As we
have already seen, traveller after traveller, Catholic and
Protestant, now visits the Dead Sea, and hardly one of them follows
the New Testament injunction to "remember Lot's wife." Nearly every
one of them seems to think it best to forget her. Of the great mass
of pious legends they are shy enough, but that of Lot's wife, as a
rule, they seem never to have heard of, and if they do allude to it
they simply cover the whole subject with a haze of pious rhetoric.[[260b]]
Naturally, under this state of things, there has followed the
usual attempt to throw off from Christendom the responsibility of
the old belief, and in 1887 came a curious effort of this sort. In
that year appeared the Rev. Dr. Cunningham Geikie's valuable work
on _The Holy Land and the Bible_. In it he makes the following
statement as to the salt formation at Usdum: "Here and there,
hardened portions of salt withstanding the water, while all around
them melts and wears off, rise up isolated pillars, one of which
bears among the Arabs the name of `Lot's wife.
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