The night until Thursday, the temperature did not fall further down than to 38 degrees at Sodom's measurement station by the Dead Sea in Israel, according to the country's weather authority according to The Times of Israel.
The old record had been set the night before, when 36.6 degrees were noted before the temperature began to rise again at 05:00 in the morning.
During the day, the temperatures by the Dead Sea are up to 50 degrees during the current heat wave.
According to the Bible, Sodom and the neighboring town Gomorrah were communities notorious for sin and cruelty. God therefore destroyed them with "fire and sulfur", according to the first book of Moses.
Whether they actually lay there where Israel's measurement station is now, by the western shore of the Dead Sea, is however unclear. Researchers have often pointed out places more northeast, on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea.
There is also a potential explanation for the Bible's "fire and sulfur". According to a study from last year, the Tal al-Hammam area in Jordan was hit by a meteor explosion 3,600 years ago. It was fully comparable to a large atomic bomb, and can thus have wiped out several villages and cities.
The catastrophic temperatures at that time also put the weather measurements in a bad light – molten material indicates, according to the study, that the impact caused a heat of over 2,000 degrees.
