Attention has already been called to the fact that the valley of the Jordan occupies a depressed or sunken region far below the level of the Mediterranean and the Red Seas. It is the belief of some geologists that this depression was caused by an earthquake which accompanied the volcanic eruption that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain. Indeed, some contend that the present site of the valley of the Jordan, including the Sea of Tiberius and the Dead Sea, is a great fissure that was made in the limestone of the valley during the time of that earthquake.
It would appear from the peculiar geography of this section of country that the Jordan River has not always emptied into the Dead Sea, but that before the time of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain the greater part of the country now occupied by the Dead Sea was a fertile valley, and the Jordan emptied directly into the Red Sea at the Gulf of Akaba; that during the disturbance through changes in the valley, or possibly by a lava stream flowing across a portion of the bed of the lower Jordan, or even by a huge accumulation of stones or ashes thrown out from a neighboring volcano, the discharge of the river into the Red Sea was cut off, and that in this way the waters of the rivers began to accumulate and to flow over the plain, thus forming the basin of the Dead Sea.
There is no difficulty in accounting for the saltness of the Dead Sea. There are large quantities of salt, and salty matters generally, in the volcanic rocks of the region, but, even if this were not so, when a river empties into a lake with no outlet to the sea, and which therefore loses its water by evaporation only, the water will gradually become very salt, since the remaining waters of such a lake contain more or less salt, while the water they lose by evaporation contains none.
The waters of the Dead Sea are very salt, but not the saltest in the world. In every 100 pounds of Dead Sea water twenty-four pounds consist of salty matters. The waters of the Great Salt Lake, in Utah, contain eighteen per cent of salty matters. Lake Van, in eastern Turkey, is, perhaps, the saltest lake on earth, it containing no less than thirty-three pounds of salty substances in every 100 pounds of water.
Daubeny, an authority on volcanoes, and quite competent to give an opinion concerning what is possible in this line, describes what he believes took place, as follows:
"Briefly then to recapitulate the train of phenomena by which the destruction of the cities might have been brought about, I would suppose that the River Jordan, prior to that event, continued its course tranquilly through the great longitudinal valley, called El Arabah, into the Gulf of Akaba; that a shower of stones and sand from some neighboring volcano first overwhelmed these places; and that its eruption was followed by a depression of the whole of the region, from some point apparently intermediate between the lake of Tiberius and the mountains of Lebanon, to the watershed in the parallel of 30°, which occurs in the valley of El Arabah above-mentioned. I would thence infer that the waters of the Jordan, pent-up within the valley by a range of mountains to the east and west, and a barrier of elevated table-land to the south, could find no outlet, and consequently by degrees formed a lake in its most depressed portion, which, however, did not occur at once, and therefore is not recorded by Scripture as a part of the catastrophe, though reference is made in another passage of its existence in what was before the valley of Siddim."
As regards the turning of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, Henderson, who has carefully studied this part of the country, remarks: "How natural is the incrustation of his wife on this hypothesis! Remaining in a lower part of the valley, and looking with a wistful eye towards Sodom, she was surrounded, ere she was aware, by the lava, which rising and swelling, at length reached her, and (whilst the volcanic effluvia deprived her of life) incrusted her where she stood, so that being, as it were, embalmed by the salso-bituminous mass, she became a conspicuous beacon and admonitory example of future generations."