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The Dead Sea appears in the Bible
as a border (e.g., in Joshua 15:5). It was also an important barrier.
Together with the Judaean desert, it isolated the mountain of Judah
on the east. So Moab, for instance, sent its tribute not to
the southern kingdom of Judah, closer as the crow flies, but to the
northern kingdom of Israel. (2
Kings 3:4)
The
Dead Sea also protected Judah on the east. Along with
the Negev to the south and the Shephelah to the west, the combination
of desert and sea made Judah a landed peninsula, vulnerable only on
the north. This geography helped Judah withstand the Assyrian onslaught
-- and if it hadn't, who would have been here to preserve the
biblical texts? (Not the Samaritans.)
The
special characteristics of this sea were a prod to prophetic vision.
Zechariah (14:8), for example, foresaw: "And in that
day living waters will flow out of Jerusalem, half of them toward
the eastern sea and the other half toward the western sea; it will
be in summer as well as in winter." Before him spoke Ezekiel (Ezekiel
47: 1-12). |
On the
sea bottom are large amounts of asphalt (bitumen, referred to in the Bible
as pitch or tar). When the earth trembles (as it often does in this deep
rift) pieces break away and float to the surface. In the third millennium
BC, people from the city of Arad (in the desert west of Masada)
exported the asphalt to Egypt, which used it to seal ships and mummies.
Arad may have been a daughter city of Egypt, stuck in the desert for the
sake of the asphalt trade.
Sodium
chloride was also valuable. This is reflected in the root of the English
"salary," and a worker, we hope, is "worth her salt." Salt piles up above
the water in the southern basin, whose western shore includes a mountain
of it eight miles long: Mt. Sodom. In the 2nd century BC, the camel
caravans of the Nabataeans bore it, together with asphalt, to harbors on
the Mediterranean. They fought the successors of Alexander the Great to
keep their commercial rights.
Alexander would have learned about the Dead
Sea from his teacher, Aristotle, who reported in his Meteorology
(2, 359a) about a sea he had heard of in this land, that
when you tie up a man or animal and throw him in, he doesn't sink. Josephus
tells how Vespasian, with plenty of captives on hand, tested the point
(War IV
8.4).
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In response
to a man who had Dead Sea water imported all the way to Italy, an ancient doctor
named Galen (129-199AD) pointed out that you could get the same effect by
putting salt in your bath. (De simplicium medicamentorum
temperamentis 4, 20.)
The Dead Sea
(main page)
©
2003
Near East Tourist Agency
(NET)
Text
© 2003 Stephen
Langfur
Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN
STANDARD BIBLE(r),
(c) Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977,
1995 by
The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
(www.Lockman.org)
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