Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 3, Number 6, DeMotte, Jasper County, 22 June 1933 — BIBLICAL CITY IN DEAD SEA WATER? [ARTICLE]

BIBLICAL CITY IN DEAD SEA WATER?

May Confirm Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

A message to the London Times from a correspondent in Cairo stated that an airman flying recently over the southern part of the Dead sea reported having seen a “town lying beneath the water.” This town, according to an assistant to Sir Flinders Petrie, interviewed by a representative of the London Observer, is thought of the London Gomorrah or another of the “five Cities of the Plain" that were destroyed at the same time with them. Archeologists are not in agreement as to the probable site of those cities. The northern shores have been considered the most likely. But in the Scriptural record mention is made of a little city nearby named Zoar, a city to which Lot and his daughters fled, a city so small as not to be as wicked as the rest! A city of that name at the south remained into Roman times. There is abundant evidence that there was a Canaanitish civilization in that region at a time when the plain was “well watered, everywhere as thou goest toward Zoar”--like the garden of the Lord. The place was filled with city states as the Scriptural record suggests, each with its king: “And it came to pass in the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar, Arioch, king of Ellasar, Chedorlaomer, king of Elam and Tidal, king of Golim, that they made war with Bera, king of Sodom and with Birsha, king of Gomorrah, Shinab. king of Admab, and Shemeber, king of Zeboiim and the king of Bela (the same is Zoar). All these joined together in the vale of Siddim (the same is the Salt sea).” Suddenly all the kings departed and with them all the “inhabitants of the cities and that which grew upon the ground," for more than 20 centuries. An “earthquake with fiery eruptions" is postulated, and a consequent general desolation. “And Abraham looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the plain and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the land went up as the smoke of a furnace.” Perhaps, too, the waters of the Dead sea were, before the disturbance, whatever it was, at a lower level. Now from the airman's height their depths even are visible, and it may be that the sequel of the story of the judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah will be told.