SODOM AND GOMORRAH.

Shannon News, 31 October 1924, Page 3

SODOM AND GOMORRAH.

BIBLE SXORX SUPPORTED.

Discoveries have just been made in Palestine which tend to confirm the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, by "brimstone and fire from heaven," as described in the Old Testament.

The "brimstone," according: to modern science, was sulphur and crude petroleum, in which, it has been discovered, the plains just north of the Dead Sea are enormously rich; and the "fire from heaven," it is believed, was a flash of lightning- that struck a natural oil gusher.

This conclusion has just been reached, after elaborate investigations, by Dr. Heinrich Byersdorfer, famous German chemist and mining engineer* and has been concurred in by a number of fi leading scientific societies. ,• „ His theory offers a vivid confirmation of the Scriptural record. A Modern Parallel. While Dr. Beyersdorfer was making a study of the oilfields in the Russian Caucasus, he happened to be' an teyevvitness to an enormous and devastating conflagration that was actually caused by lightning striking among a number of natural oil gushers. Villages and forests on low ground were completely destroyed, and the few people who escaped did so by seeking refuge among the hills just as Lot and his family did in the Bible story. Later, Dr. Beyersdorfer was called to the oilfields of Asia Minor, and, while boring and digging In the plains of the Jordan River, just North of the Dead Sea, he discovered not only evidence of periodic natural gushers, but traces which led him to believe that the basin had once been the scene of just such a conflagration as he had witnessed in the Caucasus. While the actual site of Sodom and Gomorrah has never been known, and is not shown with certainty on any ancient or Biblical maps, scholars have always been forced to the conclusion that the two wicked cities, if they ever existed at all, must have existed precisely in this spot. Site of the Cities of the Plain.

They are referred to more than once as "the cities of the plain,'" and the Jordan River bed is the only plain immediately adjacent to the mountainr above Jerusalem where the children of Israel dwelt. They must have been in that particular part of the plain, for the Bible tells how Abraham and others looked down on them from the heights of Bethel, and modern observation shows that it is,only the part of the plain where the oil beds are still located just above the Dead Sea, which is visible from that point in the hills.

As additional evidence that he was on the right track. Dr. Beyerdorfer learned that archaeologists had dug up calcined fragments of pottery and sculpture, dating apparently from about 3000 8.C., which showed'indications of having been subjected to great heat long after they were originally moulded.

To discover whether the fire caused by lightning 1 which he had seen in the Caucasus was a rare and isolated phenomenon, Dr. Beyersdorfer instituted investigations in various countries —and discovered that such fires are of astonishing frequency.

11l America alone there have been more than a dozen conflagrations in the past ten years, caused by lightning striking oil. In a number of cases it was gushers that were struck. "Such gushers as I have seen on fire in the Caucasus, and which certainly exist from time to time in the plain of the Jordan, if fired during an electrical storm, could easily create just such a terrible spectacle as that described in the Bible as being the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah—could have blotted

out the two communities and their entire population—and in my opinion, there is ample cumulative evidence to indicate that this is precisely what did happen." .: - • ', * •