Region Rocked Through The Ages

Since the time of the Bible, and before, earthquakes have been rocking the Holy Land. A quake may have caused the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the New Testament says “the earth shook and the rocks were split” at the moment Jesus died.

While the Bible rarely refers to specific earthquakes, frequent literary and figurative allusions suggest they were as common then as now.

The prophet Zechariah predicted that when the Messiah came, “the Mount of Olives shall be split in two from east to west by a very wide valley; so that one half of the Mount shall withdraw northward, and the other half southward.”

Some scholars think an earthquake may have been behind the “overturning” of Sodom and Gomorrah, believed located near the Dead Sea.

In the book of Numbers, God used an earthquake to punish some of the children of Israel for rebelling against Moses during their wanderings in the Sinai desert - also the site of Wednesday’s quake.