Alright guys, well today's episode should be pretty interesting. We're gonna be
talking about a subject that I've never publicly talked about before, but it's a
subject that I'm very passionate about. And if, like I said, if you know me
personally, you know I talk about these things a lot. And it's a, it's a, it's a
subject that I actually want to make a movie on someday. So I don't know if it's
gonna be, it's not obviously the movie I'm working on now, but it might
be the next film. It's a subject that's very, very interesting, especially when
you look into all the different facts surrounding this topic. And so today we
are going to be talking about the lost cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. And we're
not going to be talking about the usual topics when you talk about Sodom and
Gomorrah. We're gonna be talking about, you know, where are those cities located
today? Where were they located back then? And, you know, we're gonna be talking
about the Ebla tablets. We're gonna be talking about a whole bunch of different
things. You know, was the land, did the land over there in the Middle East used
to be a fertile landscape. You know, because a lot of people when they think
of the Middle East, you know, Israel, that area right there, Jordan, that
area where Sodom and Gomorrah was, they think of it as this barren landscape,
like kind of like a lunar surface. But, you know, was it like that back during
the time of Sodom and Gomorrah? You know, before those cities were wiped out, was
it barren? And so we're gonna answer that question here in a little bit. And we're
gonna be talking with Jerry Bowen. He is the director of Inker Stone
International. And so it should be a pretty interesting conversation. If you
guys heard of the research of Ron Wyatt, this is kind of, you know, how I first
heard of these topics. And so it's definitely a very interesting topic. I
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you enjoy this show, you want to see more of these shows, please donate to the
program. So yeah, like I said, we're going to be talking about the lost cities of
Sodom and Gomorrah. And we're gonna get right into today's episode. We're gonna
get Jerry Bowen on the line. Jerry, how are you today, sir? Pretty good. Pretty good.
Excellent. Awesome. Well, you want to start off by just telling us your name and
give us a little information about yourself. All right. Well, my name is Jerry
Bowen. I'm the director of Anchorstone International, which is a research
organization that has dealt with several major archaeological discoveries that
have occurred over the past 35 years. Are you familiar with the Ron Wyatt? Yeah, for
sure. That's kind of what got me down this journey. I think that's the
story for a lot of people. Yeah. Right. I ended up traveling with Ron on a couple
of occasions. We, of course, had met a number of years ago. And once my wife had
gone into web design, we talked to Ron and Mary Nell, his wife at the time, about
putting up a website. So in 1995, with Ron and Mary Nell's permission, we put
up Anchorstone International, anchorstone.com, and we hosted all Ron's
materials and put up his newsletters. And, of course, the rest is kind of history. I
mean, the site, even before Ron passed away in 1999, the site was
getting about a hundred thousand hits a month. So the information really has gone
around the world pretty significantly. Yeah, I mean, it's really monumental
findings. I mean, pretty interesting. If you guys haven't heard of Ron Wyatt and
you're listening to this, definitely check him out. He definitely has a lot of
interesting findings. You know, some of the most notable is the Exodus route
that he found. I thought that was just amazing. Same with Sodom and Gomorrah. And
so what we're going to be talking about today on this program is Sodom and
Gomorrah. I think it's the most interesting out of all of them to me. And
so, you know, when people think of Sodom and Gomorrah, they think of it
being destroyed because of homosexuality and stuff like that. But, you know,
the Bible also attributes a lot of other things to the reasons why Sodom was
destroyed. Jerry, could you go over just kind of, you know, why Sodom was
destroyed and a little bit, just kind of introductory on the subject?
All right, sure. We find the story, of course, in the Bible in Genesis chapter
19. And the events actually transpired about 3,900 years ago. And these cities
were Canaanite cities, which means that they had an ideology and all kinds of
idolatry and false deity and worship and so forth. And unfortunately, when Abraham
or Abram and Lot ended up going that way, they separated, as the story goes, in
Genesis there prior to Sodom's destruction. They separated. Lot went
toward Sodom, the cities of the plains. If you want to really know why the
cities were destroyed, there's a great scripture in Ezekiel chapter 19. Let me
just pull that up real quick here. You know, a lot of people believe that—
actually, it's Ezekiel 16—a lot of people believe that the cities were
destroyed because of all of the sexual immorality that was taking place. And
actually, from my studies, I realized that that was a symptom. The Bible never
really identifies the sexual immorality as the cause of their destruction, but
that was more or less a symptom of what the Bible does identify. In Ezekiel 16,
verse 49, for example, it says very clearly, it says,
and he's making a comparison between the cities of the plains and actually the
Israel nation itself because of that idolatry that they had gone into.
But basically, Ezekiel comes along and he says,
in verse 49,
this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom. And he lists four things here. He says,
pride, fullness of bread, abundance of idleness was in her and her daughters,
neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy. So there are four
things that are listed there. Pride being the first thing is one of the cause that
God destroyed them. They had kind of an arrogant pride. You know, the Bible says,
pride goeth before the fall, and that kind of thing. There's an arrogance of, you
know, we're better than everybody else, and, you know, you can do a whole study
on the negative aspects of pride, even though as a Christian, you know, I'm proud
to be an ambassador of God's kingdom. And so there's a pride there that's a positive
thing, but there's also a negative aspect to pride, where you feel like you're exalted
over everyone else, you're better than everyone else, etc., etc., which is not
the way that it really is. The second thing listed, there's fullness of bread.
These areas were highly industrialized. They were part of trade routes. They had
a lot of economy going on there. They had the slime pits in the vale of Sidon,
which is now the Dead Sea area. And so they had a real economy going on there, as well as
tremendous agriculture and tremendous husbandry going on with animals and so forth. A lot went
that way, because the Bible says it was well watered. Well, not only was it well watered,
but the text also indicates that it was like the Garden of Eden. So it was like a paradise
there before its destruction. And so naturally, a lot would want to have, you know, that kind of
thing for his herds and flocks, which were quite significant. But at any rate, the other thing that
they mentioned there is that not only did they have a fullness of bread, not only did they have
an incredible economy and economic structure going on there, but they were also, it says,
an abundance of idleness was in her and her daughters. In other words, they had a lot of
leisure time. And it's because they had this robust economy going on, because they had
a lot of this idle time, leisure time, they started to get into all the sexual perversion
and things that the Bible highlights in other areas. And of course, you know, the old saying
goes, you know, idle minds is the devil's playground. And one of the reasons that God
caused the flood, the flood of Noah, to occur, it says in Genesis 6 there,
because every imagination of their thought was only evil continually. And so, you know,
the Sodom destruction occurred about 400 years after the flood. The flood is about 4350 years
ago. This is about 39. So just in about 400 years after the flood, you have people's minds becoming
perverted, simply because they've got things easy. They've got a robust economy,
they've got a lot of free time on their hands, and then they're steeped in idolatry and heathenism.
So it was just kind of a natural course of events that took them down that road.
And then it said, Neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy. God said that was
a sin. It says, Behold, this was the iniquity or the sins of thy sister Sodom. They didn't
strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy. They had a corrupt welfare system. They had
people there that I'm sure were, like in any society, very wealthy. And they had other people
that were just getting by, and they probably had a segment of people that were poor.
And they used their plenty to control the people. In other words, instead of teaching people how to
become more self-reliant and how to provide for themselves, they would give them portions of
things to kind of keep them under control, almost like a form of slavery, in a sense.
And so it was a corrupt welfare system.
And I like to tell people, when you do a whole study on this,
where could you find a society today that is proud and arrogant, that has plenty, that has
lots of free leisure time on their hands and has a corrupt welfare system? It doesn't take
a rock of science to figure out that we have ripened ourselves in our Western society just
as surely as Sodom and Gomorrah did. I've even heard pastors make the comment that if God didn't
come soon, Christ didn't come soon, you'd have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah and the other
cities that were destroyed, because we have ripened ourselves in the same way, unfortunately,
that they did back then. But obviously, it got to a point where God had to step in
and check the abuses and the sins that were going on, because the symptoms of these things
led them in a direction of total sexual immorality and corruption. And it was just a basket case,
which probably, for a lot of people there, was what they would consider quite normal.
But when it got to that place, God had to check it.
Yeah. And the verse that you talked about, I think it's really important to read this verse,
because it really does show that it was a well-watered plain. It says,
And Lot lifted up his eyes, and behold, all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered
everywhere before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, even as the garden of the Lord.
So he's comparing the land as it was like the garden of the Lord. So I mean, this place had
just riches upon riches. And it does parallel the United States perfectly.
And so I want to put this conversation in context a little bit. I'm going to play a clip from the
Ron Wyatt film on Sodom and Gomorrah that explains where these five cities were located,
just so people can understand what we're talking about for the rest of the conversation.
In 1 Samuel, chapter 13, verses 16 through 18, we read how the Philistines set up camp in Mishmash.
Dividing into three companies, one went north unto the way that leadeth to Ophrah.
One went west, the way to Beth-horon, while the third went east, the way of the border that looketh
to the valley of Zeboim towards the wilderness. Even though it had been hundreds of years since
its destruction, the name of Zeboim still remained. It was common for new cities or new areas
to receive the name of an old destroyed one in the area, such as the three Jericho's which span
over 3,000 years. What evidence does the Bible give for the locations? The first mention is in
Genesis 10 19 when the boundaries of the Canaanites are given.
And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon as thou comest to Gerar unto Gaza,
as thou goest unto Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zeboim, even unto Lasha
or Laish, which later was known as Dan.
If we place these cities at the traditional site, all clustered together at the southern end of
the Dead Sea, would that description make a lot of sense? So that video gives a really good
indication of where Ron believes the cities of the plains were located. And so I guess the next
question would be, how were those cities destroyed?
I've actually been on site there about a dozen times. The most preserved site that's there
would be what we would call Gomorrah. Sodom is a little further south. And of course there are
a lot of mining companies over there that mine the minerals out of the sea,
and some of them, of course, in the area of Sodom. The largest salt dome, for example,
in the world is just right there at the edge of Sodom, which is kind of an interesting thing in
itself. But a lot of activity going over there in terms of that. But yeah, God destroyed us.
I don't know if we can say with absolute certainty exactly how the process played out.
The Bible simply tells us that God rained fire and brimstone from heaven. And that word out of
heaven is used on five occasions in the Old Testament, eight occasions in the New Testament.
And simply it means out of our atmosphere. So exactly how he ended up pulling that off,
we're not 100 percent sure. A lot of people speculate that it could have been a volcanic
eruption, and this was a fallout from that. The problem is that the sulfur that you find
around volcanoes, the seams of sulfur and whatnot, are crystalline in nature.
And what we have here is pressed powder sulfur. I don't know if you can see that on my finger or
not, but I can just rub that, and it's like a pressed powder consistency.
If you've ever been caught in a rainstorm,
we've got lots of samples of these things that we brought back. And the only reason that we find
any of the remaining brimstone—and incidentally, if I were to light that,
if I were to set that afire, I'd have to leave the room because the smell is so noxious.
Of course, it burns very, very hot. So if you put that in a spoon, for example,
held that in a spoon—I don't know if you've seen some of the videos where Ron was holding a piece of
the sulfur in a spoon, and it actually burned holes in the spoon that he was holding.
But it burns probably 2,000 degrees or hotter, kind of a bluish purplish flame. And like I said,
the smell that it puts off, the fumes that come off from it are suffocating.
They would actually just kind of take you right out if you got a big whiff of it,
knock you right out. But the sulfur is different than what you find around volcanoes and so forth.
I took some of these samples over. We don't live too far here in Virginia from Virginia Tech.
Virginia Tech has a great engineering and also a
great department dealing with rocks and minerals and so forth, a geology department.
I took those in on one of my trips back from the Middle East. I wanted to kind of get their opinion
and talk to the head geologist over there. This happened a couple of years back.
And I showed him a sample almost just like this. Actually, it's probably a little bit bigger than
this, maybe a little rounder. And I told him that we had found these over in Israel. And I wasn't
wanting to influence his thinking or decision on what they were or whatnot. So I didn't tell
him that we already had these things tested many times. And they are 95 to 98 percent pure sulfur
with some extra minerals thrown in there like magnesium that make them burn even hotter.
And I didn't want to influence him. So I didn't tell him what we already knew. I just wanted to
get his opinion on what he thought they were. And so he's holding it in his hand, and he's
looking at it. And he thought maybe they were just calcium carbonate nodules or something,
which is just a fancy name for dirt, just a dirt nodule or something that maybe had
grown underwater, in fact. And he took out a little plastic flask out of his pocket
that had acid in it. And he poured a little bit of acid, a couple of drops of acid on the sample,
and it kind of started to fizz up. And he said, Oh, yeah, see, this just has some calcium salts
on it and whatnot. Probably if it was around the Dead Sea, he said it probably was underwater at
one time. It was just a nodule. And I said, Well, you know, these things are flammable.
And he kind of stepped back and he gave me one of these looks like,
who's this guy telling me that this fancy dirt is actually flammable? So just to humor me,
he pulled a lighter out of his pocket, and he actually lit it on fire.
And he's holding it in his hand. So he's holding this large sulfur ball in his hand,
and he lit it, and it started to burn, of course. And he could tell almost immediately
from the smell that it was sulfuric, that it was sulfur. And so he blew it out quickly.
And then he had this puzzled look on his face. He was just looking at it.
And he was trying to figure out why this thing would be burning. And so then what he did is he
took a pen knife out of his pocket, and he cross-sectioned it to get a virgin surface.
And he took his acid again, and he poured some drops of acid on it. And instead of fizzing up,
it just beat it up and rolled off like water off a duck's back. And he looked at it and he said,
wow, this must be almost pure sulfur. And you see, sulfur around volcanic activity,
crystalline sulfur is probably about 40 to 45 percent pure sulfur.
And of course, this is twice that. This is twice that. And the reason he didn't recognize it as
sulfur is because he knows as a geologist that sulfur is crystalline in form. It's not
pressed powder. So what God did is God created something to accomplish the desired result and
effect. And he used something that was unique in all the world. The only place that you find
pressed powder sulfur like this are in five locations around the Dead Sea. And that would
be Sodom, Gomorrah, Adna, Zeboam, and Zor. And that's the only place that you find this type
of thing. Of course, the Bible tells us we've never really done an extensive survey outside
of the cities in the plain area. The Bible says that even the plain area was also destroyed.
There's a certain amount of territory around the cities that would have been the outskirts
and whatnot. And they were even destroyed. When the angel drug Lott and his daughters out of the
city, he basically told them, don't stay in the plain. Go to the mountain, because the angels
knew that the plain was also going to receive some of that brimstone and fire. Now, the reason why
we find these, if you think about a rainstorm, how a storm approaches an area, it starts to fall
periodically as drops, and then there may be a large downpour. And then there's a tapered off
process, the way a rainstorm comes through an area. That's exactly what took place here.
Obviously, a lot of this was on fire as it was coming down. And in a sense, that was the most
merciful way that God could have destroyed those cities, simply because we believe from
the cumulative heat, probably 5,000-6,000 degrees, which is basically the temperature
of the surface of the sun, that these areas—in fact, Abram was watching the conflagration from
a distance away, and he said it looked like a large furnace had gone off. That's the word
he used, furnace. But the cumulative heat, we believe, in the fire sucked all of the oxygen
out of the immediate area. So most of the people would have probably been rendered unconscious
pretty quickly from a lack of oxygen. And then, of course, the baking, the autoclaving of the
entire region is really what took place there at such a high temperature. Every known material
there. The buildings were built of stone. They had some tiles. We found some refired tiles
in some of our investigation. So you had tiles and stone. You had, of course, a lot of vegetation
around and trees and things of that nature, and of course, the people. All of that was
consumed and turned to ash, probably relatively quickly. The intense heat caused all of these
materials to—well, let me get back to, let me just before I get to the buildings and stuff,
let me talk about the brimstone a little bit more. The reason why we find those bits of
brimstone is simply because if the area is void of oxygen, then a lot of the stuff that
would have been on fire, the end of it would have been extinguished. We find a lot of the
balls of brimstone and so forth embedded in the ash. What it would do, it would smother out
the flame. Most of the brimstone had to be consumed, of course.
But a lot of it was extinguished and embedded itself in the ash or in a capsule. If it was
still smoldering, it would form a vitrification around it and encapsulize itself and smother
itself out. So we find a lot of the brimstone actually in capsules, almost like a peach seed,
like a large peach seed. If you cut that open, you'll find the brimstone inside of it.
Of course, there's a lot of it left over. It's been harvested out of those areas for
30 years or more. Even Josephus. Josephus, his account, first century historian,
his account, he actually said that he was an eyewitness to the destruction of those cities.
In the first century, apparently they knew where they were, and he had apparently seen some of the
same things that we see today. But of course, we're 2,000 years removed from where he was.
But God used something unique, I think specifically, to
inform us that this was something of His doing. This was a miraculous situation. It wasn't
something where a volcano went off and the cities just happened to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time. Actually, the destruction was much more severe with this press powder than it would
have been with even a volcanic eruption. But you have structures and buildings and things
that even though they were turned to ash, they still retained a semblance of their form,
so you could tell what they were, and some of the architecture and so forth of the areas.
Again, Gomorrah is probably about the best preserved out of all five of them.
Yeah, and all the cities weren't right next to each other, because when people think of
the cities of the plains, or the cities that were destroyed, they think of Sodom and Gomorrah,
but they don't think of the other cities like Zoar and stuff like that. Those cities aren't
all together, is that correct? That's right. For quite a while, I think,
for, like I said, Josephus identified and knew about the cities and their locations,
first century, but over time, information gets lost and people get displaced. That's why things
seem to get lost in history. I guess a lot of scholars that had read the story in Genesis
thought, well, this might be just a book of fables. They may not have existed at all,
because we really can't see them. Ron Wyatt drove by those places probably 20, 30 times before
God impressed him to stop and really take a look. Then once he did, he began to realize that
these were ashen remains. He could go up and just pull off a chunk of building and it would just
kind of crumble in his hand. This is like a whole bag of ash. It's like talcum powder,
very fine powder that this ash would evolve into. In fact, if you ever went there,
if you're in a colder climate, you're in Arizona, but if you're in a colder climate,
you know how sometimes if you get a snowstorm and it'll drift up against the building or whatever,
that's the way the ash has deteriorated around some of these structures. There's like a
drift of ash around some of these buildings. Of course, you can jump into it and sink down several
feet. It's kind of messy, but it's just simply ash that's deteriorated.
In 2 Peter, it says that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were turned into ashes.
The Bible does say that the cities were turned into ashes. Is there any historical evidence
of the Sodom and Gomorrah that we know of besides Josephus?
Yeah, I think there are other historians as well, probably particularly around that time frame.
I'm sure Josephus didn't keep that a secret himself. I'm sure there have been a lot of
people over the centuries that have known just where they were. One of the things that developed
along with the idea that these were just fabled cities, they weren't really real,
was that they were clustered around the southern end of the Dead Sea.
Some people believe that Bob and Draw was probably the ancient Sodom, that kind of thing.
When you look at these other areas, where they do seem to have some destruction that exists,
it's not nearly as extensive as what you find in the actual locations that God destroyed.
Like you mentioned, they are strung out along the Dead Sea,
which was called in the Bible the veil of Sittom. The Bible just simply says it was full of slime
pits and tar pits and so forth. The Bible really gives us an indication as to where these cities
were located. When you look in chapter 13 and 14 of Genesis, 14 talks about several cities
that went to war. You had Cheadlelamer, king of Elin, entitled king of nations, and they went to
war with Sodom and Gomorrah and Adam and Zebon. So there were a number of different cities that
came to battle, and it says that they came out of their cities. Verse 10 says,
the veil of Sittom was full of slime pits, and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled and fell there,
and they that remained fled to the mountain. But it says that they came out of their cities to
fight the war, to fight the battle, and they fought in the veil of Sittom, which is now
where the Dead Sea is. So if you come out from your city, that means your city is not in the
valley. A lot of scholars actually believed and taught that these cities were under the Dead Sea.
That's why they could never identify and find them. A lot of people thought they were
under the Dead Sea or clustered around the southern end, but they're actually stretched out
a good way, basically running the extent of the Dead Sea itself.
So if you read Genesis chapter 14, you'll find that they fought in the veil of Sittom,
where the Dead Sea is, and they came out of the city. So the cities were in the plain area,
not in the valley. And I think it's, let's see...
Yeah, verse two is where it says they made war.
Right. In Genesis 10, that's kind of a clue as well. I think it's verse 19.
Oh, yeah. These were Canaanite cities. In Genesis 10, 19,
it says there, and the borders of the Canaanites were from Sidon, as they'll come us to Gerar,
unto Gaza, as they'll go us unto Sodom and Gomorrah, and Admah and Zeboam, even unto
Lasha. So if you plot those out on a map, you'll find that they pretty much extend from the north
part of the Dead Sea all the way down to Zora, which was toward the southern end of the Dead Sea.
And you can access all of those from the Israeli side. I think it's Admah that's actually
in one of the crossing zones to cross into Jordan by the Allenby Bridge,
which is the northern part where you cross into Jordan from Israel. And of course,
we've been through that crossing. We've been to all of these cities, and so we had to cross.
It seemed like Gomorrah actually could have extended across the Dead Sea. You remember,
it was the Jordan River that flowed down through that valley.
And of course, once that was sealed off at the southern end, that's when that valley started
to fill up and become what we call the Dead Sea today. But because it was sealed off,
it became highly mineralized. And of course, after the conflagration,
the Bible tells us in Deuteronomy 29 that there would be six criteria
regarding the location of these cities. This is what you would find in Deuteronomy 29.
And that's an interesting chapter in itself, because again, the Lord is comparing
the nation of Israel to these cities. Let me see here.
Let's see here.
I'm just looking for the verse there. Oh, yeah. Okay. So it says in verse 23,
I'll read 22. He's talking about the generations to come to your children that shall rise up after
you, and the stranger that shall come from afar land shall say, when they see the plagues of the
land and the sickness which the Lord had laid upon it. Verse 23 says, In the whole land thereof
is brimstone, salt, burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass growth therein,
like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Adam and Zeboam, which the Lord overthrew in His anger
and His wrath. So the Bible really lays out six criteria. You've got, of course, the text that
you mentioned in 2 Peter, these cities returned to ash. So you're going to see ash, you're going
to see brimstone, salt. Here's a piece of salt here taken from Gomorrah. You can even taste it,
and it's very, very salty. It's like rock salt and burning. I have a case over here,
you probably can't see it there. There's a display case over there. It's got pictures of
some of the carbon that we noticed from the burning. Some of the things were carbonized
that took place. They could have been some type of wooden trim on buildings. They could have been
wooden idols that people had that they had sculpted. You find those throughout the ash
and remains, but they've been carbonized so that they're black. Some of the outskirts areas where
some of the rock was actually burned. You can see burned rings around portions of the rock.
I've got a sample of one in the case there. So you've got ash, brimstone, salt, evidence of
burning. No one would live there and nothing would grow there. Because these cities have a
high salt content, there's nothing that grows in them. Again, I have a picture in the case there
where even the Bedouin—of course, you can see from a panoramic picture the distinctive color.
When you go to these areas, the ash is almost blinding. It's very white and bright as compared
to the mountains and the terrain off in the distance. So the Bedouin will go right up to
the edge of some of these places. They'll actually even irrigate some of the scrub
ground out in the plain area. They'll grow some things out there, but they don't go into the
cities at all. It's kind of uncanny to see that because it's a direct revelation of what
Scripture reveals. No one would live there and nothing would grow there. These cities were quite
extensive. Zora was the smallest. You can see the square shape of the city and whatnot,
which was typical of a Canaanite city, but that was the smallest. You can just take a picture
from a distance away and you can see how white it is compared to the surrounding plain area.
Pretty interesting, though.
Yeah, super interesting. So the Ibla tablets—I wanted to get into that real quick.
The Ibla tablets, do you believe that those actually mention Sodom and Gomorrah in those
tablets?
Right. Professor Penanato was responsible, I guess, for translating most of those. There
were several—I think 17, 18, probably 20,000 of those tablets were discovered over the years.
I think they first started finding them in 1974, about 50 years ago.
It seems like to me that in his translations, he did come across some reference to these
Canaanite cities. A lot of the tablets deal with a lot of the trade, a lot of the business,
a lot of the court dealings. That particular area in Syria was an educational center,
so they were training scribes. You have a lot of things that were just copies of things that
were taking place there. So it does seem like that's a secular source to identify those cities
as Canaanite. Some people say that specifically they do mention Sodom and Gomorrah. I think
there were other comments. Professor Penanato translated everything, and I think the other
scholars kind of interpret the translations. And some, of course, that want to deny the accuracy
of Scripture, they're going to pick and choose things that seem to disregard any relevance to
Scripture. And then scholars that have the other interest in verifying the Scriptures, they're
going to pick out things that seem to verify those things. So it seems like you have both
things going on there. Yeah, and so how do we know how many people were in those areas?
Didn't they discover these massive graveyards over in the Dead Sea, near the Dead Sea area?
Yeah, on the Jordanian side, around the southern end of the Dead Sea, there are some significant
grave cemeteries there. There's two different kinds of things going on there. They have what
they call shaft graves, where they have shafts that go down to a chamber that's opened up.
And so you could have multiple, like a family plot, you could have multiple people in these
shaft graves. And then they also have these mounds. If you remember when
Lot and his daughters ended up going to, the angel told them to go to the mountain.
And that's an interesting consideration, too. A lot of people don't realize that that particular
word is a singular word. It's not the word mountains, plural, but it's the word mountain
singular. And we believe it was probably Masada. Masada, if you ever get to Israel,
I don't know if you've been there before, or if you've been on top of Masada. But you can look
out and you can see Gomorrah is pretty much right below you when you're on top of Masada. And so we
believe that the angel was trying to tell them to go to Masada, because Masada is kind of a mountain
fortress. It kind of sits out away from the chain, the regular chain of mountains.
But obviously, they didn't want to do that. They went to Zohar first. And
once they saw and realized the extent of the conflagration of the city of Sodom and the city
of Gomorrah, and once the word got to them into Zohar, I think they became fearful that Zohar was
also going to be destroyed because they had the same ideology and the same corruption going on
there. And so I think eventually they went to the mountain. I think they were scared enough
to eventually go there and find a cave to live in. But remember, the daughters said,
you know, there isn't a man left in the whole area. Today was their whole world.
There's not a man left in the world. Let's have children with our father.
So the children that they had were the Moabites and the Amorites.
And also in the Jordanian side, the Emims were very large people. A lot of the mounds,
the grave mounds that we find are pretty, pretty large. It wouldn't be uncommon to find an 8 to
10-foot skeletal remain in some of those mounds. These people were from the sons of Anak. And you
remember Samson was one of the sons of Anak. So a lot of those mounds are pretty extensive and
pretty large. And you don't hear a lot about them because it kind of goes against the theory
of evolution. In fact, you don't hear a lot about any large remains, which is definitely something
that the academia wants to kind of keep hushed up. But they do have the the shaft graves in
the area for families as well. And I think that these were probably areas designated
for family graves. I've heard estimates of a million or a million and a half
potential internments there. But I think that that's a highly inflated number. I never saw
anything like that. Like I said, we explored those areas. I never saw anything of that significance
in the areas. As far as the populations of the cities, like I said, they were pretty extensive.
Sodom was a pretty good size. Gomorrah may even have extended across the Jordan River
into what's now Jordan, because we did find similar things on the Jordanian side.
We found ashen remains, we found brimstone. We also found some structures that had these tile
materials. This is like a refired ceramic tile. And we were able to bring some of that back.
So it's a good bet. It's a good possibility that Gomorrah was even bigger than Sodom
in terms of population and area, extending across the Jordan River into Jordan itself.
Hard to estimate. We know that Zorro is pretty small. I could see maybe in Zor there could have
been 1000 people. In those other cities, it should have been even greater. They estimate
in Ebla. They estimate that that was an area or a city that had about a quarter of a million people.
Now, whether or not Sodom and Gomorrah, Adman, Zebillah were smaller than those.
But maybe there could have been 100,000, 150,000 people in each of those cities,
and maybe 50,000 or so in Adman and Zebillah.
So those grave sites, you said, because I always thought they did find 1.5 million bodies,
grave sites there. So you think those are exaggerated numbers?
I do. I don't know if anybody's ever gone through there and counted all the sites. I think maybe
they were estimating. I think some of the shaft graves were even empty. So it's like your family
buys a burial plot in a cemetery, and then as people die off, they end up becoming interred.
In Israel, you have the same thing in Israel with shaft graves and whatnot. Of course,
you just have a lot of the bone boxes. After a year, the bones are collected, and they have
smaller shaft graves where in the chambers, they just have boxes of things instead of needing all
that extra space for actually laying out a body. But I think that's a highly inflated number.
Well, in those cities, didn't they also find a lot of grains and stuff that came from different
areas of the world showing that the wealth was vast as well?
Well, there's no question that there was a lot of trade. These were on trade routes and whatnot,
and there was a lot of trade going on. Like I said, I think just like in our society today,
you have trucks going up and down the highway taking goods from one place to another. I think
obviously they had caravans of things that were moving through constantly.
I think it was a hub of activity in some of these larger cities.
Yeah, because they found five different gravesites, not just the one at the bottom of
the Dead Sea, but they found other ones too as well, right?
Exactly. There are a couple of different cemetery areas scattered out there,
mostly on the Jordanian side. This may have been an area that they designated as being just a place
where people would bury their relatives and so forth. You got to remember when they had the war,
when they had the warfare where they fought in the valley there, you had like ten different
nations coming to battle against each other. You could have had a million people that were
casualties just from the warfare there. Now, whether or not they would have all been buried
in that area or not remains to be seen, but you would have had a lot of casualties with
the warfare going on there. That was before they were destroyed.
Well, I know a lot of people that are listening right now and maybe don't understand how could
these cities still be around, especially after so many years, but has the locations of Sodom
and Gomorrah been found in your belief? Well, absolutely. Like I said, I've been
to these places a dozen times, and there's no question that the Bible identifies the six
criteria, and you find those six criteria in these five locations. The degree of destruction
is incredible. If you go and stand there, you're in awe of the destructive force that was necessary
to bring everything to ash. It's one thing to kill the people, but it's another thing to just
autoclave and bake everything to an ash. You can even walk on some of the structures
because the way that the thermal ionization caused the molecules to repel and contract
formed kind of like a crust and a layering effect of the buildings and the structures
themselves. Even city walls were turned to ash. In some places, Canaanites had double Canaanite
walls, and all of them just turned completely to ash. Because the area has been arid since that
time. Since we've been keeping records, they get about an annual rainfall of about one half inch
a year in those areas. So they don't have a lot of rain and weather that would deteriorate the
structures down to almost—you would think that in a normal situation, through changes in weather
and so forth, that something that was basically just ash would dissolve down into nothing
eventually. But they get such little rainfall, they don't have a lot of those forces doing much
to deteriorate. Like I said, there is a lot of deterioration, but not enough to bring some of
those structures down to nothing. Definitely, ziggurats and step pyramids and things of that
nature, city walls, buttresses, all kinds of things. I would urge anybody who really
is interested to pick up some of the video materials. Ron particularly did a lot of
research there as well. You can see for yourself—you don't have to take my word for it,
of course—you can see for yourself that the things that the Bible mentions are the things
that you find in these locations. Ron produced a movie. If anyone's watching this, I really do
encourage you to head over to their website, anchorstone.com, and get a copy of the movie that
Ron did called Sodom and Gomorrah. It goes through all these facts, and it's just an
extremely fascinating film. It still holds up very much today. Does mainstream archaeology
accept this as being the site of Sodom and Gomorrah? Well, there have been a lot of,
just like with all the things that Ron dealt with, there have been a lot of potential
sites that people have thrown out there. The same is true of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Like I said, Baden-Drah over there around the southern end of the Dead Sea. A lot of people
suspected that that could have been Sodom because they found some ash there. They found
some things that appeared to be destroyed by fire. But again, you have to look at all of the
considerations. You asked the question about whether or not these things, why would they
still be around after so long of time? Well, the text that you read in 2 Peter basically says that
God destroyed these cities. He turned them to ash as an example of those that should live ungodly.
If God is going to establish an example, that means that's something that you and I are going
to be able to realize. We're going to be able to see it. We're going to be able to go there
and realize that, yes, this indeed is something that the Bible talked about. That's the only
thing that would make an example profitable and beneficial, is to be able to realize that it is
there. I think in the academic realm, you have one side pushing the theory of evolution,
which means that they don't want anything at all to do with the Bible, because the Bible establishes
creation as the way that we arrived here. So you have this conflict going on within academia.
And so some scholars are going to try to discredit Scripture. And in chapter 3,
2 Peter chapter 3 talks about people that are willingly ignorant of creation and the flood
and so forth. You can show people evidence, and they can turn away from it and say,
Oh, no, I don't see anything that doesn't exist. And that's because they're willingly ignorant.
They don't want to see an example that God has left because it condemns maybe their lifestyle.
But the biggest thing is that God left these things to illustrate to us what the result
of rebellion to His law and sin would accomplish. And that would be to bring people to basically
to dust. I mean, the book of Jude, Jude 1 verse 7, says that this is an example of eternal fire.
I mean, this is the same thing that God used, the same brimstone and so forth that God used
to destroy those cities. The book of Revelation talks about destroying evil and wickedness at
the end of time as well. We have to remember, God is not arbitrary. He's a righteous and holy God.
And even though sin entered into our human family through our first parents,
God is not going to allow it to continue as an open-ended type thing. He's going to bring it to
an end at some point. And that's really what Scripture talks about. Scripture talks about
that He has a plan of salvation, and that plan would begin at a certain time, and that plan
would end at a certain time, and His entire creation would be back in harmony completely
with Him as it was prior to sin's rebellion. So He's left an example of where wickedness
would take someone. People have a choice. They can choose to accept the free gift of salvation
that God offers, or they can choose to think that they can be their own salvation. And of course,
we know where that's going to end, and that's what Sodom and Gomorrah in those cities illustrates,
that if you are a humanist, or if you are an agnostic or an atheist, if you don't believe
that God has the right not only to create but to judge a world that is in rebellion, then you're
going to end up, just like those Canaanites, those people that live, you're going to end up.
The book of Malachi talks about, the last book of the Old Testament talks about
God's people kind of walking on the dust or the ashes of those that were destroyed.
And the sad thing is, in that same chapter that you were in 2 Peter, God says He's not willing
that any should perish. He made salvation available to every single person. And it's
people rejecting His grace, rejecting His gift, that will cause their own destruction.
And that's unfortunate, and that's sad, because God really becomes the loser in all that,
because He created people very uniquely. There's not another one of you and another one of me in
all God's creation. So we're all unique. And from His perspective, we were all worth saving.
And yet some people will reject that, and that's unfortunate.
Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show today, Jerry. Can you just
quickly just tell the audience how to support you and your ministry?
Yes, we're not supported by any organizations or any universities and so forth.
We have resource materials that we provide for folks, books and videotapes and so forth.
We also, when invited, we get around to do lectures and programs. Usually they're multimedia
type programs where we take people to the sites through the video camera. We've also done tours
to the area. Not so many lately, but in the past, there were lots of tours that we did.
But basically, we want people to understand the reason that these things exist is to validate the
Scriptures. And the most important way that, of course, you could support us is to pray,
that people would be confronted with the reality of these things and make a choice
for good and for truth. And so that's the best thing to do.
Folks want to visit us at anchorstone.com. We've got some good source materials dealing with all
the discoveries that Ron dealt with. Noah's Ark, as well as Psalm and Gomorrah, of course, the Red
Sea Crossing and the real Mount Sinai, the Ark of the Covenant. We have a fantastic book.
What we had done years ago, we had stepped back. When you get involved with any of this research,
it's incredible. You can get bogged down into any one of these discovery sites
because of all the information that's valid from the Scriptures. But when we stepped back,
we began to sense that collectively God was doing something with it. And we wrote a
really good book called The Ark Secret, which explains the why, why in the last 35 years
after people have been looking for all these things for centuries. World leaders,
actually, Hitler, Mussolini, scholars and explorers, people have been looking for
these things forever. And a lot of traditional sites developed, but God took one person,
Ron Wyatt, and said, I want to step into the equation here and I want to do something miraculous
through one person instead of a whole university team and show you the real locations and show you
how they validate the Scriptures. Ron's philosophy that we carry on was simply that he just wanted
people to see these things and make a decision for themselves. And hopefully that decision would be
to understand the Bible is truthful and it's real and so it'll save their lives.
Awesome. I really appreciate you coming on the program today. I definitely want to get you back
on and talk about the other issues. There's the Exodus, of course, and then there's a bunch of
different ones as well that Ron discovered. But again, thank you so much, Jerry, for coming on
the program. I hope you have a good day and God bless. My pleasure. My pleasure. Glad to be here.
All right. Well, that was Jerry Bowen. I really appreciate him coming on the program and talking
with us today. This is a subject that just fascinates me beyond belief. And so that's why
I want to have him on the program to show, you know, has Sodom and Gomorrah been discovered?
And, you know, it really is just a fascinating, fascinating topic. And so we'll have him back on
the program. I want to talk to you about the Exodus route and different there's other different sites
I want to talk to him about as well. But thank you so much for everyone tuning in and supporting
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