But, unfortunately,
having a Frenchman's dread of ridicule, he attempted to give a
rationalistic explanation of what he calls "the enormous needles
of salt washed out by the winter rain," and their connection with
the Lot's wife myth, and declared his firm belief that she, "being
delayed by curiosity or terror, was crushed by a rock which rolled
down from the mountain, and when Lot and his children turned about
they saw at the place where she had been only the rock of salt
which covered her body."
But this would not do at all, and an eminent ecclesiastic privately
and publicly expostulated with De Saulcy--very naturally declaring
that "it was not Lot who wrote the book of Genesis."
The result was that another edition of De Saulcy's work was
published by a Church Book Society, with the offending passage
omitted; but a passage was retained really far more suggestive of
heterodoxy, and this was an Arab legend accounting for the origin
of certain rocks near the Dead Sea curiously resembling salt
formations.
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