That's how this event is described in Genesis. No matter how you treat it, it is full of colorful details. The story of Lot and his daughters in the cave is clearly a Hebrew "moral story", invented with an almost comical purpose: to explain what "wicked" in the literal and figurative sense were the enemies of the Israelis of the tribe of Moabites and Ammonites. It is easy to guess the origin of the idea of turning Lot's wife into a salt column. The Dead Sea is so rich in salt that the fish cannot survive in it, and its coast is dotted with columns of crystal salt of the most diverse form. The accidental resemblance between one of these columns and a human figure could well have given rise to a story about a man who has become a pillar of salt. This area is also very rich in native sulphur, which is sometimes found in the form of small balloons. Could this be a source of conviction that God once brought down the sulfur rain (fire)?
Many other motifs of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah are in the folklore of other peoples. The warning "not to look back", ignored by Lot's wife, can be found, for example, in the Greek myth of Orpheus. He managed to save his wife Eurydice from Hades, but only if she did not look back when she left the Lower World; she looked back and Orpheus lost her forever. The prohibition to look back was a taboo in the many rituals performed in ancient societies from Rome to India. For example, when the Romans left their offerings on the graves of the dead, they never looked back on their way back.
In fact, the leitmotif of the story of the city, destroyed to the ground for the sins of its inhabitants, enjoyed great popularity. The examples do not need to go far, so there is a temptation to interpret the history of Sodom and Gomorrah in a purely folklore sense. However, do not give up other evidence. In 79 A.D., there were undoubtedly comforters and moralists who claimed retrospectively that "they had foreseen it" and that the inhabitants of Pompeii "asked for it themselves" when they were covered with a cloud of hot ashes erupted by Vesuvius. That behind a widespread motive of a history about the rich and "sinful" city destroyed by natural cataclysm, there are some real events, it seems very probable.
The best description of the vicinity of the Dead Sea in the I century AD belongs to the Jewish historian Joseph Flavius, who retold the history of his people for Greek-Roman readers. Apparently, Joseph himself saw what he wrote about:
"To him (the Dead Sea) adjoins the area of Sodom, once rich in its fertility and prosperity of cities, but now completely burned. It is said to have been destroyed by lightning as a result of the sinfulness of its inhabitants. Still now there are traces of the fire sent down by God, and still now we can see the shadows of five cities. Each time the ashes appear again in the form of unknown fruits, which appear to be edible in color, but as soon as they are touched by hand, they turn into ashes and ashes. Thus, the ancient tales of the Sodomian country are confirmed visually"
In a more modern era it was easy to come to the conclusion that Joseph Flavius simply invented all this. William Whiston, whose translation of the "Jewish Wars" was published in 1837, was distressed by the lack of reliable evidence:
"The remote location on the extreme southern tip of the Sodom Sea, in the wild and dangerous deserts of Arabia, makes it extremely difficult for inquisitive travelers to study this place. As for the reports of local residents, they cannot be considered to be quite satisfactory.
The situation did not become clear in 1894, when George Adam Smith wrote his seminal work on the geography of the Holy Land. The study of the notorious "land of Sodom", which he called "hell over which the sun shines", has made little progress since then, and Smith concluded that the ruins of the city simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Other scholars claimed that there was no city at all. After the triumph of Darwin's theory, which denied the importance of catastrophes and the value of the Bible as a historical monument, this view became particularly common in academic circles.
Even the researchers of the Bible could say little in favor of the hypothesis of the reality of Sodom and Gomorrah.