Ron Wyatt and Sodom
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| Ron Wyatt claims that these vertical cliffs are the walls of ancient Sodom. |
According to Ron Wyatt, he has located the remains of ancient Sodom on the plain at the foot of Masada. As I mention elsewhere, I have received acrimonious correspondence from people who have been on his tours and "seen for themselves" the irrefutable proof that this is truly Sodom.
The thing is that when viewed from ground level, the cliffs you see on the right do, indeed, look like walls - to the uninitiated and ignorant! Notice that the supposed "walls" are simply cliffs of mud: there is no sign of stone work, no indication of mud bricks. If these are walls, they are totally unlike any other wall in Palestine!
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| When viewed from the air, the "walls" turn out to be a perfectly natural watercourse. |
Unfortunately, Wyatt's tours are always on ground level - necessarily so, of course. If you could view the site from the air you would get a very different picture, and fortunately we can do exactly that, thanks to the wonder of Google Earth. Start the program and type "Masada" into the search box at upper left.
This will "fly" you to Masada, with north at the top of your screen. Use your mouse wheel or the PageDown button to zoom out until the "eye alt", shown at the bottom right of your screen, is about 4.5 km. You will now be able to see two areas of white. It is the southern of the two which, I believe, Wyatt claimed was Sodom.
Zoom in on this using either the wheel on your mouse or the PageUp key. Notice that the "walls" do not form a circle about a city, as they would in any genuine walls. Instead they simply line the twisting course of a wadi, a seasonal watercourse.
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| The supposed "walls" are not only on different levels, but they enclose what are clearly mesas. |
This fact is even more clearly seen in the photograph on the left, where the "walls" are seen to be on different levels, though not regularly so as would be the case if they were the product of man's construction. Furthermore the "walls" enclose numerous mesas - just how many Sodoms were there? Walls which do not completely surround the area to be defended, but merely meander off into the distance as two parallel lines are a waste of time!
I am told that after leading his dupes around "Sodom", Wyatt would pick a small dark object out of the mud and set fire to it, thereby proving that it was sulphur, after which he would intone a verse from the Bible saying that God rained down "fire and brimstone" (sulphur) on Sodom. His customers would go away feeling greatly privileged to have seen such dramatic proof that the Bible is true!
None of them ever stopped to think that if God did indeed rain down burning sulphur on Sodom, He must have been singularly inefficient to leave so much unburned!
In fact these little globules of sulphur - for they really are brimstone - can be found all over the area around the Dead Sea, and were deposited by perfectly natural processes (probably involving sulphur-loving bacteria) when the land was covered by the Dead Sea. Far from being the "spatter" from an ill-aimed thunderbolt, the sulphur globules can be paralleled in other locations around the world with a similar geologic history.
As I point out elsewhere, the crunch test of whether this is the site of Sodom (or some other ancient city) lies in the pottery. Fire, even Divine fire (assuming it is sufficiently tame to leave walls standing), does not destroy pottery, it merely hardens it. If this was Sodom, we could expect to find copious quantities of broken pottery lying about on the ground; this is not the case with Ron Wyatt's Sodom.
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