In 2021, a paper in a major journal announced that science had found Sodom. A city east of the Dead Sea — Tall el-Hammam, in modern Jordan — had been wiped out around 1650 BC, the authors said, not by an invading army but by a rock from space exploding overhead, a blast like the one that flattened a Siberian forest in 1908. The pottery had melted into glass. The mud bricks had bubbled. For a while, the story was everywhere: science confirms the Bible.

In April 2025, the journal took the paper back. Retracted — the strongest correction science has.

Retractions don’t happen because a claim is unpopular. They happen because the work doesn’t hold up, and over four years this one’s problems piled up: no crater, ever, anywhere near the site; the melted material matching what pottery kilns and a burning city produce on their own; images in the paper that critics showed had been altered. The explosion had been assembled out of ingredients that were each real enough — a destroyed city, high-temperature damage, a region full of sulfur and salt — and assembled is the right word. As one careful walk-through of the site puts it: a recipe is not a meal.

Here is what survives the retraction, and it’s not nothing. Tall el-Hammam was a real, substantial Bronze Age city. It really did burn — the destruction layer is there in the ground. And afterward, the whole fertile strip east of the Dead Sea sat nearly empty for centuries, which is its own mystery in a region people had farmed for thousands of years. Something ended that city. The ground has never said who, or what, lit the fire.

The neighborhood sharpens the puzzle rather than solving it. Down the shore sit the ruins traditionally matched to the Bible’s five “cities of the plain.” The salt pillar tourists photograph as Lot’s Wife turns out, on a geologist’s reading, to be the last wall of a collapsed salt cave. And the cliffs of Mount Sodom carry real sulfur — brimstone — that burns blue and purple under a flame. The ingredients for the Genesis story are lying all over that landscape. Whether they were ever a meal is a different question, and so far the honest answer is that nobody knows.

The paper is gone. The ashes are still there.

Read more

• For the original claim and its withdrawal: Bunch et al., “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam” (Scientific Reports, 2021; retracted April 2025) — the retraction notice is part of the same record.
• For a careful, skeptical tour of the site and the evidence: C.J. Cornthwaite, “Geologists Just Found Out What Jordan’s Sodom Site Actually Is” (YouTube).