WI-Surviving Sodom and Gommorah

So, what if real cities of Sodom and Gommorah were never destroyed, and had continued to exist in the middle east.
 
I think the assumption would be that

A: God doesn't nuke them

B: It wasn't God who nuked them and they avoid the volcanic eruption, gas leak, or earthquake that destroyed them and inspired the Biblical account.
 
It's not entirely impossible, though the likelihood of the stpory that attaches toi them being anything like true is pretty low.

Problem is, if they still existed, chances are we wouldn't know it was them and there'd be several competing theories which city they were.
 

Rockingham

Banned
Sodom and Gomorrah are likely only a metaphor for sin. Even if they did exist, it is unlikely they were anything like the Bible describes them to be... perhaps the story of Sodom and Gomorrah came into existence to explain why 2 cities were destroyed (in some way or another) in religious terms, and was naturally dramtised.

After all, God is supposedly all-powerful and omniescient, and so naturally he had a reason to destroy them, from 1000 BC perspective.
 
Sodom and Gommorah

Did they actually exist or are they just biblical allegory? If they existed, what historian can actually verify them? Personally I don't think that they really existed at all.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Did they actually exist or are they just biblical allegory? If they existed, what historian can actually verify them? Personally I don't think that they really existed at all.
There are references to them in contemporary cuneiform texts. Now, clearly that doesn't mean that the events that brought their downfall unfolded precisely as they did in the book of Genesis, but there's no reason to assume that they didn't exist.

Wrt the OP, Sodom was once the metropolis of a very fertile region made wealthy through trade, in which were found at least five Cities of the Plain and possibly as many as 13. If Sodom and Gomorrah had survived, they might have posed a threat to the Israelites similar to that posed by the Philistines. I briefly toyed with idea of a TL along these lines (a Sodomite Confederacy) but just couldn't figure out what to do with it beyond the novel premise of just allowing them to survive.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
We might actually find out just what the Hell they got up to in Gommorah that was so bad?
They invented junk mail. They kept sending sealed cuneiform tablets to the other four Cities of the Plain which, when opened, contained offers of the aphrodisiacs "necessary to keep all of your wives pleased all night long," penis enlargment, correspondence degrees at the University of Gomorrah, and invitations to the Gomorrah Casino.

It got to the point where the average Sodomite was receiving forty pounds or more of tablets a day in junk mail.

God buried them under an avalanche of their own junk cuneiform tablet mail. True story.
 
it's not certain, but they think they've found the five 'Cities of the Plain' on a salt desert SE of the Dead Sea. All appear to have been burnt and never reoccupied (oddly). It appears that earthquakes did them all in (that, and the fires that the quake started), followed by a climatic shift to drought/desertification. Nobody knows just which city was which, but it's widely agreed that two of them were probably Sodom and Gomorrah.

Even if the two cities survived the earthquakes/fires that took out the other 3, I'd think that the desertification would cause the cities to be abandoned anyway...
 
Top