Travel Guide Bab Adh-Dhra (Sodome)

In the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament for Christians), five cities of the Dead Sea are mentioned in the story of a war between Chaldean rulers: Sodom, Gomorrah, Adama, Seboim and Bala (or Segor) (Gen. 14:2). They are all potentially located along the Wadi Araba road. The confrontation would have taken place " on the plain of Siddim ". The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah were defeated, fled and fell into pits of bitumen where they perished. The plain of Siddim was described as a sea of salt. It was probably located south of Safi, as the southern part of the present Dead Sea may have been dry at the time. In 1924, the remains of an ancient city were discovered at Bab ad-Drha, near Safi. More recently, beginning in 1973, archaeologists Walter Rast and Thomas Schaub conducted excavations as part of an extensive program called Expedition of the Dead Sea Plain. They discovered the remains of four other cities, aligned along a north-south axis at the edge of the Jordanian plateau: Numeira, Safi, Feifa and Khanazir. Their investigations revealed that all these cities were occupied during the Early Bronze Age, i.e. between 3300 and 2300 BC. Two of them, Bab ad-Dhra and Numeira, showed traces of a brutal destruction, with earthquake and fire, and can therefore be considered as Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom would therefore be Bab ad Drha, Gomorrah would correspond to Numeira, Segor would be Safi, Adama is located in Fifa and Seboim in Khanazir.