specially cited the words, "A standing pillar of salt is a monument of an unbelieving soul."[1]
Never was chain of belief more continuous. In the first century of the Christian era Josephus refers to the miracle, and declares regarding the statue, "I have seen it, and it remains at this day"; and Clement, Bishop of Rome, one of the most revered fathers of the Church, noted for the moderation of his statements, expresses a similar certainty, declaring that he knew the miraculous statue to be still standing.
In the second century that great father of the Church, bishop and martyr, Irenæus, not only vouched for it, but gave his approval to the belief that the soul of Lot's wife still lingered in the statue, giving it a sort of organic life; thus virtually began in the Church that amazing development of the legend which we shall see taking various forms through the middle ages the story that the salt statue exercised certain physical functions which in these more delicate days can not be alluded to save under cover of a learned language.
This addition to the legend, which in these signs of life, as in other things, is developed almost exactly on the same lines with the legend of the Niobe statue in the rock of Mount Sipylos and the legends of human beings transformed into bowlders in various mythologies, was for centuries regarded as an additional confirmation of revealed truth.
In the third century the myth burst into still richer bloom in a poem long ascribed to Tertullian. In this poem more miraculous characteristics of the statue are revealed. It could not be washed away by rains; it could not be overthrown by winds; any wound made upon it was miraculously healed; and the earlier statements as to its physical functions were amplified in sonorous Latin verse.
With this appeared a new legend regarding the Dead Sea: it became universally believed, and we find it repeated throughout the whole mediæval period, that the bitumen could only be dissolved by such fluids as in the processes of animated nature came from the statue.
The legend thus amplified we shall find dwelt upon by pious travelers and monkish chroniclers for hundreds of years: so it came to be more and more treasured by the universal Church, and held more and more firmly—"always, everywhere, and by all."
In the two following centuries we have an overwhelming mass of additional authority for the belief that the very statue of salt
- ↑ For the usual biblical citations, see Genesis xix, 26; St. Luke xvii, 32; Second Peter ii, 6. For the citation from "Wisdom," see x, 7. For the account of the transformation of Lot's wife put into its proper relations with the Jchovistic and Elohistic documents, see Lenormant's "La Genèse," Paris, 1883, pp. 53, 199, and 317, 318.
