[[222]]
In all this there is nothing presenting any special difficulty to
the modern geologist or geographer; but with the early dweller in
Palestine the case was very different. The rocky, barren desolation
of the Dead Sea region impressed him deeply; he naturally reasoned
upon it; and this impression and reasoning we find stamped into the
pages of his sacred literature, rendering them all the more
precious as a revelation of the earlier thought of mankind. The
long circumstantial account given in Genesis, its application in
Deuteronomy, its use by Amos, by Isaiah, by Jeremiah, by Zephaniah,
and by Ezekiel, the references to it in the writings attributed to
St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. Jude, in the Apocalypse, and, above
all, in more than one utterance of the Master himself--all show how
deeply these geographical features impressed the Jewish mind.
At a very early period, myths and legends, many and circumstantial,
grew up to explain features then so incomprehensible.
As the myth and legend grew up among the Greeks of a refusal of
hospitality to Zeus and Hermes by the village in Phrygia, and the
consequent sinking of that beautiful region with its inhabitants
beneath a lake and morass, so there came belief in a similar
offence by the people of the beautiful valley of Siddim, and the
consequent sinking of that valley with its inhabitants beneath the
waters of the Dead Sea.
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