I think it stands to reason that at some point a city in the Levant was destroyed violently. A comet exploding and taking out a city seems like a very plausible reason for how such a event may be attributed to holy intervention. You can discuss whether or not it was some divine being sending a comet towards a particularly bad city or not, but I'd definitely tell stories about divine punishment if I saw the remains of a destroyed city like this. Even today, I think you'd find plenty of people who'd claim that whatever the people in those city were doing was bad enough to upset the divine powers enough to bomb them from space.
See New Orleans and Katrina.
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
The Navajos have a Soddom and Ghomorra tradition about the Anasazi.
THe Welsh had such traditions about the downfall of Roman Britain.
The Greeks accused the Minoans of hubris (hence the legend of Atlantis.)
The Jews accused themselves of sin again, and again, and again, every time an outside force came to their borders. Both exiles are attributed to corruption and sin.
> Starting with the publication of his book Discovering the city of Sodom in 2013 and after fifteen years of excavations of the upper and lower tall, Collins has been arguing that Tall el-Hammam is the site of the biblical city of Sodom. A 2018 conference paper identified a likely Tunguska-like airburst event near the Dead Sea ca. 1700 BCE, which destroyed a region including Tall el-Hammam[18]. According to professor Eugene H. Merrill, himself a Biblical inerrantist, the identification of Tall al-Hammam with Sodom would require an unacceptable restructuring of his early biblical chronology.
Seems worth noting that there's not a consensus in the inerrantist camp.
I admire the rigor of the archaeology and physical/chemical analysis of the site, but think it’s important to note the above when evaluating the conclusions.
If this event happened, I would expect it to leave long lasting trace in oral tradition.
Tunguska was apparently visible for 500 miles (800km); for a similar event north of the Dead Sea, that would be nearly to the Euphrates valley, central Anatolia, and most of the Nile Valley.
Namely, the article notes that the most probable locations for Sodoma and Jericho are two cities that show evidence for the air burst theory. Meaning story of Lot and the Fall of Jericho would have to happen on the same day, which kinda doesn't work with bible being infallible and inerrant.
"After eleven seasons of excavations, the site excavators [i.e., the folks affiliated with Veritas International University] independently concluded that evidence pointed to a possible cosmic impact. They contacted our outside group of experts from multiple impact-related and other disciplines to investigate potential formation mechanisms for the unusual suite of high-temperature evidence, which required explanation."