Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed on 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar).

[hunter]

A big asteroid came in at a very low angle, slammed into the Austrian alps at Köfels, and the fireball continued on across the Mediterranean.

This was a bad day for all the people who got incinerated, buried under debris, etc.,etc.

I imagine the two cities were mysterious and sometimes dangerous urban places to the rural people who saw them destroyed. Some of these people were probably relieved that their children would no longer be drawn away by the urban cultures there.

http://www.physorg.com/news126183668.html

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Yep, stay home on the farm, kids, 'cause every so often God decides to fry cities, probably for all that partying.

Mom says dad worked in the city when he was young.

Dad stares at the horizon, and he drifts back in time...

I remember standing on the corner at midnight
Trying to get my courage up
There was this long lovely dancer in a little club downtown
I loved to watch her do her stuff
Through the long lonely nights she filled my sleep
Her body softly swaying to that smoky beat
Down on Mainstreet

In the pool halls, the hustlers and the losers
I used to watch 'em through the glass
Well I'd stand outside at closing time
Just to watch her walk on past
Unlike all the other ladies, she looked so young and sweet
As she made her way alone down that empty street
Down on Mainstreet

And sometimes even now, when I'm feeling lonely and beat
I drift back in time and I find my feet
Down on Mainstreet
Down on Mainstreet

[aquart]

1. Nice extrapolation but no actual proof.

First you need to define the plume, then establish that the locations of Sodom and Gomorrah were within the plume. And then maybe a little something about the dates.

Off with you now. We'll be eagerly awaiting your results.

[hunter]

4. All these oral histories are to be read as allegories.

Before histories were reliably written or remembered, they were transmitted in stories like this.

Bad things sometimes happen to cities, either war or natural disaster, even very rare sorts of natural disasters.

People of the countryside to whom cities were something to be wary of, and refugees from cities that had fallen, would remember what was lost by means of these stories.

They would also immediately recognize the use of these stories as allegories. The only people who see these Biblical stories as history in the modern sense are the Fundamentalists who unreasonably insist the stories are what they are on the surface -- that yes, God wiped out the bad people of Sodom and Gomorrah because they were wicked -- and the people who insist the histories are the fabrications of insane Fundamentalists. Everyone else, even religious people, know it's just a story to remember by.

I found this story about the Pohono spirits of Yosemite here.

There was this tale of a young Yosemite Indian girl who was drawn by the beauty of a rainbow by Bridalveil Falls. She wanted to get close to the rainbow and when she got near to the mist of the falls, a gust of mist came up, she was suddenly taken by the Pohono Spirit and dragged into the water. The girl who was with her gathering, ran hurriedly to the Indian camp and all the people came to the waters edge to rescue her, but she was no where to be found. They believed the Lady in the Water had taken her and that the Lady of the Water is in the blowing mist.

So remember the next time you see a beautiful rainbow at the Bridalveil falls, even thought it might be a wonderful sight to see, it is best not to get to close...or the Lady in the blowing misty waters just might take you on a trip to her deep watery world. A trip you might not ever return from.

It's presented in this case explicitly as a memory story -- don't play around the falls, you might slip and be drowned -- but it might also be expanded to note that many beautiful things can be very dangerous. It might also be extended even further to assert the actual existence of a dangerous Pohono spirit.

I've never seen any reason to reject these kinds of spiritual thinking. Our scientific thinking, limited by our very small brains, lights up only a small fraction of the universe. Much of the impetus for our culture to reject "superstitions" such as the Pohono spirits first arises not from our conversion to truly scientific ways of thinking, but from our insistence that our Christian Culture was the one True Faith, and that all other faiths were inferior. From there it is a simple step to dismiss this Christianity and monotheism itself, leaving the culturally prejudiced rejection of all the other spiritual (or "magical") thinking intact.

If an asteroid impact destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, that's the kind of thing that would be remembered in exactly the same way that the loss of an Indian girl chasing rainbows in the falls would be remembered by her community. The development of allegories and traditions around those stories -- of harmful, neutral, or beneficial social consequence -- would be the same too.

What's interesting about the story I posted is that apparently somebody was around back then to record it in a way we might regard as having some scientific or historic accuracy, and later on somebody was around to make a copy of that recording.

[Warpy]

2. This is also telling

"The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material - including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast."

The plume would contain molten ejecta which would rain down from the sky just like the biblical description of the rain of burning sulfur, setting everything it touched on fire.

Interesting, but Bronze Age semi nomads would have no idea of the cause. "God did it" was used to explain everything.

[sam sarrha]

3. it has been determined that Sodom vanished due to earthquake liquefaction, the stone buildings sunk

into the sand and slid into the red sea, the sand dried without as much as a footprint.. flat smooth sand ..gone in minutes.

[edhopper]

5. Could you source that

"determination"
I find this whole story ridiculous. Kilometer wide asteroid indeed.
This is what it looks like when crap hits the Earth. And even a sideways hit would have left major impact evidence.

[John Gauger]

6. Or,

the story is fabricated out of whole cloth. Which of these explanations is simpler, and requires less mental gymnastics?