Genesis 19:24: The single event the whole southern Dead Sea frame exists for

"Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven." Nothing on this map moves, and after this verse there is nothing on it to move. The two cities are named together, as they are named together every time either of them is named in Genesis, and the sentence says the LORD twice — once as the one who rains and once as the source of what falls — which is a form the Hebrew uses nowhere else in the book. What is being destroyed is a place nobody can find. That is the honest state of it: 477 of the atlases behind this dataset put Sodom on the plain south of the Lisan, which the Dead Sea has since risen over; 112 put it at the north end of the sea; 109 at Bab edh-Dhra on the eastern shore. Gomorrah is worse — its leading identification is the same drowned plain, so it has no point of its own and stands on Sodom's as an open ring. Five cities were said to be down there and no tell for any of them has ever been agreed. The country itself is not a bad witness. The rift floor at the south end of the sea is a bitumen field: lumps of asphalt float up out of the water after earthquakes and were being traded out of here in antiquity, the ground is heavy with salt and sulfur, and the whole valley sits on the most active fault line in the region. Genesis 14 has already mentioned the bitumen pits in the Valley of Siddim, and the men of Sodom fell into them. None of that proves anything about this verse. It does mean the picture the verse draws is a picture of that particular ground and of nowhere else. The next morning Abraham stands on his ridge thirty miles west and looks at what is left, which is the map after this one.