, but they are much older than the conventional date of Abraham. The northern view rests on Genesis 13: Lot, standing near Bethel, “beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered every where”, and the word for the plain, kikkar, is used elsewhere of the Jordan valley around Jericho. Its advocates point to Tall el-Hammam, a large Middle Bronze city east of the Jordan which its excavators date to destruction around 1650 BC; a 2021 paper in Scientific Reports claiming that a cosmic airburst destroyed it was retracted by the journal in April 2025. Deuteronomy remembers only that the land of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim became “brimstone, and salt, and burning”, and none of the sites can be called certain.