Dead Sea

The Hebrew Bible calls it the Salt Sea, and treats the whole basin as a landscape of judgement. Genesis sets Sodom and Gomorrah in the plain at its southern end, describes their destruction by fire from heaven, and leaves Lot's wife standing as a pillar of salt for looking back; Deuteronomy and the prophets use the sulphur and the sterile ground as a standing image of a land under curse. The Quran tells the same destruction in the account of Lut, and its ruins are named as a sign for those who pass by.

Archaeologists have proposed candidate sites, the Early Bronze Age towns at Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira among them, and the identification is not settled; what is clear is that the basin has real salt domes, real bitumen and real seismic history, and that the storytellers were describing a place they knew. The Greeks and Romans called it Lake Asphaltites for the asphalt that rises from its floor and was collected from boats, a commodity Egypt used in embalming.

Its physical strangeness carried religious weight of its own. Nothing swims in water that is around a third dissolved mineral, a swimmer cannot sink in it, and the haze over it in summer reads as smoke. Barbara Kreiger's history follows how travellers from antiquity to the nineteenth century wrote the sea as a place of judgement first and a curiosity second, and how slowly the second description replaced the first.

In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd found jars of manuscripts in a cave above the northwestern shore. Eleven caves eventually yielded fragments of some nine hundred scrolls, including a complete Isaiah a thousand years older than any Hebrew biblical manuscript then known, copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, and a body of sectarian literature, the Community Rule, the War Scroll, the pesher commentaries, describing a group that called itself the sons of light and kept a calendar different from the Temple's.

The settlement at Qumran beside the caves has been argued over ever since. Jodi Magness' archaeological study defends the standard reading, that it housed a sectarian community, probably Essene, whose numerous stepped pools served ritual immersion; other scholars have proposed a fortified farm or a villa, with the scrolls brought from Jerusalem for safekeeping before the revolt of 66. The dispute is about the site rather than the texts, whose importance for the study of Second Temple Judaism and of Christian origins is not contested.

The sea itself is disappearing. Diversion of the Jordan and industrial evaporation ponds have dropped the surface by more than thirty metres since 1960; sinkholes open along the retreating shore each year, and the access roads to some archaeological and monastic sites have had to be moved. Proposals to feed it from the Red Sea have been studied for decades without being built.