9 Scientific Explanations For Famous Bible Stories

The destruction of the cities of the plain, the most famous of which being Sodom and Gomorrah, is one of the more action-packed parts of the Bible, with sex, sin and smiting all rolled into one.

Those pits of filth and villainy were destroyed by God with fire and brimstone in order to cleanse the earth of their sinful inhabitants.

Scientists, however, reckon that the fire and brimstone were actually meteorites. Every 2,500 years or so, Earth passes through a particularly dense belt of meteorites. One of these instances occurred around 2200 B.C. which would place it right at the destruction of the cities. A shower of flaming meteorites falling from the skies would indeed look for all the world like God's wrath raining down upon them.

A similar theory points to a particularly nasty low-angle asteroid impact that occurred, according to an ancient cuneiform tablet, in the year 3123 B.C.

The asteroid itself hit Europe with a colossal impact and its path across the sky would have been truly spectacular and terrifying. Although it landed in Austria and didn't directly hit the cities, some experts suggest that the asteroid could well have caused a superheated cloud of air to scorch its way through the atmosphere over the Mediterranean, actually igniting the skies above northern Egypt, causing the cities below to go up in flames.

However, the bit about Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt (and a pretty cheery one judging by the picture above) might have been an imaginative addition to the story, as scientists don't yet have an explanation for that one.