ht their ancestors into the coastlands of Canaan in
consequence of an earth-quake on the shores of "the Assyrian Lake." But
the lake is more probably to be looked for in the neighbourhood of the
Persian Gulf than in the valley of the Jordan.

The vale of Siddim, and "the cities of the plain," stood at the northern
end of the Dead Sea. Here were the "slime-pits" from which the naphtha
was extracted, and which caused the defeat of the Canaanitish princes by
the Babylonian army. The legend which placed the pillar of salt into
which Lot's wife was changed at the southern extremity of the Dead Sea
was of late origin, probably not earlier than the days when Herod built
his fortress of Machaerus on the impregnable cliffs of Moab, and the
name of Gebel Usdum, given by the modern Arabs to one of the
mountain-summits to the south of the sea proves nothing as to the site
of the city of Sodom. Names in the east are readily transferred from one
locality to another, and a mountain is not the same as a city in a
plain.

There are two sufficient reasons why it is to the north rather than to
the south that we must look for the remains of the doomed cities, among
the numerous tumuli which rise above the rich and fertile plain in the
neighbourhood of Jericho, where the ancient "slime-pits" can still be
traced. Geology has taught us that throughout the historical period the
Dead Sea and the country immediately to the south of it have undergone
no change. What the lake is to-day, it must have been in the days of
Abraham. It has neither grown nor shrunk in size, and the barren salt
with which it poisons the ground must have equally poisoned it then. No
fertile valley, like the vale of Siddim, could have existed in the
south; no prosperous Canaanitish cities could have grown up among the
desolate tracts of the southern wilderness. As we are expressly told in
the Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), the Canaanites dwelt only "by the coast
of Jordan," not in the desert far beyond the reach of the fertilizing
stream.

But there is another reason which excludes the southern site. "When
Abraham got up early in the morning," we are told, "he looked towards
Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld,
and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."
Such a sight was possible from the hills of Hebron; if the country lay
at the northern end of the Dead Sea, it would have been impossible had
it been south of it.