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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 Judean 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 Nabatean 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).
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.)
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. (www.Lockman.org)
© 2003 Near East Tourist
Agency (NET)
Text © 2003 Stephen Langfur
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