How Lot’s Wife Became a Pillar of Salt

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Abraham famously argued with God about his decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah: “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” the patriarch asks the Master of the Universe. “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it?” God agrees for the sake of the innocent fifty. A superb negotiator, Abraham bargains with the Lord until he agrees to save the city even for only ten righteous souls (Genesis 18:23–32).

But there were not even ten. “The Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven” (Genesis 19:24).

Only Lot was warned ahead of time. While living in Sodom he had been hospitable to two angels of the Lord. As dawn broke, the angels urged Lot to flee with his wife and two daughters. But “do not look behind you,” they warned. Lot’s unnamed wife, however, “looked back, and she became a pillar of salt” (Genesis 19:1–26).

An extraordinary pillar of salt at the southern end of the Dead Sea—it is 65 feet high!—can easily be seen as having a human form, especially when approached from the north. Long identified as Lot’s Wife, this salt pillar may perhaps be taken as the remains of the woman who looked back by those who interpret the holy words literally. For other people, however, the story is a powerful religious myth that teaches a moral lesson about obedience to God. But how did the myth arise? What raised the notion that Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt?

I suggest that the source is the unusual pillar of salt itself that can still be seen on a height of Mt. Sedom near the southwestern shore of the Dead Sea. (The name Mt. Sedom follows the present Hebrew pronunciation of the Biblical name Sodom. In ancient Greek sources it is Sodoma and in Arabic Usdum)

The usual explanation for the creation of this salt pillar has been erosion by direct rainfall.¹ For hundreds of years, it has been thought that the pillar was created by occasional rains washing down the salt mountain. The real explanation is more complicated. Recent research has shown that other, sometimes complex, geological forces were at work. 040Moreover, we can now even date the creation of the salt pillar—to about 4,000 years ago, or 2000 B.C.E. And an astounding aspect of its creation is that it appeared quite suddenly—right around the time traditionally attributed to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Salt pillars of any substantial size are quite rare because rock salt dissolves rapidly under normal exposure to rainfall. This one survived only because of the extremely arid conditions of the Dead Sea area and the unusual way in which it was created and protected by caprock.

Mt. Sedom is what geologists call a diapir: a mobile mass that intrudes upward into preexisting geological strata—often through denser overlying rock strata—along some fracture or structural weakness. Mt. Sedom is an actively rising salt diapir, the salt (sodium chloride, like ordinary table salt but unlike the ingredients of the present Dead Sea) having been deposited by the waters of an ancient precursor of the Dead Sea.^a The mountain is composed of vertical layers of prehistoric salt covered by a residual caprock on top of the salt. The rising (which is still going on) is driven by the buoyancy of the lightweight salt cutting through the overburden of denser sediments. The rise occurred adjacent to what is called the Sedom Fault, southwest of the Dead Sea.

Over time, salt dissolution occurred in the diapir we call Mt. Sedom, mainly along ephemeral streams carrying runoff water. These streams sometimes create long vertical shafts open to the sky (up to 300 ft high), horizontal underground channels and sometimes unroofed caves, all within the mountain/salt diapir, making Mt. Sedom a 041wonderful, but dangerous, place to explore. Some caves were originally roofed, but in time the roofs collapsed, creating unroofed caves. On the floors of these unroofed caves we find debris of the caprock that covered the salt mountain before the salt underneath the cap dissolved and the roofs of the caves later collapsed.

Lot’s Wife, as we may call the surviving pillar of salt, was once part of a wall of one of these unroofed caves on top of Mt. Sedom. This was (and is) one of the largest salt caves in the region (and in the world). When the roof collapsed, it left the pillar we know as Lot’s Wife, an isolated pillar of Sedom salt. A major earthquake, which is not uncommon in this region, probably acted as the trigger for the roof collapse.

Today Lot’s Wife stands on the nearly 300-foot-high 042eastern escarpment of the Mt. Sedom diapir. Long before the roof collapse, the pillar had been part of the wall of the cave. The creation of the cave left this wall on the eastern escarpment of Mt. Sedom. When the pillar was still an unseparated part of the cave wall, an ephemeral cave stream created a separation in the cave wall, providing an outlet for the water that then drained down the eastern escarpment of Mt. Sedom. Gradually, this outlet became deeper and deeper, along with the floor of the main cave passage. A short distance from this outlet (on the other side of what would become Lot’s Wife), another trench was created. This trench might also have been created by ephemeral water (similar to the creation of the outlet just mentioned). At this point the cave wall between the outlet and trench was a kind of column from the floor to the roof of the cave. When the roof collapsed, what had been a column supporting the roof became a pillar—Lot’s Wife!

In this scenario, it will be seen that Lot’s Wife appeared quite suddenly—when the dome that formed the roof of the cave collapsed.

The upper third of Lot’s Wife is composed of caprock, the lower two-thirds is salt comprising vertical layers of the salt diapir that pushed up over time through a fracture in the bedding. The caprock prevents the salt from being dissolved by direct rainfall. (Yes, it sometimes, although rarely, rains here.)

Quite surprisingly we can date the occurrence of the northern part of the cave. As the cave developed from the ephemeral streams within the salt mountain, twigs were left in the wall of the cave at different levels, the lower ones being later than the higher ones. We recovered and obtained dates of the wood at different cave levels through carbon-14 043analysis.^b The results confirmed that as the location of the samples became lower, their dates became progressively later—just as we would have expected. The uncalibrated carbon-14 dates range from 4050 to 3580 B.P. (before present), or roughly between 2900 and 1700 B.C.E. The youngest sample (we tested more than one sample at each level), presumably deposited just before the collapse of the roof of the cave that created Lot’s Wife, dates with a 95 percent probability to sometime between 2150 and 1730 B.C.E., after calibration.

Since the creation of Lot’s Wife, other geological processes have continued. We have been able to measure the rate at which the location of Lot’s Wife continues to rise year by year (relative to the adjacent foothills) as the base of the escarpment recedes. Using direct geodetic leveling (the kind of measurement performed along roads to allow precise construction work) across the eastern escarpment of Mt. Sedom in three successive years, we determined that the salt layer that comprises Lot’s Wife rises approximately 0.3 inches per year. When Lot’s Wife was created around 4,000 years ago, it was about 100 feet lower than it is now, so the pillar would have been even more directly visible to travelers coming from the north.

Studies of Dead Sea sediments have also 044documented the history of seismic events (earthquakes) in this area. The largest cluster occurred around 2100–2000 B.C.E. Within this period, the largest one, dated c. 2050 B.C.E., was suggested independently to reflect a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale, the strongest in the entire Holocene record of the Dead Sea area.^c2 The comparable dates of this seismic event and that produced by the carbon-14 testing of the creation of the salt pillar suggest that this was possibly the earthquake that created Lot’s Wife by triggering the collapse of the cave roof.

As noted at the beginning of this article, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is associated in the Bible with the story of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. The sudden appearance of the pillar of salt about 4,000 years ago somehow generated the explanation of its being Lot’s wife, who looked back when fleeing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. That destruction, too, is thought by many geologists to reflect a natural calamity that took place in early historical times.³ However, it has not been possible to date this calamity by geological evidence. But the fact that a major earthquake occurred at the same time Lot’s Wife was created certainly suggests that this earthquake was also the inspiration for the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Biblical account of course relates the two events—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt.

The site of Bab edh-Dhra on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea has been suggested as a candidate for Sodom. Several nearby sites could be Gomorrah.^d4 The pottery at these sites, as well as carbon-14 dates of organic material, indicate that these sites were intensively inhabited during the third millennium B.C.E. The latest carbon-14 date for the Sedom cave that produced Lot’s Wife and the date for the end 064of habitation at Bab edh-Dhra are practically identical—3580 B.P. and 3595 B.P., respectively. It seems probable that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah developed from the same seismic event from which the story of Lot’s wife developed. A major earthquake that could have destroyed sites near the Dead Sea also created a pillar of salt on a nearby uplift.

In searching for an explanation for the sudden appearance of the salt pillar, the ancient mind could have created the myth about Lot’s wife. Similarly, the tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah could emerge as people saw the ruins of the sites. The pillar was perceived as testimony to God’s wrath at disobedience to his instructions. The destruction of the sites was attributed to the immorality of the inhabitants. The early observers transmitted this narrative as a living memory through time until the evolved myth was permanently enshrined in the Book of Genesis in a tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt.

The story of the pillar of salt that is Lot’s Wife is probably the oldest narrative than can be geologically attributed to a particular dated geological feature.

Abraham famously argued with God about his decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah: “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” the patriarch asks the Master of the Universe. “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it?” God agrees for the sake of the innocent fifty. A superb negotiator, Abraham bargains with the Lord until he agrees to save the city even for only ten righteous souls (Genesis 18:23–32). But there were not even ten. “The Lord rained […]