Original subtitles

- Tonight,

[explosion]

they are among the Bible's most legendary sites,

even though so much about them is shrouded in mystery.

- Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel, Mount Sinai,

did these places exist at one time?

- The book of Genesis is full of clues

if you know where to look.

- Finding these iconic lost locations

could reveal much about humanity's ancient past.

- Many of these stories are rooted in history.

And they are telling us stories

about the complex nature of who we are.

- Future archaeological breakthroughs

may bring us that much closer

to understanding the Old Testament

and unlocking its secrets.

- Few sites in the Bible are holier than Mount Sinai.

The problem is no one actually knows where it's.

- Maybe a natural catastrophe destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

And if so, there should be signs of what happened.

[volcano rumbling]

- These could be the actual ruins of the Tower of Babel.

- Now we explore the top theories

surrounding these lost biblical places.

Did they actually exist?

And if so, where could they be?

[dramatic music]

[rhythmic music]

For thousands of years, the Bible's Old Testament

has been the bedrock of Judeo-Christian beliefs.

But so much about this important document remains unknown,

including who wrote it and when.

- According to Jewish tradition,

the first five books of the Bible

were given directly to Moses by God

after he led the Israelites out of Egypt.

And until the 19th century, scholars believed

that Moses did write all of those books.

- Scholars today believe that at least parts of these books

were based on stories

passed down from generation to generation

through oral tradition

and that they therefore predate Moses

by hundreds, if not thousands of years.

- While we're not sure of the origins of these stories,

literally for billions of people around the world,

these stories talk about actual people, actual places,

actual events that are still important to us today.

- [Laurence] What's clear

is that some Old Testament locations are very real.

- We don't have bones that we can trace back to people

that are featured in the Old Testament,

but some of the places that are mentioned still exist

and you can still visit them today.

- One place that's very well known is the Dome of the Rock.

The Dome of the Rock was built in 691 CE in Jerusalem,

but it is built on the location

where Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac.

And then, 20 miles to the south,

we also have the Cave of the Patriarchs.

There's a tomb there.

And the legend is that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

are buried here.

- [Laurence] But the Bible also mentions

many important places we can't definitively locate.

- Where's the Garden of Eden?

Where are Sodom and Gomorrah?

Is the Bible making these places up

or did these places exist at one time

and they're just mysteries

and we haven't found them yet?

- The Old Testament's full of stories

that have almost a kind of mythical quality to them.

And once you can go back and visit it,

it makes those stories real.

It turns them from myth into history.

- The Bible is about more than science,

and so we can understand that faith and science,

faith and reason, don't have to conflict.

They are telling us two different stories

about the complex nature of who we are.

- [Laurence] One of the most elusive sites

from the Old Testament is the Tower of Babel.

- In the Book of Genesis,

in the early times after Noah's flood, humankind is united.

They all speak the same language.

And as these people begin to migrate to the east,

they reach a land called Shinar.

- [Laurence] Shinar is the ancient Hebrew name

for Mesopotamia, the Middle Eastern region

often referred to as the Cradle of Civilization.

- Within the Biblical tradition,

these were people who wanted recognition.

And so, in the story, the idea is that this tower

that they build to make a name for themselves

literally reaches up to the heavens, into the clouds.

- The humans want to be like God.

And so the story of the Tower of Babel is about pride,

or at least the arrogance of trying to be like the gods.

- So God looks down and decides

that this is something that needs to be stopped.

He decides to mix all of the languages of all of the workers

so that they're no longer able to understand each other

and work together.

- According to the story, in the aftermath of God's wrath,

the entire project falls apart, the people are scattered,

the city is abandoned, the tower falls into ruins.

- [Laurence] The location of the partially built tower

remains a mystery,

but is it possible the Bible actually hints

about where it could be?

- The clue to the location of the Tower of Babel

may, in fact, be in the name itself.

We think of Babel as babbling, incoherent.

What if instead Babel meant a location?

- Semitic scholars know that Babel

actually comes from the word gate, bab, and el, God,

the gate of God, [water splashing]

which refers to a specific city in Mesopotamia

in an area known as Iraq today.

[dramatic music]

[pulsating music]

- Babylon as a city has a long history.

It was probably founded between 1770 and 1670 BCE.

And it had about 200,000 people living in it,

making it the largest city of the ancient world.

The ruins of Babylon today can be found

about 55 miles south of Baghdad,

on the banks of the Euphrates River.

- [Laurence] In 1899, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey

begins excavating there.

- Koldewey and this team of some 200 researchers

descends on this region, the former location of Babylon.

And they spend years, day after day, excavating the site.

They're finding more and more of the city walls.

And then they find something really fascinating.

- So in 1913, he and his team find

a giant base of a ziggurat.

A ziggurat is a kind of tiered pyramid-like structure

often used to worship the Mesopotamian gods.

Koldewey's team discovers

that not only is the foundation massive,

but it also appeared to match up perfectly

with biblical texts.

- It says in the Book of Genesis specifically

that the people would take bricks and bake them.

This is what the tower was constructed out of.

Well, Koldewey discovers when he's out there

excavating the base of the ziggurat

that it's also made of baked brick.

[mysterious music]

- The ziggurat that is found

is 300 feet long by 300 feet wide.

In modern terms, that's basically the length

of two football fields.

And you can imagine how tall a building

that would allow for,

because the wider the base is,

the taller the tower.

- [Laurence] Could this be the base of the Tower of Babel?

- For the time, a building that huge, that monumental,

would've been the tallest thing around.

It's easy to imagine that people would think

that it reached all the way to the heavens.

- [Laurence] But before the team

can finish excavating the ziggurat, they hit a roadblock.

- The archaeological team

is not able to investigate this further

because the base of this tower actually sits below

the modern water table.

So, if they were to dig any lower,

they would flood the site.

[water splashing]

- It's possible that Koldewey and his team

were on the verge of a major breakthrough,

but suddenly they were stopped in their tracks.

- [Laurence] The dig may be over, but the question remains.

Is this really the Tower of Babel?

Some believe an ancient stone relic

known as the Esagila Tablet may hold the answer.

- This tablet was originally

found in the 1800s.

It's located in the Louvre Museum today.

But it dates back to the 6th century BCE.

- On this tablet, it mentions a temple

which sits next to a ziggurat that had a base

of about 300 feet wide,

a ziggurat that reaches about 300 feet tall,

which would make it the tallest standing structure

in ancient Mesopotamia.

It sounds an awful lot like the structure

that was dug up back in 1913.

- [Laurence] Then in the 1990s,

another stone tablet discovered in a private collection

reveals an intriguing link between Babylon

and the Tower of Babel.

- One of the first things they found

was that it contained the outline

of a giant seven-story ziggurat.

Additionally, it had a depiction of King Nebuchadnezzar II,

with the implication being that he was the one

who ordered the construction of this giant ziggurat.

There was even an inscription that they translated

that said that Nebuchadnezzar had brought in laborers

speaking different languages

from, quote, all countries everywhere

into his capital city of Babylon

to build this giant edifice.

- What they discover is that this inscription

explicitly mentions this ziggurat, or Tower of Babylon.

What's more, you can directly connect this inscription

with the tablet that's back in the Louvre

that also talks about the ziggurat of Babylon.

- Some scholars believe

that the information on these two tablets,

the picture of the ziggurat, its incredible size,

Nebuchadnezzar, all the different languages,

indicate that this is indeed the Tower of Babel.

This would mean that Babylon could be the site

where God changes the course of humanity forever.

- [Laurence] It's a compelling theory,

but there are some timeline issues.

- We know that the tower in Babylon

is built in the sixth century BCE.

However, in the Book of Genesis,

it says that the Tower of Babel

was built maybe a hundred years after the flood,

which takes place in 2350 BCE.

So you've got like 1,600 years there

where this tower should been built much, much earlier

than the evidence that we have archaeologically.

- If this tower is built in the sixth century BCE,

that's already well past when you have civilizations

in Greece, China, Europe, Egypt.

And so this can't be the scattering of people

who then establish civilizations elsewhere

because these civilizations are already going.

- [Laurence] Nebuchadnezzar's building of his tower

could be the inspiration

for the story of the Tower of Babel,

just not at the same time period.

So maybe we ought to be looking at additional places

as the potential site of the Tower of Babel.

- [Laurence] One of the most legendary lost places

of the Old Testament, the Tower of Babel,

has long been linked to the ancient city of Babylon.

- Most experts would agree that a ziggurat,

or a rising tower, was built by Nebuchadnezzar II

in the sixth century BCE,

and that that building inspired the story

of the Tower of Babel.

- [Laurence] But not everyone's convinced.

- British Egyptologist David Rohl proposed in 1998

that the actual city of Babylon wasn't ancient enough

for that temple to be the temple mentioned

in the Book of Genesis as the Tower of Babel.

- For Rohl, the chronology issue is a huge deal,

so he begins to think to himself,

all right, who's more ancient than Babylon?

- In southern Mesopotamia, around 2000 BCE,

approximately when the Tower of Babel is supposedly built,

there is an ancient civilization that exists

before the Babylonians, and

they're known as the Sumerians.

[rhythmic music]

- Sumeria is credited often with the invention of writing.

And now you have a story about the building of a tower

that has incorporated with it

a tale about diversity of peoples

exploding onto the scene.

- According to this theory, the Tower of Babel

was built by Noah's great grandson,

a Sumerian king named Nimrod.

- Genesis says that Nimrod

built this extremely tall tower in Mesopotamia

[rain falling] [waves crashing]

to provide an escape in case God floods the world.

So Nimrod was really trying to work to obstruct

the will of God.

This sounds very similar to the elements

in the Tower of Babel story.

- [Laurence] Rohl digs deeper, looking for clues.

- Rohl went out and he pulled the Sumerian kings list,

which is a document far older than Babylon itself.

It goes back to the ancient Sumerian civilization.

And there on the Sumerian kings list,

Rohl finds a king named Enmerkar.

- [Laurence] Both Nimrod and Enmerkar

are said to rule around the third millennium BCE,

and both are known as great hunters and builders.

Some historians think they could be the very same man.

- Enmerkar might not sound anything like Nimrod,

but when we start breaking the names down,

we find a lot of similarities.

- In Sumerian, the word kar, or the addition of kar,

refers to a hunter.

So there we might see a link between Nimrod,

who was the great hunter before the Lord, and Enmer.

- When Hebrew was written, it was written without vowels.

And so you just have consonants.

Nimrod's name was N-M-R.

And if you listen to Enmerkar and you take the vowels out,

you end up with N-M-R kar.

And what's left are three consonants

that are essentially equivalent between the two names.

- We're left with two strikingly similar names.

So taking the significance of language at hand,

Rohl goes and looks at the records

of the ancient Sumerian cities.

- [Laurence] If the two kings are the same man,

is it possible that the Tower of Babel

was built not in Babylon but at an even older site?

- The ancient Sumerians considered Eridu

to be the first city in the world.

It was founded around 5,400 BCE,

which would make it thousands of years older

than ancient Babylon.

The Sumerian king list cites Eridu

as the city of the first kings.

And it's even said that King Enmerkar

was hosted in the city.

So it is plausible that Eridu,

not Babylon,

is the city where the Tower of Babel is actually built.

- Archaeologists have come into the site of Eridu

and done some excavating,

and they actually found an incomplete foundation

of a ziggurat that would have been

an unprecedentedly large structure.

- The ziggurat was abandoned before it was completed.

Now had it actually been completed,

the base is so large that the ziggurat itself

would've been taller than any other building

for hundreds of miles around.

- Whatever was built there on this unfinished foundation

would have been built right around the time

that the Old Testament is telling us

that the Tower of Babel was constructed.

- The theory about Eridu does fit

a lot of the characteristics of the Tower of Babel.

This ziggurat was enormous.

And it fits the right time period,

as well as it was on a major commercial center,

a trade line that would've brought lots of caravans

and workers from all parts of the known world.

So while the city was quite ancient,

it was on the cutting edge of a new form

of bringing folks of different languages,

ethnicities, and cultures together.

And as we know, even today,

sometimes that brings with it some tension.

- [Laurence] According to the Bible,

God gets angry at the tower builders,

changes their language, and drives them apart.

[tense music]

Eridu is eventually deserted.

- What happens eventually to Eridu,

it reaches a critical mass

to support a very large population.

So gradually, the city is abandoned

as people have to move away,

like the story of the Tower of Babel.

- By 600 BCE, like so many ancient cities,

it was abandoned not because of war

but because it simply ran out of natural resources

to support it.

- There's something there that the Bible's trying to tell us

about the ills that can take place

when you have all of these different peoples

coming together, trying to be like God.

And so the Tower of Babel's story

is a story of God essentially punishing humans.

- And the Eridu theory does check a lot of boxes.

However, as far as a general scholarly consensus,

you're rarely gonna find that

regarding any Old Testament topic.

And today, the site of the Tower of Babel

remains an ongoing debate.

[mysterious music]

- [Laurence] The Dead Sea,

situated between Israel and Jordan,

is the lowest point on Earth's surface,

1,400 feet below sea level.

According to the Old Testament,

two notorious cities once sat along its shores,

Sodom and Gomorrah.

[mysterious music continues]

- Sodom and Gomorrah, according to the account in Genesis,

were places of irredeemable evil,

so evil that God himself had no choice

but to destroy them both in fire and brimstone.

However, he let one man, one good man named Lot, escape.

[rhythmic music]

- The story of Sodom and Gomorrah

tells the story of a man named Lot,

who's actually Abraham's nephew.

And Lot is standing outside the gates of the city

and he meets two strangers

and invites them back to his house for hospitality.

- These two reveal themselves to Lot as angels.

Just about the same time,

there's a great pounding at the door.

There is a mob that's gathered around his house,

demanding that Lot

turn over these strangers to them to be taken away.

Well, Lot refuses.

[mob jeering]

And that turns out to be a very wise choice.

[rhythmic music]

- And so these angels tell Lot and his family

to leave Sodom and Gomorrah

because God is going to destroy these cities

[explosion]

because of their unrighteous behavior.

- As they're fleeing,

God is so angry with Sodom and Gomorrah

for the evils that they have done

that he rains down fire and brimstone

and completely destroys these cities.

- Whatever happened to the people there,

it was sudden and it was devastating.

- [Laurence] Is it possible

that such a cataclysmic event actually happened

and left evidence that's traceable today?

- One clue is this reference

to the five cities of the plain,

two of which are Sodom and Gomorrah.

- These cities of the plain

were located somewhere near the Dead Sea,

in the lowland valleys of the Jordan River.

- [Laurence] Genesis tells us

that as people raced from Sodom and Gomorrah,

some fell into fiery pits.

For geologists,

this southwestern edge of the Dead Sea

is intriguing because of its rich deposits

of a substance called bitumen.

- Bitumen is actually a highly flammable,

tarry, asphalt-like substance.

It was used in warfare.

It was also used to waterproof boats.

And it was harvested off the Dead Sea.

- We can look at where bitumen is available

in the Dead Sea Basin

to figure out where Sodom and Gomorrah might have been.

- So in the 1920s, surveys that are done of the Dead Sea

actually reveal there are bitumen pits

around the southern end.

- [Laurence] In 1973, archaeologists

begin excavating nearby ruins

and trying to fit the puzzle pieces together.

- One of the candidates for the city of Sodom

is the city of Bab edh-Dhra.

This is on the southern end of the Dead Sea

on the Jordanian side.

And the city dates somewhere between 3300 and 2000 BCE.

- The original name of Bab edh-Dhra is unknown.

But according to some descriptions,

it's thickly walled.

It seems to match the early descriptions

of Sodom and Gomorrah in that they were heavily walled.

- Underneath Bab edh-Dhra, there are the remains of a city,

including a 22-foot-thick wall.

The encompassing area of this wall is about 10 acres.

- The ruins there at Bab edh-Dhra

show that the city had once

had a giant, heavily-fortified gate that from all appearances

seemed to have been destroyed by fire.

And the heavily-fortified gates

certainly catch our attention

because, well, that's where the biblical story starts,

with Lot at very similar city gates,

welcoming in these travelers.

- The excavations revealed

that it wasn't just the city gates.

Much of the city had been completely leveled

by some sort of catastrophe.

[buildings and walls rumbling]

There was a very, very thick layer of ash everywhere.

There were bodies that were trapped

in these collapsed buildings.

So something very, very bad happened in this city.

[ominous music]

- There on the Dead Sea are

two geological fault lines.

So some archaeologists

have speculated

that perhaps what happened at the story of Sodom and Gomorrah

was you had an earthquake

that ruptured these bitumen pits underground,

forced the bitumen up to the surface,

where, when exposed to air, it becomes flammable,

and that something triggered an explosion

of this newly-ruptured bitumen.

- So if you've got cities sitting on the Dead Sea,

where earthquakes take place at pretty regular intervals,

you can imagine how a story of a great fire,

a great punishment from God,

could be remembered from generation to generation

and appears to match the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

- [Laurence] And there may be more to the story.

- One of the issues here with securely identifying

Sodom and Gomorrah with these cities

is the problem of the timeline.

It says in the Book of Genesis that this takes place

when Abraham is about

a hundred years old,

but this destruction

would've taken place

maybe 350 years before

Abraham was even born.

- Even though we have chronologies that don't line up,

oftentimes that can be a result of oral traditions

and oral storytelling.

However, it's possible

that we're just looking in the wrong place.

[mysterious music]

- The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah

is one of the most violent scenes in the Old Testament,

apocalyptic destruction, mass casualties,

whole cities swallowed by flame.

Given the scale of the damage,

archaeologists and historians have looked for wreckage

to pinpoint the location of both cities.

Today, they are finally getting close.

[tense music]

- One of the clues in the story itself that helps us to know

where Sodom and Gomorrah

and the other cities of the plain are

is that we are told that Lot was in Bethel,

looking out over the cities of the plain.

- Bethel is a city that's about 10 miles north of Jerusalem.

It's at about 3,000 feet elevation.

And it's a city that was well known in the Bible.

It's mentioned 60 times in the Old Testament.

For a long time, archaeologists and biblical scholars

thought that Sodom and Gomorrah

must be somewhere on the southern end of the Dead Sea.

[tense music]

So in 2001, an archaeologist known as Dr. Steven Collins

decides that he's going to go to Bethel.

And he is going to, like Lot,

look out and see what he can see.

- He looked down and said,

"I can't see the south side of the Dead Sea from Bethel,

so maybe I should go looking

on the north side of the Dead Sea

and see whether or not there's a candidate

for Sodom and Gomorrah there.

[tense music]

- In 2005, Steven Collins begins digging

in the northern part of the Dead Sea,

a site called Tall el-Hammam,

in a valley where the Jordan River flows into the Dead Sea.

- Now, Tall el-Hammam is an ideal place for a city.

It's on this luscious pasturing land

on the northeastern shore of the Dead Sea.

So Dr. Collins begins his excavations there

and he begins to find a structure that turns into a city

that dates to about 2000 BCE.

And this leads many scholars, including Dr. Collins,

to suggest that maybe Tall el-Hammam

is the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

- He discovers that there's a gate and 50-foot towers.

This corresponds with the biblical account

of Lot meeting the angels at Sodom

at the gateway to the city.

- Digging deeper into the remains of this ancient city,

Collins finds that there are a lot of collapsed buildings,

a lot of skeletal remains.

Things start to get really dark.

[tense music]

- [Laurence] It looks like

almost everyone in this ancient city

may have been burned alive.

- The dig team uncovers pottery fragments,

the surface of which are basically glass,

which meant that these were subjected

to heat of immense proportions,

in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

And the kilns of that period

could not produce heat like that.

It really was just like volcanic glass.

- And to achieve that effect,

you have to basically expose this material

to these incredibly

intense bursts of heat.

- One of the things that instantly comes to mind

when you think of that kind of heat

would be a volcano.

The problem is there are absolutely no volcanoes

in this particular area.

- Some theorize that whatever happened here

actually came from out of this world,

in the form of a meteor.

[meteor rumbling] [tense music]

Granted there's no meteor crater in the area,

but a meteor can break up to the point of exploding.

[explosion booming]

- The air burst theory means

that the meteor doesn't actually have to hit the ground,

it can break up in the air.

And the heat generated by this breakup

is enough to incinerate everything beneath it.

Maybe this is what the ancient people saw

and understood to be

the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah

at the hands of God with fire and brimstone.

So according to the biblical chronology,

Sodom and Gomorrah would have to be destroyed

between 2100 and 1700 BCE.

And Tall el-Hammam's destruction

is dated at around 1600 BCE.

So not an exact match, but closer.

[mysterious music]

- Finding these places, like the Tower of Babel,

Sodom and Gomorrah, serves two purposes.

One, it can help to confirm people's faith.

But secondly, it helps us to sort of link humanity

to its ancient history.

- And it's not just about buildings and cities

that are located in the biblical past.

There are entire land forms waiting to be found as well.

- [Laurence] There's no place

more sacred in the Old Testament than Mount Sinai,

where God first spoke to Moses

through the burning bush

and later gave him the 10 Commandments.

But this Holy Mountain can't be found on any map.

- People want to find historical locations,

specifically biblical locations,

because it helps them with their faith.

If I can walk in the place that Moses walked,

it gives me the feeling that these people were real

and that what they did was real.

The dispute over the location of Mount Sinai

goes back to when Christian pilgrims

built a monastery at the foot of Mount Serbal

in the Sinai Desert.

And while they believed

that this was the location of Mount Sinai,

others have questioned this location

because it doesn't exactly match

with what it says in the Book of Exodus.

There are actually thousands of mountains

on the Sinai Peninsula.

So which one is actually Mount Sinai is anybody's guess.

- Part of the confusion about where Mount Sinai is

is that we don't know exactly where the Israelites went

after they fled Egypt.

They wandered for 40 years,

and we don't know exactly what their route would've been.

- The Book of Exodus tells us that Moses and the Israelites

wandered for three months

from Egypt to get to this particular site.

The second clue is that it is a 14-day journey

from the city known as Elim to Mount Sinai.

And it also says it's an 11-day journey

to reach an oasis known as Kadesh Barnea.

- Based on these distances

indicated in the Bible in the Book of Exodus,

some researchers say that the location of Mount Sinai

should be somewhere

on the eastern edge of the Sinai Peninsula,

which borders the Gulf of Aqaba.

And it turns out there is a place just like that.

[suspenseful music]

- The Bible also gives us clues

in the story of the burning bush.

The first clue being that Moses

was there with his father-in-law.

And within a few dozen miles

of his father-in-law's Midianite camp

would've been the place where Moses

would've encountered God in the form of the burning bush.

So if we can find the Midianite camp,

we can find the actual site of Mount Sinai.

- According to the Book of Exodus,

Moses was tending to his goats when he saw the burning bush.

And because goats don't normally graze

more than 30 miles from home,

it's believed that Mount Sinai

must not have been very far away.

- In the 1960s, an Israeli archaeologist

actually find some Midianite relics

in this valley north of the Gulf of Aqaba.

So if that's where the goats are from

and we go out 30 miles from there in a radius,

we might be able to actually locate Mount Sinai in Egypt.

[mysterious music]

- One possible candidate

is a mountain called Hashem el-Tarif.

That mountain is 2,890 feet high,

which is about as high as described in Exodus.

It also has a large plateau at its base,

because according to Exodus,

the Israelites were gathered on a plateau

while Moses went to the top of Mount Sinai

to receive the 10 Commandments from God.

- There's also a scene in the Book of Exodus

where the Israelites are very thirsty

and Moses comes down and he strikes at rocks with his staff

and fresh water springs out of the ground.

The site now doesn't have any spring,

but excavators have found traces

of calcium deposits there in the area,

which indicates that at some point there,

there was a spring.

It's also been discovered

that there are are a number of sacred structures

and artifacts in this particular area

that shows that there were probably religious rites

or rituals that took place on this site.

So it seems to have been regarded as sacred.

- [Laurence] Finding Mount Sinai has long been a quest

by archaeologists and biblical scholars

because of its important role in the Old Testament.

Some experts think it may indeed have been a place

of awesome power.

- [Laurence] Mount Sinai is considered

one of the holiest places

in the Old Testament.

And the Bible describes it in vivid and awe-inspiring terms.

- In the Book of Exodus,

Mount Sinai is described as being wrapped in smoke

because God has descended fire upon it.

It also says that Mount Sinai shakes

and there are the sounds of trumpets at its summit.

- We also get a third description of Mount Sinai,

and it says in the Book of Judges

that Mount Sinai melted in the presence of God.

- [Laurence] Based on that description,

there may be more to this famous peak then meets the eye.

- It's written that Mount Sinai blazed with fire

that reached up into the heavens.

This is far from the way the Bible describes most mountains.

- Smoke, heat, shaking, fire,

these descriptors all make Mount Sinai

appear to be more of a volcano.

The problem is there are no volcanoes

located on the Sinai Peninsula.

However, there is one that's not too far away

from that location.

[tense music]

[mysterious music]

- In order to believe this theory,

you have to accept that the Israelites

actually moved much farther east,

out of the Sinai Peninsula,

and into what is today Saudi Arabia.

- For a long time,

archaeologists and biblical scholars

thought that Moses and the Israelites

crossed at the northern part of the Red Sea

up across the Gulf of Suez.

However, this theory suggests that they traveled eastward

and they crossed over the Gulf of Aqaba,

through a place called Etham.

- While the traditional biblical account

says that the children of Israel passed through Etham twice,

some have speculated

that maybe there were two cities named Etham,

one on the east side of the Gulf of Aqaba

and one on the west side.

- If Moses and his followers crossed the Gulf of Aqaba,

this takes them, in fact, into the Arabian Peninsula.

- So if Mount Sinai actually was a volcano,

then we would expect to try to find it

in the Arabian Peninsula.

And, in fact, there are dormant volcanoes

in the Arabian Peninsula.

- [Laurence] Could volcanic activity

also explain the account in Exodus,

of how God guided the Israelites through the desert?

- The Bible says that the Hebrews

were led by a pillar of cloud by day

and a pillar of fire by night.

Now, the most logical explanation for this

is a volcano

that would be emitting both a fire

that you could see in the evening

and smoke that you could see during the day.

That's what's leading you to Mount Sinai.

- According to the Old Testament,

Mount Sinai is 11 days away

from an oasis known as Kadesh Barnea,

which is where Moses and the Israelites camped

on their journey from Egypt to the promised land.

- An 11-day journey would be roughly 200 miles.

And some scholars have drawn

a 200-mile circumference around Kadesh Barnea,

looking for any potential volcanoes

that could fall within that radius.

And sure enough, there are a few candidates.

- According to the findings, there were three volcanoes

that would've been active during Moses's time.

But only one, Hala-'l Badr, would've been powerful enough

to be seen from where the Hebrews were.

[eruption booming]

- The eruption certainly would've been visible.

The smoke would've been at least three miles

above the volcano.

The imagery of a volcano with the fire, with the smoke,

really does fit the accounts in the Hebrew Bible.

- [Laurence] And the resemblance doesn't end there.

- At the base of the volcano,

there is also a very flat plateau

and there's a source of a freshwater spring there.

So these details seem to line up pretty nicely

with what we find in the Book of Exodus.

Identifying the actual location of Mount Sinai,

or Sodom and Gomorrah, any of these ancient lost cities,

isn't going to make believers out of unbelievers,

but it is going to at least make more real

some of these stories that we find in the Old Testament.

- There is evidence

that there probably was a Tower of Babel,

that there were ancient cities

that we've called Sodom and Gomorrah that probably existed.

Now, how these stories continue to be told

or shaped is one thing.

But what we do know is that many of them,

if not most of them, are rooted in history.

- With the Old Testament, so much of it

is so familiar and certain parts of it have been uncovered.

But, even still, some of these key places,

we still don't know where they are,

and so those mysteries still persist to this day.

[flames crackling]

- As biblical experts

and archaeologists continue their quest

to find the lost places of the Old Testament,

they continue to unearth new information

about the ancient world.

What other secrets can be found

hidden beneath the desert sands

and what will they reveal

about the Old Testament's most legendary figures?

Only time will tell.

I'm Laurence Fishburne.

Thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries."

[mysterious music]