Thanks, Digger, for your interest in Tall el-Hammam/Sodom. Perhaps I talked to you (and didn’t know it) at the ASOR meeting. I spoke with many people about our work at TeH while at ASOR and NEAS, and there was a great deal of interest to be sure. There’s been a tremendous amount of interest generated as a result of recent publications about Tall el-Hammam, from our pending
ADAJ report on the first four seasons of excavation to my ASOR and NEAS papers. In late October I was privileged to speak at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem at the invitation of Prof. Ami Mazar. My topic there was
Tall el-Hammam: The Emergence of a Bronze Age City-State in the Southern Jordan Valley. It was well attended by both students and faculty, and by several visitors from the IAA, and well received. So, the information on TeH is getting around, some of which is challenging some widely-held views about the lack of a true city-state in the Transjordan. But we now have one in the classic formation of multiple satellite towns, villages, and hamlets with massive Tall el-Hammam at the controlling-center. With its fortified inner city and outer city, Bronze Age TeH/Sodom is reminiscent of northern Levantine sites like Tell Atchana/Alalakh and Zincirli/Sam’al, and is of similar size. One interesting surprise has been Tall el-Hammam’s seemingly continuous occupation through the EBA, IBA, and most of the MBA. If it utilized its extensive, complex fortification system and retained its city-state configuration with satellites during the IBA (2350-2000 BCE), it would be unprecedented. I think it did. In the current state of the literature, oft-cited Tall Iktanu is usually styled as the quintessential IBA site in the area, but we now know that it was more likely one of several subordinate unwalled IBA towns within the gravity of the much larger Tall el-Hammam. As I’m now quite fond of saying, interpreting the regional Bronze Age without Tall el-Hammam is like writing a history of France without mentioning Paris. Of course, eventually the archaeological literature will catch up as our publications advance over the next several years. Right now I’m working on a pile of articles and chapters that I’ve been asked to contribute to various books and journals, all of which will help project our data into the literature. I was quite pleased to see Prof. Aren Maeir’s citation of our MBA fortification system in a recent edition of
BASOR. So, we’re making good progress, but the data-crunching and interpretive writing is always a slow and laborious process.
As for your second comment, questions and skepticism on the Sodom issue have abated significantly simply because we’ve made a rigorous geographical case based on proper avenues of scientific inquiry. Right now, I can’t think of a single major scholar who doesn’t agree (at least in principle) with my (and a raft of other scholars’) observation that “the Kikkar” (= disk, circle, as in “Cities of the Plain [
hakikkar]” and “Plain [
kikkar] of the Jordan”) should be considered a formal geographical construct and capitalized (like “the Negev”). There is now simply no room for a protracted discussion on the location of the Kikkar, which is the wide, roughly circular plain of the southern Jordan Valley immediately north of the Dead Sea, visible from the Cisjordan highlands near Bethel/Ai. Those who don’t yet accept this are simply ill- or misinformed, and suffer from a lack of a lack of geographical acuity on the subject. I’m sorry, but it is as simple as that. That Bronze Age Tall el-Hammam and its assortment of large, medium, and small associated sites lie at the geographical core of the Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim) tradition preserved in Gen 10-19 is about as certain as the identification of any “biblical” geographical subset. That’s why, in time, all good geographical sources (such as Bible atlases like A. Rainey’s excellent work
The Sacred Bridge) will incorporate the term “the Kikkar” for that widened area of the Jordan Valley north of the Dead Sea. As for the identification of Tall el-Hammam as Sodom, that’s another animal. Personally, I think I’ve made the case that the Genesis writer envisioned Sodom as the largest and most prestigious city of the Kikkar of the Jordan cluster. In my view, and in the minds of many scholars, that timeframe was the Bronze Age. Other scholars would merely allow that the Bronze Age tells/talls scattered across the eastern Kikkar provided an etiological opportunity for an Iron Age Gen writer to weave those still-impressive ruins into his “tale of five cities.” But even in this case, the Gen writer, likely being quite familiar with the area, would have known that the ruins we now call Tall el-Hammam were, by far, the largest and most impressive of all, and deserved a dramatic story to account for its demise (thus, his “Sodom”). I mean, good grief, you can still walk the substantially-exposed Bronze Age city wall perimeter today (and at a good clip, it takes you a good half-hour or more to walk it!). Imagine what it, replete with palace and temple ruins, would have looked like 3,000 years ago when it was in a much better state of preservation. Yes, it would have been impressive, to say the least. Thus, whether or not biblical Sodom was a factual or etiological representation, Tall el-Hammam has to be considered the prime candidate for that ‘honor’ if for no other reason than that it is, in fact, the biggest and badest pile of ancient ruins on the Kikkar in antiquity. Period. I’m sorry, but the Robinsonian/Albrightian southern Sodom theory is the height of pre-Copernican-style logic, having been constructed without the benefit of rigorous textual analysis and the now-available (but still little known!) scientific knowledge regarding the Bronze Age cities of the eastern Jordan Disk (Kikkar), especially massive Tall el-Hammam/Sodom.
As for why I didn’t speak at BAS’s BibleFest---I wasn’t invited. Notwithstanding the fact that the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project is one of the most significant and interesting digs in the history of Levantine (thus biblical) archaeology, the power-that-be (note the singular) at BAS/
BAR has chosen to ignore our work, me in particular. One would think the fact that Joey Corbett’s article about Sodom on this website (which deals with our work) was/is highly popular, and that the two Hammam threads on this forum have out-distanced all others by leaps and bounds, would lead the power-that-be to conclude that, at the very least, a presentation or article in
BAR or other BAS/
BAR venue would generate both interest and vigorous debate. Who knows, such a biblically-based discussion might just invigorate magazine sales for a publication titled
Biblical Archaeology Review! You’d think there’d be room at a
BibleFest for such a subject as the Tall el-Hammam/Sodom excavation. Thus, I’m forced to the conclusion that the members of that ‘club’ find my geographical use of the biblical text vis-à-vis biblical Sodom distasteful, but I’m perfectly willing to debate all the relevant issues with all comers (
BAR readers aren’t stupid, and they’ll recognize a rigorous, scientifically-sound argument when they see it…which I’ve got and my opponents don’t). I’ve thrown down the gauntlet before the power-that-be in the past, and it has been disregarded. I’ve been a subscriber to
BAR for many decades, and I know full-well that an article or series of articles on my theories (with scholarly interaction, of course!) would become one of the most popular features in the history of the magazine (look at the Forum stats!). If the right scholars were allowed to contra my position, I guarantee that my responses and the ensuing exchange would be a history-making discussion. Oh well!!!
On your fourth question: Those who donate to the dig get daily email updates from me (and others) from the site. I’m leaving for the excavation on Dec 7 (this coming Monday), and will be in the field for the next eight weeks. That means eight weeks of
TeHEP Updates describing what’s happening on the dig, and showing photos of what’s coming out of the ground. Great stuff! Donations can be made online at
www.shop.tsu-edu.us. I doubt if I’ll be back on this forum any time soon due to my heavy schedule over the coming months.
Steven Collins
Director, Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project, Jordan
Author
