Have Sodom and Gomorrah been found?

Where Genesis puts the cities

Genesis names five “cities of the plain”: Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Bela, also called Zoar (14:2). Their kings fight in the valley of Siddim, “also called the Salt Sea” (14:3), a valley “full of tar pits” (14:10). When Lot chose his land, he saw “all the plain of the Jordan, that it was well-watered everywhere” (13:10). Then came the end.

Then Yahweh rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from Yahweh out of the sky.

So the search has always centered on the Dead Sea, about 430 meters below sea level, the lowest land on earth. The trouble is that the clues point two ways. Zoar points south: the sixth-century Madaba mosaic map, in a church in Jordan, marks it at the south-eastern end of the sea. “The plain of the Jordan,” the river valley above the sea, points north.

The southern candidates: Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira

On the south-eastern plain, in Jordan, lies Bab edh-Dhra, an Early Bronze Age walled town, discovered by William F. Albright’s expedition in 1924. Paul Lapp excavated its cemetery from 1965 to 1967, and Walter Rast and Thomas Schaub dug the town from 1975 to 1981. The cemetery is vast, with an estimated 20,000 shaft tombs. A smaller site to the south, Numeira, ended in a fire. Some researchers, among them the archaeologist Bryant Wood, argued that Bab edh-Dhra was Sodom and Numeira was Gomorrah.

The problems are dates and size. Bab edh-Dhra was abandoned around 2350 BC, and Numeira was destroyed around 2600 BC, centuries before most dates proposed for Abraham. Bab edh-Dhra covered about 4 hectares (10 acres): a town, not a great city. And neither site has produced a name.

The northern candidate: Tall el-Hammam

From 2005 Steven Collins of Trinity Southwest University led excavations at Tall el-Hammam, a large mound in Jordan about 13 kilometers north-east of the Dead Sea. He argues it is Sodom, because Genesis 13 has Lot look out over the plain of the Jordan, and because, he says, the site was a great fortified city in the Middle Bronze Age that ended in violent destruction. Most archaeologists reject the identification. Another proposal makes the mound Abel Shittim, where Israel camped “in the plains of Moab” (Numbers 33:49).

In 2021 a team including members of Collins’s project published a paper in Scientific Reports arguing that a cosmic airburst, a space rock exploding in the air like the Tunguska blast of 1908, flattened the city around 1650 BC. Headlines hailed it as Sodom’s fire. Other scientists found altered images and data that did not support the claim. The journal added an editor’s note in 2023 and retracted the paper on April 24, 2025; its authors dispute the retraction.

What can honestly be said

The region fits the story’s ingredients: a sunken plain of salt, sulfur and bitumen on a great fault line, where earthquakes are common. Some suggest an earthquake set the tar pits of Genesis 14:10 alight. Others think the cities lie under the shallow southern basin of the Dead Sea, now largely turned into evaporation ponds. But no excavated ruin has been shown to be Sodom or Gomorrah, and no inscription has been found that names them.

The Bible itself treats the cities less as a dig site than as a byword for judgment: “we would have been like Gomorrah,” says Isaiah (1:9), and Jesus warns towns that reject his disciples that Sodom will fare better (Matthew 10:15). For the woman who looked back as they burned, see why Lot’s wife became a pillar of salt.