At great length he brings all his shrewdness and learning to bear
against the whole legend of the actual transformation of Lot's wife
and the existence of the salt pillar, and ends by saying that "the
whole story is due to the vanity of some and the credulity of more."
In the beginning of the eighteenth century we find new tributaries
to this rivulet of scientific thought. In 1701 Father Felix
Beaugrand dismisses the Dead Sea legends and the salt statue very
curtly and dryly--expressing not his belief in it, but a
conventional wish to believe.
In 1709 a scholar appeared in another part of Europe and of
different faith, who did far more than any of his predecessors to
envelop the Dead Sea legends in an atmosphere of truth--Adrian
Reland, professor at the University of Utrecht. His work on
Palestine is a monument of patient scholarship, having as its
nucleus a love of truth as truth: there is no irreverence in him,
but he quietly brushes away a great mass of myths and legends: as
to the statue of Lot's wife, he treats it warily, but applies the
comparative method to it with killing effect, by showing that the
story of its miraculous renewal is but one among many of its kind.
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