In the days of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, given roughly as the thirteenth century BCE, the western side of the Dead Sea was in the province of Canaan. At around the same time the eastern side became settled by the kingdoms of Moab and Edom. When the Israelites entered Canaan, the tribe of Reuben and the Moabites both occupied the lake’s east bank, while the west belonged first to the tribe and then to the kingdom of Judah. Such was the status of the Dead Sea environs for the next several centuries. In the sixth century BCE, the Jews were exiled to Babylonia, and around that time the eastern shore was conquered by the Nabateans, a people from southern Arabia. The western side was divided between Judah and, to the south, Idumea, settled by the Edomites when they were pushed from the east to the west side of the valley.

      Given the long history that has been enacted on its shores by many nations, it is not surprising that the Dead Sea has had various names. Its oldest is Yam Ha-Melah, the Salt Sea, that name first appearing in the Bible in the books of Genesis, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, where it usually serves as a geographical landmark. To the Greeks it was Lake Asphaltites because of the lumps of asphalt that were periodically thrown up from its depths, and that name persisted in the texts of medieval writers. Christians of the Middle Ages also knew it as the Devil’s Sea, and their Arab contemporaries referred occasionally to the Stinking Lake, presumably because of the smell of sulphur emitted from several places along the shore. But the names that appear most frequently in Arab texts are commemorative of the cataclysm that engulfed Sodom and Gomorrah. They called it simply The Overwhelmed, “from the cities of Lot that were overwhelmed in its depths,” or the Sea of Zughar (i.e., Zoar), after the town that had escaped destruction and flourished in the Middle Ages. Likewise the Jews, who sometimes referred to it as the East Sea, to distinguish it from the Mediterranean, or the Sea of the Aravah, referring to the valley in which it lies, but more often called it the Sea of Sodom. Except for the little used Arab name Al Buhairah al Miyyatah, the Dead Lake, the notion of lifelessness is not reflected in Arab and Jewish names, though Mare Mortuum, the Dead Sea, had appeared in early Roman texts. (In Tacitus’ History we also find it called the Jewish Sea.) Today the Arabs call it Bahr el-Lut, the Sea of Lot. To Jews it is still Yam Ha-Melah.

      As early as Hellenistic times, and through the days of the Roman Empire, geographers and historians wrote about the peculiar nature of the Dead Sea. In the Middle Ages, however, religious attitudes overtook scientific curiosity, and the medieval attraction to the fantastic found a natural subject in the strange lake. Christian pilgrims sometimes stopped at the Dead Sea, either en route from Mt. Sinai to Jerusalem or as an excursion from the holy city. But many were also discouraged from undertaking the dangerous trip, warned off by tales of deadly beasts and poisonous reptiles lurking about on the shore and in the water. “In this country the serpent tyrus is found,” wrote a fourteenth-century German pilgrim. “When it is angry it puts out its tongue like a flame of fire, and one would think that it was fire indeed, save that it does not burn the creature. . . . Were it not blind, I believe that no man could escape from it, for I have heard . . . that if they bit a man’s horse, they would kill the rider.”

      The Dead Sea itself had a reputation that was dreadful and frightening, its vapors thought to be fetid and noxious. “In storms it casts up many beauteous pebbles,” this pilgrim went on, “but if anyone picks them up his hand will stink for three days so foully that he will not be able to bear himself.” Those who did descend approached timidly, not taking lightly this sea that had opened to swallow the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as brimstone and fire raged out of an angry heaven. As one pilgrim explained, “It is plain that here is a mouth of hell, according to us Christians, because we believe that hell is in the midst of the earth, and that the Holy City standeth on the mountains above it.”

      For centuries the Dead Sea had inspired this kind of curiosity, awe, and even contempt. As they journeyed to the remote valley, travelers had absorbed the myths of the region, and if they did not add their own to the accumulation, others more sedentary did. The collection of fantastic tales was reinforced by the quite real dangers of the region, and by modern times the lake had become shrouded in superstition. In an attempt to break the intellectual quarantine which had been imposed, one of the first Dead Sea explorers, traveling in 1810, refuted, first of all, the notion “that iron swims upon it, and light bodies sink to the bottom—that birds, in their passage over it, fall dead into the sea.” And several decades later, a Frenchman approached the Dead Sea and demanded with temerity, “Where then are those poisonous vapours, which carry death to all who venture to approach them? Where? In the writings of the poets who have emphatically described what they have never seen. We are not yet five minutes treading the shores of the Dead Sea, and already, all that has been said of it appears as mere creations of fancy. Let us proceed fearlessly forward, for if anything is to be dreaded here, certainly it is not the pestilential influence of the finest and most imposing lake in the world.” A Dutch contemporary concurred: “In vain my eye sought for the terrific representations which some writers . . . have given of the Dead Sea. I expected a scene of unequalled horror, instead of which I found a lake, calm and glassy, blue and transparent, with an unclouded heaven, with a smooth beach, and surrounded by mountains whose blue tints were of rare beauty.”

      Some of the many explorers who journeyed to the Dead Sea in the nineteenth century were adventurers, others were driven by religious fervor. But the largest number were scientists and geographers, and their combined efforts over the course of the century yielded important finds in the fields of Biblical geography and the natural sciences. The Dead Sea, they would come to discover, is hundreds of feet below sea level and is part of the great Syrian-African Rift. They would discover that it is nearly one third solid; that its salt-encrusted shores had been cultivated by centuries of Jews, Romans, and Byzantines. They did not know that in the caves of Qumran, on the northwest side of the lake, manuscripts were stored that twenty centuries later would be found and become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But they did identify Masada, thirty miles south, where the Jewish zealots made their last stand against the Romans in 73 CE. The puzzle would be slowly pieced together, and the image that emerged was rich in detail.

      A great deal of attention has been paid to the exploration of the Nile River, where European efforts were more glamorously concentrated in the nineteenth century. The Nile was wrapped in the mystery of a region that had never been seen by westerners, and the race to locate its source was intense and at times bitter. This was not the case with the Dead Sea. There was no compulsion to be the first. No Burton-like expeditions were ever mounted to discover where its strange water came from; it had one major and well-known source, and no issue, thus containing its own mystery in a basin just forty-seven miles long and eleven wide.