ified that
the salt pillar at Usdum was once Lot's wife, but declared that she must
retain that form until the general resurrection. In the seventh century
too, Bishop Arculf travelled to the Dead Sea, and his work was added
to the treasures of the Church. He greatly develops the legend, and
especially that part of it given by Josephus. The bitumen that floats
upon the sea "resembles gold and the form of a bull or camel"; "birds
can not live near it"; and "the very beautiful apples" which grow there,
when plucked, "burn and are reduced to ashes, and smoke as if they were
still burning."

In the eighth century the Venerable Bede takes these statements of
Arculf and his predecessors, binds them together in his work on The
Holy Places, and gives the whole mass of myths and legends an enormous
impulse.(431)

(431) For Antoninus Martyr, see Tobler's edition of his work in the
Itinera, vol. i, p. 100, Geneva, 1877. For the Targum of Jerusalem, see
citation in Quaresmius, Terrae Sanctae Elucidation, Peregrinatio vi,
cap. xiv; new Venice edition. For Arculf, see Tobler. For Bede, see his
De Locis Sanctis in Tobler's Itinera, vol. i, p. 228. For an admirable
statement of the mediaeval theological view of scientific research,
see Eicken, Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, Stuttgart,
1887, chap. vi.

In the tenth century new force is given to it by the pious Moslem
Mukadassi. Speaking of the town of Segor, near the salt region, he says
that the proper translation of its name is "Hell"; and of the lake
he says, "Its waters are hot, even as though the place stood over
hell-fire."

In the crusading period, immediately following, all the legends burst
forth more brilliantly than ever.

The first of these new travellers who makes careful statements is Fulk
of Chartres, who in 1100 accompanied King Baldwin to the Dead Sea and
saw many wonders; but, though he visited the salt region at Usdum, he
makes no mention of the salt pillar: evidently he had fallen on evil
times; the older statues had probably been washed away, and no new one
had happened to be washed out of the rocks just at that period.

But his misfortune was more than made up by the triumphant experience
of a far more famous traveller, half a century later--Rabbi Benjamin of
Tudela.

Rabbi Benjamin finds new evidences of miracle in the Dead Sea, and
develops to a still higher point the legend of the salt statue of Lot's
wife, enriching the worl