Why Did God Destroy Sodom & Gomorrah, page-12

I beg to differ.

While the authors of Genesis appear to have heard about a number of ruined settlements in the northern part of the Arabah that exhibited considerable traces of burning and destruction, it seems the authors of Genesis and later Jewish redactors never bothered to get off their backsides to investigate what was actually there.

If they had taken the time to visit the Arabah, they would have seen the remains of numerous copper mining operations that had been conducted by the Hyksos, Egyptians, Philistines and possibly Edomites from at least very early in the second millennium.

If the post-Exodus Jews had ventured to re-smelt the slag left behind by the above copper smelting operations, they would have realised a great resource of iron with which they could then have turned into weapons, armour and chariots with which to battle against the Philistines, Egyptians, Damascenes, Assyrians, Babylonians, etc,but alas the Jews were just too smug in thinking that they were the chosen people or just too lazy or stupid to realise otherwise. The Philistines no doubt had press-ganged great numbers of Jews into their iron smelting operations and no doubt some of these Jews had risen through the ranks to be on sufficiently friendly terms with the Philistines to be informed about what was actually going on.

The later Jewish redactors could have corrected the Bible record by writing about the Philistine world-redefining iron-smelting operations and also the inability of earlier Jews to exploit either the copper or iron resources,but alas we all had to wait some 2400 years for modern Western archaeologist to reveal the truth of the matter.