Chedorlaomer Really Was There

Many men like to scoff at the Bible, particularly at the book of Genesis. As an example, Genesis 14 tells of King Chedorlaomer (Ched-or-la-oʹmer) of Elam fighting with the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah and some neighboring sovereigns, taking Lot captive, and of Lot’s being rescued by Abram. The modern supercritical Interpreter’s Bible calls this a “tale” of “unhistorical character,” a “narrative” from an age in which “the historic sense of Judaism had sunk almost to zero.”

It was reported on July 25, this year, that archaeologist Nelson Glueck, president of Hebrew Union College, is now convinced that he has found the trail of destruction left by Chedorlaomer across the Negeb, or desert area in the south of Palestine. He has discovered a dozen ruins of “Bronze Age” communities crossing the desert from Sodom to the present Israeli border near Kadesh Barnea. He reports that the type of pottery that was in use in these communities dates them as at the time of Abraham, and he believes that all of them were destroyed about the time of Chedorlaomer’s attack. “This is an indication of the remarkable historical memory recorded in the Bible,” he said. “It is not my purpose to prove the Bible right, any more that I want to prove it wrong. But the story of this invasion must have been written down 1,000 years after it happened. The evidence I am finding in the Negeb is pretty good substantiation for it.” The likelihood that this information was preserved in written form for most of that time, rather than being trusted to memory, as Dr. Glueck thought, even further substantiates the accuracy of the Biblical account. One after another the critics’ arguments continue to fall!