The Dead Sea and the Jordan River. Barbara Kreiger
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breathing,” and Tacitus wrote that “its sluggish waters support their freight as if on solid ground, and trained swimmers as well as those ignorant of the art are equally buoyant upon its surface.”
Josephus observed that it “is not easy to go down into the depths even by deliberate effort,” and he recounted that Vespasian, later to become Roman emperor, came to examine the water. Ordering some slaves to be thrown in with their hands tied behind them, he “found that they all came to the surface as if blown upwards by a strong wind.” Finally among the ancient writers, Pliny described how “the bodies of animals will not sink in its waters, and even those of bulls and camels float there,” but a nineteenth-century editor of his work assures us he exaggerated, that error itself an illustration of the uneven progress of Dead Sea investigation even in modern times.
In the thirteenth century, Bartholomew wrote that “whensoever thou wouldst have drowned therein anything that hath life with any craft or gin, then anon it plungeth and cometh again up; though it be strongly thrust downward, it is anon smitten upward.” His Arab contemporary, the geographer Yakût, wrote that anyone who falls into the lake “cannot sink, but remains floating about til he dies.” A century later, an Englishman known as Maundeville—about whom there is doubt he ever lived, let alone traveled to the Dead Sea—disagreed: “Neither man, beast, or anything that hath life, may die in that sea; and that hath been proved many times by men that have been condemned to death, who have been cast therein, and left therein for three or four days, and they might never die therein, for it receiveth nothing within him that breatheth life. . . . And if a man cast iron therein, it will float on the surface; but if men cast a feather therein, it will sink to the bottom; and these are things contrary to nature.” Recent geographers believe Maundeville’s book to have been plagiarized from various sources, but consider it important anyway, as George H. T. Kimble noted, as an illustration of the layman’s idea of the world in the fourteenth century. If the appeal of the fantastic was as great as Kimble explains it was in that age of supreme faith, one need have no fear that the medieval imagination went unexercised. With regard to the lake’s buoyancy, the opportunities for invention were endless. A burning lantern will float, but an extinguished one will sink; try to immerse a living creature, and it will immediately leap out; no ship may sail on it, “for all things that hath no life sinketh down to the ground.”
The attraction of the Dead Sea by virtue of this singular phenomenon did not end when it was explained. Early in the nineteenth century one explorer observed that “those of our party who could not swim, floated on its surface like corks,” and a contemporary complained of the embarrassing posture forced on the would-be swimmer, whose stroke was rendered useless as his behind bobbed high out of the water. Another was positive he could have slept, “and it would have been a much easier bed than the bushes at Jericho.”
Less pleased was the traveler who evidently had not taken to heart what he had heard about the effects of the water: “I think we were all good swimmers, but when I dashed in and threw myself forward to get out of my depth, there was enough to do without observing my friends. The unusual degree of buoyancy in the briny liquid threw me off balance, the salt stung my eyes, ears, and every abrasion of my skin, and I could scarcely tell in what direction I was striking out.” Yet another put it most succinctly, saying simply that “the trial of skill is not to swim, but to sink.” Finally we have Mark Twain’s account, whose encounter with the waters of the lake occupies a full two pages in The Innocents Abroad: “No, the water did not blister us; it did not cover us with a slimy ooze and confer upon us an atrocious fragrance. . . . It was a funny bath. We could not sink. . . . No position can be retained long; you lose your balance and whirl over. . . . If you swim on your face, you kick up the water like a stern-wheel boat. . . . A horse is so top-heavy that he can neither swim nor stand up in the Dead Sea. He turns over on his side at once. Some of us bathed for more than an hour, and then came out coated with salt till we shone like icicles.”
This strange water is as capable of supporting life on it as it is incapable of supporting life in it—both attributable to its chemical make-up. The Dead Sea is close to one third solid—more than Utah’s Great Salt Lake (which is one quarter) and ten times more saline than the Mediterranean. While the salt content of most seas and lakes is largely sodium chloride, the Dead Sea’s largest concentration is magnesium chloride, which accounts for approximately one half its mineral content. Sodium chloride makes up another quarter; the last fourth consists primarily of calcium chloride, with potassium chloride, magnesium bromide, and several other minerals in relatively small concentrations. Roughly accurate analyses had been done since the end of the eighteenth century, and so confident was one traveler that he announced (prematurely) in 1837 that “modern science has solved all the mystery of this water.”
As noted, one of the major attractions of the Dead Sea was its connection to the Cities of the Plain, whose arrogance and evil ways were dealt with by God in the days of Abraham and Lot, and whose fate is recorded in the Book of Genesis: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” Many hundreds of years later, Josephus reflected on the conflagration when describing the region: “The country of Sodom borders upon . . . [the lake], which was of old a happy land, both for the fruits it bore and the riches of its cities, although it is now all burnt up by lightning for the impiety of its inhabitants.”
The possibility that the remains of the punished cities might be found was enough to prod on certain travelers who might otherwise have lacked the courage to descend to the mysterious valley. One such was Maundrell, who badly wanted to see the remains of those ancient towns “made so dreadful an example of the divine vengeance,” and he looked hard for some sign. “But neither could I discern any heaps of ruins, nor any smoak [sic] ascending above the surface of the water; as is usually described in the writings and maps of geographers.” (It has been suggested that Maundrell was possibly encouraged by a map such as the fifteenth-century one which illustrated William Wey’s Itineraries, in which one can distinguish the outlines of the Cities of the Plain lying beneath the transparent blue water of the Dead Sea.)
In the nineteenth century, numerous travelers eagerly sought the ruins commonly thought to be located in the lake’s depths. “Lying between the barren mountains of Arabia and Judea,” considered one, “was that mysterious sea which rolled its dark waters over the guilty cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Another referred to the damned Cities of the Plain “seething below the [Dead Sea’s] waters,” and a third observed that “to the north was the calm and motionless sea . . . while many fathoms deep in the slimy mud beneath it lay embedded the ruins of the ill-fated cities.” At mid-century, the Dutchman C. W. M. Van de Velde described most evocatively the feeling that was shared by many who walked on the Dead Sea’s shores in those days of greater spiritual certainty: “Solemn ride along this briny strand! . . . The burning and vanishing ground, with its doomed cities, comes up vividly before the mind. What a tract of country! What a terrible witness to the righteous vengeance of God’s justice!”
Map of the Dead Sea showing the Cities of the Plain submerged beneath its waters, from The Itineraries of William Wey, 1458 and 1462 (from an 1867 facsimile of the original in the Bodleian Library). Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.
Jewish, Moslem, and Christian tradition all placed the Cities of the Plain at the southern end of the Dead Sea, though some nineteenth-century investigators were convinced that a combination of geographical and Biblical evidence proved that they had been situated on the northern shore. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Arab town of Zughar flourished at the southern part of the lake. But whether the site it occupied was indeed the one that had been occupied by the ancient town of Zoar was a matter for the most tentative conjecture. (In the early 1920s, the eminent archaeologist William Foxwell Albright determined that it was not.)
Theories about the cataclysm—some based on observable, if wrongly interpreted, evidence, others just fantasy—were frequently put forth, and debate was widespread. One speculator departed from the widely held theory of