I don't necessarily agree with everything that David Kent believes, but why do you demand a literal interpretation when this sort of description is used in the prophets to describe the calamity of divine judgment on a place?
For instance, Isaiah 34 -- a passage that would be very familiar to Jesus and His hearers -- uses the following language regarding the coming judgment of Edom:
Isaiah 34:1-10
Come near, you nations, and listen;
pay attention, you peoples!
Let the earth hear, and all that is in it,
the world, and all that comes out of it!
The Lord is angry with all nations;
his wrath is on all their armies.
He will totally destroy them,
he will give them over to slaughter.
Their slain will be thrown out,
their dead bodies will stink;
the mountains will be soaked with their blood.
All the stars in the sky will be dissolved
and the heavens rolled up like a scroll;
all the starry host will fall
like withered leaves from the vine,
like shriveled figs from the fig tree.
My sword has drunk its fill in the heavens;
see, it descends in judgment on Edom,
the people I have totally destroyed.
The sword of the Lord is bathed in blood,
it is covered with fat—
the blood of lambs and goats,
fat from the kidneys of rams.
For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah
and a great slaughter in the land of Edom.
And the wild oxen will fall with them,
the bull calves and the great bulls.
Their land will be drenched with blood,
and the dust will be soaked with fat.
For the Lord has a day of vengeance,
a year of retribution, to uphold Zion’s cause.
Edom’s streams will be turned into pitch,
her dust into burning sulfur;
her land will become blazing pitch!
It will not be quenched night or day;
its smoke will rise forever.
From generation to generation it will lie desolate;
no one will ever pass through it again.
Notice the key phrases I have highlighted in red.
Last time I checked, the stars are still in the sky, the heavens have not been rolled up, and there is no smoke "rising forever" from the site of ancient Edom.
I learned this lesson as a young Christian teenager when we studied this passage in Sunday School. I asked the teacher if he had a modern photo of this burning sulfur and the smoke plume reaching into the sky. (I grew up in the midst of refineries and a sulfur extraction plant, so this was not an obscure image.) The teacher stammered and didn't know how to answer the question since he suddenly had his faith rocked. Over time, I read more of the prophets and realized that they were using extreme imagery that is quite different than what we would use in a post-Enlightenment Western culture. It would actually be quite surprising if they thought and spoke using the same metaphors we use.
If we are going to interpret scripture by scripture, we can know that there is an extremely high probability that this is metaphorical language, not literal.