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Tonight, 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

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 is.

Maybe a natural catastrophe destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and if so, there

should be signs of what happened.

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?

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

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 believe that Moses did write all of

books.

Scholars today believe that at least parts of these books were based on

passed down from generation to generation through oral tradition, and

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.

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

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.

But the Bible also mentions many important places we can't definitively

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? 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

location?

Semitic scholars know that Bab El actually comes from the word of gate,

El, God, the gate of God, which refers to a specific city in Mesopotamia in an

area. known as Iraq today.

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

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.

In 1899, German archaeologist Robert Koldove begins excavating there.

Koldove and a team of some 200 researchers descends on this region, the

location of Babylon, and they spend years, day after day, excavating the

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

Mesopotamian gods.

Col de Vey's team discovers that not only is the foundation massive, but it

appeared to match up perfectly with the biblical text.

It says in the book of Genesis, specifically, that the people would take

and bake them. This is what the tower is constructed out of.

Well, Goldivet discovers when he's out there excavating the base of the

that it's also made of baked bricks.

The ziggurat that is found.

It's 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.

Could this be the base of the Tower of Babel?

For the time, a building that huge, that monumental, would have been the tallest

thing around. It's easy to imagine that people would think that it reached all

the way to the heavens.

But before the team can finish excavating the ziggurat, they hit a

The archaeological team is not able to investigate this further because the

of the tower actually sits below the modern water table. So if they were to

any lower, they would flood the site.

It's possible that Koldove and his team were on the verge of a major

breakthrough. But suddenly they were stopped in their tracks.

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 Isagila tablet may

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,

ziggurat that reaches about 300 feet tall, which would make it the tallest

standing structure in ancient Mesopotamia. It sounds an awful lot like

structure that was dug up back in 1913.

Then, in the 1990s, another stone tablet...

discovered in a private collection, reveals an intriguing link between

and the Tower of Babel.

One of the first things they found was that it contained the outline of a giant

seven -storied 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

everywhere into his capital city of Babylon to build this giant edifice.

What they discover is that this inscription explicitly mentions this

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

the ziggurat, its incredible size, Nebuchadnezzar, all the different

indicate that this is indeed the Tower of Babel. This would mean that

could be the site where God changes the course of humanity forever.

It's a compelling theory, but there are some timeline issues.

We know that the tower in Babylon is built in the 6th century BCE.

However, in the book of Genesis, it says that the tower of Babel was built maybe

100 years after the flood, which takes place in 2350 BCE.

You've got 1 ,600 years there where this tower should have been built much, much

earlier than the evidence that we have archaeologically.

If this tower is built in the 6th 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.

Nebuchadnezzar's building of his tower could be the inspiration for the story

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

of Babel.

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 6th century BCE, and that that building inspired the

story of the Tower of Babel.

But not everyone's convinced.

British Egyptologist David Rawls proposed in 1998 that the actual

city of Babylon wasn't ancient enough for that temple to be the temple

in the Book of Genesis as the Tower of Babel.

For Roll, 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

is supposedly built, there is an ancient civilization that exists before the

Babylonians, and they're known as the Sumerians.

Sumeria is credited often... with the invention of writing.

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

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.

Janet? says that Nimrod built this extremely tall tower in Mesopotamia

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.

Roll digs deeper, looking for clues.

Roll 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, Roll finds a king named Enmerkar.

Both Nimrod and Enmerkar are said to rule around the 3rd 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 Nimrud, 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 Nimrud, who was the great hunter before

Lord, and Enmer.

When Hebrew was written, it was written without vowels. And so you just have

consonants. Nimrud's name was N -M -R.

And if you listen to N. Merker and you take the vowel thought, you end up with

N, M, R, Kerr.

And what's left are three consonants that are essentially equivalent between

two names.

We're left with two strikingly similar names. So taking the significance of

language at hand, Roll goes in and looks at the records of the ancient Sumerian

cities. 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 5400 BCE, which would make it thousands of years older

than ancient Babel.

The Sumerian king list cites Eridu as the city of the birth king.

And it's even said that King Enmerker was hosted in the city. So it is

that Eridu, not Babylon, is the city where the Tower of Babel is actually

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

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 have been taller than any other building for hundreds of miles

around.

Whatever was built there on this unfinished foundation would have been

right around the time that the Old Testament is telling us that the Tower

Babel was constructed.

The theory about Eridu does fit a lot of the characteristics of the Tower of

Babel. The 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 have

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.

According to the Bible, God gets angry at the tower builders, changes their

language, and drives them apart.

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 story is a story of God essentially punishing

And the Eridu theory does check a lot of boxes. However, as far as a general

scholarly consensus, you're rarely going to find that regarding any Old

Testament topic. And today, the site of the Tower of Babel remains an ongoing

debate.

The Dead Sea, situated between Israel and Jordan, is the lowest point on

surface,

1 ,400 feet below sea level.

According to the Old Testament, two notorious cities once sat along its

Sodom and Gomorrah.

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

man named Lot escape.

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,

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, and that turns out to be a very wise choice.

And so these angels tell Lot and his family to leave Sodom and Gomorrah

God is going to destroy these cities because of their unrighteous behavior.

As they're fleeing, God is so angry with Sodom and Gomorrah.

for the evil 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.

Is it possible that such a cataclysmic event actually happened and left

that's traceable today?

One clue is this reference to the five cities of the plain, two of which are

Sodom and Gomorrah.

The cities of the plain were located somewhere near the Dead Sea in the

valleys of the Jordan River.

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

where Sodom and Gomorrah might have been.

So in the 1920s, surveys that are done of the Dead Sea actually reveal there

bitumen pits around the Southern Ant.

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 Babadra. 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 Babadra 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 Babadrak, there are the remains of a city, including a 22 -foot

wall. The encompassing area of this wall is about 10 acres.

The ruins there at Babi Dra showed 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 gate certainly catch our attention because, well,

that's where the biblical story starts, with lots 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.

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 the city.

There on the Dead Sea are two geological fault lines.

So some archaeologists have speculated that perhaps... What happened to 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

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

punishment from God, could be remembered from generation to generation and

appears to match the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

And there may be more to the story.

One of the issues here with securely identifying Sodom and Gomorrah with

cities is the problem of the timeline.

It says in the book of Genesis that this takes place when Abraham is about 100

years old. But this destruction would have 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.

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

Given the scale of the damage, archaeologists and historians have

wreckage to pinpoint the location of both cities.

Today, they are finally getting close.

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

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, 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.

So in 2001, an archaeologist known as Dr. Stephen 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

or not there's a candidate for Sodom and Gomorrah there.

In 2005,

Stephen Collins begins digging in the northern part of the Dead Sea, a site

called Tal al -Hammam, in a valley.

where the Jordan River flows into the Dead Sea.

Now, Tal al -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 Tal al -Hammam is the biblical city 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, Cullens finds that there

are a lot of collapsed buildings, a lot of skeletal remains.

Things start to get really dark.

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

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.

Problem is, there are absolutely no volcanoes in this particular area.

Some theorize that whatever happened here actually came from out of this

in the form of a meteor.

Granted, there's no meteor crater in the area, but a meteor can break up to the

point of exploding.

The airburst 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 him. Maybe

this is what the ancient people saw and understood to be 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 Tal al -Hammam's destruction is dated at around 1600 BCE.

So not an exact match, but closer.

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 landforms waiting to be found as well.

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 Ten

Commandments.

But this holy mountain can't be found on any map.

People want to find historical locations, specifically biblical

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

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

have 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 a 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.

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

few dozen miles of his father -in -law's Midianite camp would have been the

place where Moses would have 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 finds 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.

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

Sinai to receive the Ten 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 was a spring.

It's also been discovered that there are a number of sacred structures and

artifacts in this particular area.

that shows that there were probably religious rites or rituals that took

on this site, so it seems to have been regarded as sacred.

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.

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.

Based on that description, there may be more to this famous peak than meets the

eye.

It's written that Mount Sinai blazed with fire that reached up into the

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.

Problem is, there are no volcanoes located on the Sinai Peninsula. However,

there is one that's not too far away from that location.

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

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 Etam.

While the traditional biblical account says that the children of Israel passed

through Etham twice, some have speculated that maybe there were two

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.

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

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

that could fall within that radius.

And sure enough, there are a few candidates.

According to the findings, there were three volcanoes that would have been

active during Moses' time, but only one, Halal Abadar, would have been powerful

enough to be seen from where the Hebrews were.

The eruption certainly would have been visible. The smoke would have 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.

And the resemblance doesn't end there.

At the base of the volcano, there is also a very flat plateau, and there's a

sort 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,

it is going to at least make more real some of these stories that we find in

Old Testament.

There is evidence that there probably was a Tower of Babel, that there were

ancient cities that we have 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

And so those mysteries still persist to this day.

As biblical experts and archaeologists continue their quest to find the lost

places of the Old Testament, they continue to unearth new information

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 Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.