Discovered Sodom and Gomorrah!

Discovered: Sodom and Gomorrah! A Video

(Nashville, TN: Wyatt Archaeological Research, 1992) 45 min., $25.00 (call 941-421-1782 to order)

Ron Wyatt claims to have discovered Noah's Ark, the remains of Sodom and Gomorrah, the "real" Mount Sinai (the one in Saudi Arabia), chariot wheels from the Red Sea, the Ark of the Covenant-well, you name it.

Our office regularly receives calls and letters from people who have heard Wyatt speak or have seen his videos and want to know if they should believe his extravagant claims. We respond that we-and the academically trained archaeologists we deal with-ve Wyatt little credence. If it sounds too good to be true, we say, it probably is.

Wyatt is an amateur archaeologist; he makes his livelihood as an anesthetist. Wyatt calls himself a "biblical archaeologist, but he would be more at home in the l9th century, when some supposed experts expected the Bible to be a clear, uncomplicated guide to the treasures of the past. In Wyatt's case, the treasures he seeks are not gold or jewelry, but sacred objects and locales mentioned in the Bible.

Like many who have no sense of serious archaeology, Wyatt believes that the fabulous and miraculous-Noah's Ark, whole citiesare out there to be found if only you read the Bible and search hard enough. Not for him are the arduous years spent untangling the stratigraphy of a single site (or just a single area within a site). Nor does he seem to know that great archaeologists can spend decades in the field and never discover even a scrap of an inscription. For Wyatt the Bible is a long inventory, and he would like to say, "Found that, found that, found that, still looking for that, found that ...

A 1992 video called Discovered: Sodom and Gomorrah! conveys the nature of Ron Wyatt's work. It describes how he became convinced that an area near Masada,...