The journal Scientifics Reports withdrew a study published in 2021, which argued that an explosion in the air destroyed, in the average bronze age, the city of Tall El-Hamman, which would have inspired the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom.
The publication indicated today on its website that the editors retracted the article and explains that the statements contained in this “do not seem sufficiently backed by the data” of the text.
“Given these concerns, the editors no longer trust that the conclusions presented are reliable,” adds Scientific Reports, which refers to those expressed by other authors on errors “of methodology, analysis and interpretation of the mineralogical and geochemical data of the article.”
The study is entitled “A burst of the size of Tunguska destroyed Tall El-Hammam, a city of the average bronze age located in the Jordan Valley, near the Dead Sea.”
The burst of Tunguska refers to the powerful explosion recorded in 1908 on the sky of that Siberine city, caused by a meteorite and that swept 2,150 square kilometers of taiga.
Scientific Reports adds that “the comparisons between the Tall El-Hammam site and the Tunguska event are not sufficiently grounded, as a result of errors propagated from the original sources, which overestimated the temperature, wind speed and the impact of the air explosion in Tunguska.”
The statements that an air explosion destroyed the city of Tall El-Hammam, of the Average Bronze Age, “do not seem sufficiently backed by the article data,” said Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature publication.
The original study, among whose signatories is the comet research group (United States), indicated that there is an “ongoing debate on whether Tall el-Hmman could be the biblical city of Sodoma”, although they did not enter their possible existence or location.
However, I was talking about “if oral traditions about the destruction of this urban city (Tall el-Hammam) for a cosmic object could be the source of Sodom’s written version in Genesis.”
The decision to retract the article occurs two years after Scientific Reports published a note in which readers that the magazine was studying the doubts that aroused the data and conclusions of the work, remember today on its website Retraction Watch.
This website that informs and collects the cases of retired articles and retracted by the scientific publications indicates that the article began to receive criticism shortly after its publication in 2021 and that before the retraction, the authors had already corrected it twice, one in February 2022 and another in May 2023.