The foreign substance in the water gives it a peculiar appearance at night. Under the influence of a full moon, the sea has a strikingly bright and beautiful phosphorescent glow. The breakers dashing against the rocks, and beating against the shore, look like waves of consuming fire. The whole scene resembles a restless, turbulent sea of flame vainly trying to devour the very rocks that mark its limits! Going around the sea next morning, the rock-bound coast, and the bleak desolate hills around, look as though they might have been scorched with fire the night before.
LOT’S WIFE.
In seeking for a satisfactory explanation of why this water is so salt, Johnson argues thus; “Sodom and Gomorrah once stood at the north end of this sea. From here Lot fled with his family when the cities were destroyed. On one of the surrounding hills Lot’s wife was standing, when she disobediently looked back and was immediately turned into a pillar of salt.” Johnson becomes more and more animated as he contemplates the subject and expresses his views. His face is radiant with gladness, and his soul is all aglow with emotion, as he closes with this sentence: “Now, Whittle, since Mrs. Lot was turned to a pillar of salt upon one of these hills, we may safely account for the present salty condition of the water simply by supposing that she has melted and run back into the sea.” This thought was born in Johnson’s brain, and he nurses it with all the love and passionate fondness that characterize the young mother as she tenderly caresses her new-born babe.
It is therefore with sincere regret that I raise the golden hammer of truth to break the young child’s head, but the false theory must die. I say, “Johnson, come with me.” Going around on the east side, not far from the north end, of the Dead Sea, we come to a broad shelf of rock, probably 1,000 feet above the water. Arriving at the edge of this stone table, and pointing to a colossal statue of salt-rock standing on its centre, I say, “Johnson, your theory is not true. Mrs. Lot has not melted; for, behold, she still stands!” This famous pillar is a slender, isolated needle of salt-rock, thirty or thirty-five feet high. This, we are told, is actually Lot’s wife. And I readily see how a man with a diseased imagination could fancy this a woman; for, as Professor Palmer remarks, “It does really bear a curious resemblance to an Arab woman with a child upon her shoulders.” The rock lifts itself up solitary and alone, something like a giantess, wearing tattered garments and disheveled hair, while her furrowed face is slightly turned over her left shoulder, as though she were still looking back on the desolate plain where the ill-fated cities once stood.
The Arabs point to this pillar as Lot’s wife. M. de Saulcy has written very ingeniously to prove that it really and truly is Lot’s wife. And, to do the Frenchman justice, I should add that he really did prove it—to his own satisfaction. I dare say, however, that he utterly failed to convince any of his readers. There have been men in all the ages who found in this pillar, or some other one like it, the veritable Mrs. Lot. Josephus relates the Scriptural incident of Lot’s wife being turned into salt, and then says of the pillar of salt: “I have seen it, and it remains to this day.” Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, and Leland all speak of Lot’s wife still standing as a pillar of salt. One says she still “retains her members entire,” and another says that as fast as any part of this pillar is washed away, it is supernaturally restored. That Lot’s wife disobeyed God, and was forthwith turned into a pillar of salt, I do not doubt. That this pillar of salt will ever be located and identified, I have no hope.
Let us again recur to the question, “Why is this sea so salt?” Around the east side and southern end of the sea, the whole country seems to be composed largely of salt. “The salt hills run round for several miles nearly east and west, at a height of from three hundred to four hundred feet, level atop, and not very broad; the mass being a body of rock-salt, capped with a bed of gypsum and chalk. Dislocated, shattered, furrowed into deep clefts by the rains, or standing out in narrow, ragged buttresses, they add to the weird associations of all around. Here and there, harder portions of the salt, withstanding the weather while all around them melts and wears off, rise up as isolated pillars. In front of the ridge, the ground is strewn with lumps and masses of salt, through which streamlets of brine run across the long muddy flat towards the beach, which itself sparkles in the sun with a crust of salt, shining as if the earth had been sown with diamonds.”
A sea whose bed and beach are salt would naturally be brackish, even if it had an outlet. During the rainy season this sea has probably a thousand tributaries, all of which bring in more or less salt. It is always receiving salt. Bear in mind the fact that this Sea of Death has no outlet. All of the water is taken up by evaporation. In midsummer the heat around it is fearful to contemplate. The rays from the noon-day’s sun are almost like streams of fire. The heat is simply intense. The water vaporizes, is taken up into the air, and is there condensed and poured out in showers of rain on the parched hills around, to revive the vigor of vegetation. As Thompson would say, “The clouds pour their garnered fullness down.” Of course the sun takes up only the oxygen and hydrogen, leaving all salt and other impurities behind. Hence the sea never fills up; hence also the water that is left behind is becoming more and more salt as the years pass by.