Shittim: Baal Peor – Stand and See!
Abel-Shittim (She-TEEM): The Field of Acacias
by Jennifer Bartlett
On your visit here with us. Imagine yourself now standing over this condensed site to see the field, exactly where the Bible says it was, where the Tabernacle sat. It is all here.
You’ve had manna for dinner every night for the past 40 years. (What IS that stuff?) You can’t wait to finally settle down in an actual house and grow your own fruits and veggies! Some spies just left to scope out Jericho, that city on the other side of the Jordan River. You’re not quite sure how you’re all going to get across the Jordan, but you’ve heard the story of the miraculous parting of the sea ever since you were very young. Moses could do that again, but he just wearily climbed that mountain behind you. Could it be true that he won’t be coming back and that this General Joshua guy is the new leader?
Welcome to Abel-Shittim: the Field of Acacias. (Abel-Shittim is likely the full name of the site that is more commonly called simply Shittim.) There are still acacia trees here, in the Plains of Moab. Acacia wood was used in the construction of the Ark of the Covenant and other items of furniture in the Tabernacle that once stood there. This was the final stop the Israelites made during their wilderness wanderings, just before crossing the Jordan River (Josh. 3:1). While they were camped here, Balaam was commissioned by Balak, the fearful king of Moab, to curse Israel. Although Balaam refused, he did suggest an effective tactic to invoke God’s judgment on Israel: sending idolatrous women to seduce the Israelite men. This grave sin led to the death of 24,000 men (Num. 25:9). Moses’ brother Aaron the priest and their sister Miriam had both died not long before. Even Moses died on Mount Pisgah/Nebo before the Israelites crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land. This was the land of God’s righteous judgment.
In fact, a much more catastrophic event had occurred in this area (~1650 BC), centuries before the Israelites arrived. Nearby Tell el-Hammam (Arabic: Tall al-Hammam) does indeed tell us about the array of cultures that have named and renamed the site – Shittim, Abila, Livias – for over 3,500 years since it was first decimated by what some think may have been a comet approaching from the southwest. Some Bible scholars (for example, the site’s head archaeologist, Steven Collins) think this tell may have been biblical Sodom, which was incinerated during the lifetime of Abraham. Others contend that the site is too far north, or that the destruction layer is too late to have been Sodom. Even so, archaeologists have discovered “the presence of unusual materials, including melted mudbrick fragments, melted roofing clay, melted pottery, ash, charcoal, charred seeds, and burned textiles, all intermixed with pulverized mudbrick … [Excavators] concluded that evidence pointed to a possible cosmic impact.” Even skeptical scientists agree that this site was one of the oldest cities that were “destroyed by a cosmic airburst”.
[1] Ted E. Bunch et al. “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el‑Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” Nature: Scientific Reports (2021) 11:18632. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-97778-3.
[2] Ibid.
