After Abraham's intercession — 'Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?' (Genesis 18:23) — the Lord sent two angels to Sodom. Lot received them; the men of the city demanded he hand them over. The angels struck the assailants with blindness and led Lot, his wife, and his daughters out of the city.
At sunrise, 'the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground' (Genesis 19:24–25). Lot's wife, looking back, became a pillar of salt.
The traditional location was placed south of the Dead Sea, but archaeological work since the 1970s has put forward Tall el-Hammam — a massive Bronze Age tell north-east of the Dead Sea, showing evidence of catastrophic destruction by extreme heat in the patriarchal era — as a leading candidate. The identification remains contested; a 2021 Nature Scientific Reports paper arguing for an airburst event was later retracted.