Sodom and Gomorrah: The Visitors, the Fire and the Lost Cities

The story in Genesis

The cities first appear as a fertile place. In Genesis 13 Lot looks at the plain of Jordan and chooses it, and the text adds that this was before the cities were destroyed. The judgment itself is announced in Genesis 18:

And the LORD said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous;

Genesis 18:20 (KJV)

Then two of the three visitors go on to the city:

And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground;

Genesis 19:1 (KJV)

Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

Genesis 19:24-25 (KJV)

But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

Genesis 19:26 (KJV)

For the full chapters, see Genesis 18: The 3 Visitors and Genesis 19: Lot’s encounter with higher-dimensional beings. My Genesis overview places both chapters in the wider book.

The war of the kings

Before the fire there is a war. Sodom and Gomorrah belong to a coalition of five kings that rebels against four kings from the east.

• Lot’s capture provides motivation for Abram’s involvement in the conflict: my verse-by-verse reading of Genesis 14. The invaders loot Sodom and Gomorrah and take Lot, and Abram goes after them to bring him back.
• Chedorlaomer killed the Nephilim: the leader of the eastern coalition, the list of the five kings with Bera king of Sodom and Birsha king of Gomorrah, and the Battle of Siddim.
• Zénaïde A. Ragozin’s The Story of Chaldea: Ragozin retells the campaign from the Chaldean side. Five cities, Sodom and Gomorrah among them, are subdued and pay tribute for twelve years before they rebel.
• Genesis Apocryphon: in this text Abram himself tells how Lot moved to the Jordan valley and bought a house in Sodom.

The visitors

Genesis 18 and 19 are a contact story before they are a judgment story. Three men eat with Abraham, and two of them walk into Sodom.

• Genesis 18: The 3 Visitors: I propose that the three men were extraterrestrial or angelic, and that the wicked could be hybrids in a colony at Sodom.
• Genesis 19: Lot’s encounter with higher-dimensional beings: I split the chapter into two layers, a visit by higher-dimensional beings who help Lot, and a destruction narrative that may have been added later.
• Paul Wallis on Abraham, Moses and the Elohim: Wallis reads Abraham and Sarah as a human origins story, with advanced beings who visit them first.

Advanced beings two of them move on from there to Sodom and Gomorrah

Paul Wallis, Wallis on Abraham Sarah and Yahweh, at 16:10

• Were There Many Gods in the Bible?: the two “associates” who visit Sodom are described as handsome men, which the video takes as a sign that the Elohim looked human.
• Paul Wallis Exposes the Dark Secrets of the Old Testament: Wallis compares the stir the two visitors cause in Sodom to the fame of a modern celebrity, before their power shows.

Fire from the sky: the advanced weapon reading

This is where most of my sources part ways with the traditional reading.

• What Happened at Sodom and Gomorrah?: Paul Wallis points out that Yahweh had given these cities no laws, so the moral reason for the destruction is unclear. He compares the description with a nuclear explosion and concludes that advanced beings used advanced technology.
• Did Jesus Worship Yahweh?: Wallis reads El Shaddai as “the powerful one” or “the destroyer”, and notes that within a couple of chapters two cities are destroyed.
• Sumer: The First Known Civilization: Jim Marrs follows Zecharia Sitchin. Marduk sacks the cities, Enlil and his sons get Anu’s consent to use seven mighty weapons, and the warning to Abraham shows the destruction was planned.

But Zecharia Sitchin noted that the original Sumerian word interpreted by Hebrew scribes as “salt” also meant “vapor.” Lot’s wife then was vaporized by the explosion that consumed Sodom and Gomorrah.

Jim Marrs, Sumer: The First Known Civilization

• Elizabeth Clare Prophet Interviews Zecharia Sitchin: Sitchin claims ancient texts and archaeology point to nuclear events, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah among them.
• BIRTHRIGHT series (#2 part 1) Robert Nelson: Nelson lists Sodom and Gomorrah with the Tower of Babel as Anunnaki events involving advanced technology.

Natural causes and later layers

Not every page on this site reaches for a weapon.

• The Sumerian clay tablet: Planisphere: Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell suggested that the debris plume of an asteroid impact could have inspired the story. The page also gives the problems: the biblical dates do not match, and critics reject the plume idea.
• Destroyed cities: Sodom and Gomorrah head my list of cities destroyed or judged in the Bible, with the tradition that nearby towns may lie under the Dead Sea.
• The origins of two great nations: if I set aside the destruction narrative and the YHWH-centered covenant, Genesis 16 to 21 reads as a story of two blessed nations through Ishmael and Isaac.
• Floods, Meteor strikes and Mantel shifts: Genesis 19:24-25 sits next to the flood and Babel verses as one of the catastrophes I compare.

The Dead Sea as a memory

On Why Is the Dead Sea Called the Sea of Death? I follow an account from Dolores Cannon’s regression work with Suddi. He explains the old name of the sea:

S: It is called this because it is upon these shores that Gomorrah and Sodom on were brought to destruction.

Suddi, in Dolores Cannon, Jesus and the Essenes

In older books on this site

• Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883): Ignatius Donnelly places the plain of Sodom and Gomorrah on Atlantis, together with Adam’s fields and Job’s cave.
• First Book of God: in the OAHSPE version, Abraham and a hundred men visit the cities in the valley of Siddim before they are destroyed, and Lot is spared for Abraham’s sake.
• Thus shall Babylon sink: Isaiah 13:19 compares the fall of Babylon with the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, and I set this beside Plato’s Atlantis.

Related pages

• Abraham
• Genesis 13: Lot and Abram separate
• Genesis 14: Abram rescues Lot
• Genesis 18: The 3 Visitors
• Genesis 19: Lot’s encounter
• Who Is Yahweh?
• Elohim
• Gods Who Travel in Fire
• Dead Sea

For every page I tagged with Sodom, see the Sodom tag archive.