Sodom & Gomorrah Chapter 2- Looking for Proof

Looking for Recognizable Structures of a City

Our next plan was to actually go into the best preserved site, which was Gomorrah, and see if we could locate the perimeters of the city walls and trace any of the streets. A tremendous amount of erosion had taken place over the last almost 3,900 years and we didn't expect too much. But we were in for a tremendous surprise.

A City Wall

As we parked and followed along what looked like the northern wall, we soon saw a very interesting object setting by itself, a few hundred yards from what we believed was a wall.

A Sphinx Shape Outside the Wall

As we neared it, its shape became obvious. It was shaped like a sphinx. And this made sense to Ron. He knew that many ancient cultures had these half-animal, half-human statues that represented their gods, guarding the entrance into their cities.

A City Gate or the Entrance into the City

And from this sphinx, we saw that we had arrived at a place where the "wall" had an open place exactly like an entrance- probably the main entrance. Walking down the "streets" we discovered that they truly did communicate with each other like streets. If these had only been gullies from flash floods, they would have washed down from the mountainside in a random pattern. But there was an order to all we were seeing.

Another interesting thing was that it appeared that the structures (buildings, etc) were set quite a bit higher than the level we were walking on and that below a certain level everything looked likes heaps of white powder. Digging down, we discovered that we were walking on a level very close to the bedrock. This indicated that not only had the cities been burned but even the ground dirt had been turned to ash right down to the bedrock. This caused the paths we were walking along to be eroded down to a much lower level than the sections that looked like structures.

View from Masada

The next thing we did was ride the cable-car to the top of Masada in order to view the remains of the best preserved site from an aerial point of view. The road turning off of the main road along the shore of the Dead Sea which leads to Masada cuts through the remains of the site of Gomorrah. From atop the mountain, the remains revealed features that we couldn't distinguish from ground level.

From here, we could see sections which looked exactly like artificially-raised platform areas of other ancient cities which were temple areas. These "platform areas" showed vast flat areas with ziggurat-shaped masses on them, as well as large ashen "chunks" which bore the overall resemblance of the sphinx we had first seen, only these were much larger. On areas where the ground level would rise, the ashen structures seemed to be terraced, following the lay of the land.

VIDEO- Our first video of the area from Masada

Canaanite Cities had Double Walls

The walls extending around this site displayed one feature that was very exciting- it was "double-walled", exactly like the Canaanite city walls of other excavated sites.

Where the wall had an opening in it on the northern side (which we believe was where the gate was, and therefore an entrance into the city) there was a tall structure on the western edge of this opening, exactly like a gate "tower".

There was no doubt that all of these features were simply beyond the realm of simple coincidence. But at this point, Ron still felt that there had to be SOMETHING which would prove these sites to be the cities and which would prove it beyond a doubt. But what this might be, we simply didn't have a clue. Well, actually we did, but we didn't understand it.

A VERY Strange Discovery

In August of 1990, I had taken a small sample of ash, about 4 inches long, and was about to wrap it in tissue paper and place it in a plastic soap-carrying container. As I handled it, the layers loosened and separated, revealing a very, VERY strange sight within the white material. I took it to Ron because it looked to me like an eyeball. I knew it wasn't- actually, it was a perfectly round hole within the ash surrounded by a reddish ring of hard, crusty material. But Ron didn't have any idea what it was.

We filmed and photographed, roaming throughout the site on the "streets". When we returned home, we met Richard Rives who had read Ron's book and was very interested in the research. Richard owns a travel agency and offered to help us get good airfares. Then, Ron asked him if he would be interested in also going over and helping with the field work. He was interested and two months later, in October of 1990, Ron and Richard returned to the site below Masada- the site we were sure was Gomorrah.

Sodom and Gomorrah Chapter 3