In the last post —– I talked about The prophets’ views on what the sin of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah was and how their view might differ with our own. I then suggested the solution was actually to listen to the prophets and rectify our misinformed views.

In this post we will look at the story from another point of view. Today I want to look at the story from the point of view of the etiologist; looking at how the environment – the geography and even the geology – shapes the ancient author’s views of God.

The person of Abraham supposedly lived around the second millennium BCE (1900ish). The first writing about Abraham that we have evidence of was written after the turn of the first millennium BCE (950ish). This is a fairly easy one. The oldest (and only) mention of Abraham is in Hebrew literature, that is to say, literature written in Hebrew. Hebrew is not a verifiably written language until around the turn of the first century BCE. So, the stuff being written about Abraham was written hundreds of years after the character supposedly lived. This does not disprove Abraham as a real historical figure. But, it does cast some reasonable aspersions on the legitimacy of the details of the story. Most scholars understand Abraham to be a composite figure, made of up of characteristics of tribal leaders in the ancient near east that had value in the formation of the cultural identity of the people doing the writing. Since this is not primarily about Abraham or the Abrahamic Narrative (which might be the topic of a future post), I’ll leave that there. Whether you believe that there was an Abraham or not is a matter of faith and so that is up to you.

But it does set the story over about a thousand-year time span of oral and aural traditions and makes some of he details of the story that survived interesting. (To be clear, I mean the story, per se, not details about the characters of the story.)

There have been several cities around the shore of the Dead Sea (or in Hebrew, “Salt Sea”) that have been identified as possible locations for the legendary cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. One of the excavations to take a look at is the excavation at Bab-edh-drah. The difficulty in pinpointing them is that they are – well – legendary. Looking for it is probably folly. But, looking at why the story is set where it is – is not folly. It can tell us good deal.  

There are two details of the narrative that interest me the most. The first is how the cities are destroyed and the second is how Lot’s wife is destroyed. (Poor dear.)

The Dead Sea happens to sit on a chain of fault lines that stretch from Syria to Mozambique. The action of the tectonic plates causes earthquakes. It is not difficult to imagine how this might have played out. An earthquake resulting from the shift of the tectonic plates causes fissures in the earths crust. That would have released natural gas and petroleum. The natural geology of the area is abundant with sulfur encased in gypsum. The release of natural gas and petroleum during earthquakes and the resulting raining down of ignited sulfur is generally understood to be what ancient people thought of as brimstone.

To someone who does not understand plate tectonics, natural gas and geological deposits of sulfur, it is easy to see how they would interpret this as the action of a wrathful God against injustice. It would be natural for the ancient human to follow up with a question about what exactly the injustice was, and to include this in the story to emphasize accepted cultural norms that the writers wished to emphasize.

As a sort of “icing on the cake” the author confirms the vengeful nature of their God by turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Thus, providing an etiological explanation of the salt structures that proliferate the shore of the Dead Sea.

This helps us to understand how geography and geology shapes the view of deity in ancient cultures. And, that knowledge might challenge how we think about deity today. Hopefully, sane people today do not view natural events as the actions of a god against humans.