August 20, 2019 • 43 mins
You’ve probably heard the Biblical tale of Lot’s wife, in which a trio of angels destroy a couple of ancient cities and the resulting blast turns a woman into a pillar of salt. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe set aside most of the theology to ponder if and how a human body could become a big old chunk of salt.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick in today. You know, I didn't
think about this until just this moment. But this is
(00:21):
another geo mythology episode, isn't it? It ultimately is. Yeah,
we are, of course talking about an often overlooked figure
from from the Old Testament and from from from from
Jewish myth and legend. We're going to be talking about
lots wife. That's right. The story of Lot's wife is
a traditional Jewish story that comes from the Torah. It's
(00:43):
from the Book of Genesis, chapter nineteen. So I guess
we should explain the context of the story before we
read the relevant passage. All right, So we're in the
part of the Book of Genesis after God has revealed
himself to Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish religion, and
so Abraham now has a relationship with God, and we're
learning about Abraham and Uh and some of his relatives,
(01:05):
and one of his relatives is his nephew Lot. That's right.
So basically what happens is Abraham catches wind that three
angels are about to smite the cities of Sodom and gomor. Yeah.
The reasoning is that these cities are very bad and
God doesn't like them, and they're full of wicked people.
But Abraham tries to reason with God. He says, now,
wait a minute, are you going to destroy all the
(01:25):
good people in these cities along with all the wicked people?
So he begins to wade into theologically murky waters, right, like,
if if bad things must happen to the bad people,
what about the good people in those cities, what should
we do about them? Right? And he actually is successful
in negotiating with God because he argues him down, basically
because God, at first it's like, okay, what if they're
(01:46):
fifty people, fifty good people in the city, would that
be enough to spare the city? And God says yes, sure, yeah,
that's okay, you make a good point, he's like. But
then Abraham starts hedging, right, He's like, I don't wait,
I don't know if I can find fifty good people.
I mean, that's that's a lot, right, But yeah, it
begins talking him down, Well, what about forty five? What
about forty etcetera. Ultimately brings it down to a mere
ten righteous individuals in the city. And uh, and God agrees, Okay,
(02:10):
if you can find ten righteous people, I'll spare these cities, right,
And so then a couple of angels are sent to
the city presumably I guess to like do some recon
to figure it out. Yeah, yeah, we're dealing with you know,
this is the Old Testament God, whose powers are at
once like more like dramatic and cataclysmic, but also requires
(02:30):
like foot soldiers to literally go to the town to
conduct some surveillance, a little recon. Yeah, there's less of
a sense of sort of automatic omniscitions. It's more like,
you know, he gets information from beings that work for him, right,
And so he sends these two angels down to to
scope things out, to do the count, and they visit
Abraham's nephew a lot. Now the angels are in disguise,
(02:51):
of course, and and this is ultimately a trope that
you've seen a lot of different myths and legends throughout history,
the idea that the people that are coming to to
pay you visit, whether you're having a chance encounter with
might actually be divine beings in disguise. Uh yeah, I
mean this does show up a lot in the Bible.
In fact, it also shows up later in in Christian
(03:12):
mythology with like the Parables of Jesus where he talks
about like, you know, the person who you show a
kindness to or you shoot you do not show a
kindness to might have been me, right. Yeah, But but
then also there are other tales and other traditions that
involved like a mysterious stranger who turns out to be
a powerful being of some sort of the other. And
as this tale makes clear, one of the most important
(03:35):
ways of being righteous in the ancient world was showing hospitality. Actually,
this is something that I think is under emphasized in
a lot of the like morality tales of today. You
see it hugely important in the mythology and religion of
the ancient world, is like being a good host. Yeah,
especially with the story of Lot's wife. Like growing up,
(03:56):
I vaguely remember it being brought up in in church
from time to time, but more more to the point,
you would see it in like like Chit tracks like
some sort of you know, you know, cartoon that is
ultimately kind of like wallowing an awfulness and and trying
and and using the story to spin off a really
(04:16):
um homophobic message. Oh yeah, that's weird, like I think,
especially in the twentieth century, for some reason, the Sodom
and Gomorrah story came to be associated with condemnations of homosexuality,
which is not really what what the story and the
Bible is focused on. Right, Yeah, Ultimately there's a story
about hospitality, and as it turns out, you know, Lots,
(04:37):
a Lot and his wife are really the only people
that are that show any hospitality to these two angels
in disguise, right, They take the angels in hosts them
at their house, and then the story turns fairly horrific,
like a mob shows up outside the house demanding to
rape the angels that are staying there with him, and
Lot tries to offer up his daughters instead to the mob,
(04:58):
and the mob does not acquiesce to this, and then
the angels instruct a Lot to take his wife and
his children and flee the city because the city is
going to be destroyed. Yeah. Basically, they're like, look, we're
not gonna hit our tin righteous individual quota here, but
you two seem all right, so you should clear out,
and so they do. They attempt to clear out, to
flee the city right as it's about to be smited,
(05:19):
and uh and and but they warned them like, look,
you cannot turn around, You cannot look back at the
city while it is a mid smite, or it's gonna
be very unpleasant for you. Uh. And so they they're
heading out, they're fleeing the destruction. But then Lot's wife
either she doesn't listen or she can't help herself, but
she turns around and looks backward at the city as
(05:43):
it is destroyed by the divine fire. And then this
turns her into a pillar of salt. Yeah, so I
want to read this passage from the King James translation.
It goes, the sun was risen upon the earth when
Lot entered into Zoar, and that's like another village that
they were fleeing to a small place. Then the Lord
reigned upon Sodom and upon Gomor a brimstone and fire
(06:06):
from the Lord out of heaven, and he overthrew those
cities and all the plane and all the inhabitants of
the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But
his wife looked back from behind him, and she became
a pillar of salt, a pillar of salt. This always uh, this,
this is the detail that always captivated me the most.
It's this strange, It's like an intriguing, sad, tragic story.
(06:29):
It doesn't you know, it doesn't really explain her motives. Uh.
And that's something that a lot of people have been
able to read back into with like literature about this story.
The one main thing that comes to mind for me
is the poem by the Russian poet and Akamatva called
Lot's Wife. Do you mind if I read this here?
This is the translation by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.
(06:51):
It goes, and the just man trailed God's shining agent
over a black mountain in his giant track, while a
restless voice kept harrying his woman. It's not too late.
You can still look back at the red towers of
your native Sodom, the square where once you sang, the
spinning shed, at the empty windows set in the tall
(07:11):
house where sons and daughters blessed your marriage bed. A
single glance, a sudden dart of pain stitching her eyes
before she made a sound, Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground. Who will
grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant
for our concern? Yet in my heart I'll never deny
(07:33):
her who suffered death because she chose to turn. Oh
that's beautiful and sad, and it captures, you know, ultimately
a lot of the feelings one has when you encounter this,
this passage where yes, she seems to to perish. Um,
you know for the smallest slite. You know, all she
did is glance backwards. Well yeah, And the what I
love about this poem is it emphasizes not the external
(07:56):
view of the city as this place of wickedness that
must be destroy aid, but the view of it as
her home. You know, she's looking back to the place
where her home that she loved all you know, all
her good memories are there. Yeah. Because one of the
things it kind of comes back to our discussions about um,
you know, identity and like what makes a person who
they are? Is it internal or is it external? And
(08:19):
you know, if if a righteous person was able to
live in this city, it stands to reason that the
place was not like otherwise completely um, you know, exotically evil. Well, yeah,
I mean that that gives it obviously the character of myth,
Like this doesn't read like a historical account because you
cannot plausibly imagine a city in which everybody except one
(08:40):
family is just evil to the core. Right, Uh, yeah,
that's pure myths spinning. Even though that kind of myth
spinning still goes on today, um as we consider other
places and and then and people from other places, etcetera.
But of course this hasn't stopped numerous You see a
lot of efforts, especially if you're just searching around online,
people looking for historical accuracy of of Sodom and gomorrah
(09:04):
um and you know, in in similar cases from the
Old Testament. Well, yeah, I think that's a good thing
to note, because we're gonna be talking about some geomethology
in today's episode, possible connections between between mythology and geological
facts about the world. But those those connections are always hypothetical.
We can just discuss possible ways that they line up.
(09:24):
But I just want to say is a note that
when you're reading articles about this kind of thing, you
always have to be wary and try to separate out,
like what are the facts that are being reported versus
what are the conclusions you're being invited or even explicitly
told to draw from them, because they're just all kinds
of reports about archaeological or geological findings from the ancient
(09:45):
levant with headlines like Bible story confirmed. You know. Uh,
And then actually when you read, okay, well, what are
the facts they're talking about? It might be something like,
for example, there was a settlement in the Dead Sea
region that was depopulated at some point, and therefore this
settlement must be the Sodom from the Bible, and it
confirms the Bible story is true about the brimstone and
(10:08):
the angels and all that. Yeah, I feel like reads
like this they tend to, you know, completely discredit the
power of mythology, like it's it's he, it's everything has
to be considered as a as as a potential historical reality,
whereas mythology is this thing that you know, resides between
objective reality and our perception. It is this, I mean,
(10:30):
but it's it's not just mirror, you know, made up
stuff like mythology. You know, it is essentially the skeletal
system on which we we build ourselves in our culture. Well,
an important part of culture, I think is is conceiving
of mythology is perhaps true without being factual, maybe meaning
it somehow contains wisdom, but it is not like an
(10:51):
accurate description of things that happened. Uh, And and the
emphasis on like people this must be an accurate description
of things that happened. First of all, it's such a
confused way of looking at archaeology. I don't think we
can even be confident that the people originally telling stories
like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot's Wife
and the Pillar of Salt meant for the stories to
(11:13):
be taken as literal fact. Maybe they did, but I'm
not so sure they meant that right, Because, as we've
said plenty of times before, we don't want to discredit
the creative abilities of ancient people's and we also don't
want to discredit like things like dreams or certainly um
in cultures where there was some sort of a tradition
of you know, hallucinatory or psychedelic substance use, like that
(11:36):
could have been a factor as well. Like there there
are there are various ways that one can acquire the
elements of these stories, and then of course they're build
upon them through Uh. The oral tradition. Yeah exactly. But
I mean even even if you think about sometimes myths
just being stories that people made up for a reason.
(11:57):
The reason might have been something like to convey up point,
to explain the origin of something, to emphasize some kind
of moral value that you wanted people to take away.
Now that this story is kind of a jumble of
things that are morally absolutely horrific to us today, but
also like in there there is some stuff about that
that's worth thinking about, about hospitality, about like taking people
(12:19):
in and protecting them under your roof. But yeah, so
it just gets so weird when we modern people look
at like scientific evidence and then we say, aha, it
confirms the story from mythology is true. Uh, It's like
it's an impulse that leads to bad reasoning and over
interpretation of little bits of physical evidence. But I think
(12:39):
it also most of the time just completely misses the
point of the story, right, and then you end up
kind of like busting your own myth right, kind of
like like bye bye. So you know, veheminently attempting to
connect mythology with objective reality, like it more often than not,
it just it feels fake. It feels like you're trying
too hard to make this magical unreality real, and in
(13:03):
doing so, you just make it feel like it's just
made up stuff. Yeah, totally. Should we take a break
and then come back and talk about what kind of
myth this might be? Let's do it. Thank Alright, we're
back here on this episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind.
We were talking about lots wife looking enough for looking
at this as a story of geo mythology, and later
(13:24):
we'll even get into a little bit of chemistry. All right,
So there's the question of what kind of myth this
is the idea that Lot's wife turned and looked back
at her home and then turned into a pillar of salt.
A lot of the myths from the ancient Neres and
actually from all over the world I think, can can
be interpreted as origin myths, also known as ideological myths.
(13:45):
We've talked about this on the show before, but this
means that they explain the beginning or the cause of something,
and there are a lot of different forms this can take.
One of the most common kinds of ideological myths is
the myth that explains the name used for something. Ancient
people usually didn't have the tools to study etymology and
understand the origins of words and names that passed down
(14:07):
through the culture. So a lot of ideological myths I
think are built around false cognates, words that sound similar
but aren't actually related. And this would be like if
I said the capital, why is the capital of the
United States called Washington? Well, once there was a man
who lived there and he washed himself in the Potomac
River all the time. He washed himself so much that
(14:31):
he that they would walk by and they would say,
there's old Washington washing himself in a way that never ceases.
And that's where the town gets its name. Obviously that
would be untrue, but that's that's kind of like a
name based adeological myth. A lot of other ideological myths
I think explain the origins of cultural practices or rituals.
(14:53):
So why do we cut a branch of mistletoe and
bring two bulls on the solstice to do this ritual? Well,
it's because once the god thought or was standing under
some mistletoe and it felt, you know, like, so they
come up with something that weaves together all of these
practices or elements of a ceremony that you don't remember
the actual origins of because it's been passed down for generations, right,
(15:14):
and these are the these would be the kind of
stories that would give your everyday rituals and even just
every day you know, sort of vaguely ritualized activities, meaning
because you are embodying some sort of mythic motif. Right,
you're recreating the actions of the gods when you do
this thing now, And so a similar thing happens for
natural phenomenon and natural objects. Why do we have thunder
(15:37):
and lightning? It's because of a storm god throwing angry
bolts of lightning, or fighting a war in the heavens.
Why do we have four seasons and we can't grow
crops in the winter, Well because in the fall and
winter Persephone has to live in Hades and her mother Demeter,
the goddess of the harvest. She mourns her absence and
won't allow crops to grow. But then the spring and summer,
Persephony can come up again and Demeanor rejoy ses and
(16:00):
nourishes or crops. And there are also versions of these
natural ideologies just for objects in the world. When you know,
there will sometimes be a myth explaining the existence of
a mountain or of a giant crater or something like that. Yeah,
And we've discussed some of these on the show before,
like ideas of basically topography being formed from the say,
the bodies of fallen gods, and like, yeah, and so
(16:22):
could the story of Lot's wife be a myth like
this existing to explain the origin of something we don't know?
But I do think it's possible, And so I want
to look at a passage from Josephus, the first century
Jewish historian. He wrote about the story of Lot's Wife
and his work known as the Antiquities of the Jews.
And this is from book one, chapter eleven, translated by
(16:45):
William Wiston, and it starts off talking about the wickedness
of the people who lived in Sodom, saying that Lot
fled the city with his wife and daughters. And then
Josephus writes, God then cast a thunderbolt upon the city
and set it on fire with its inhabitants, and laid
way the country with the like burning, as I formerly
said when I wrote the Jewish War. But Lot's wife
(17:05):
continually turning back to view the city as she went
from it, and being too nicely inquisitive what would become
of it, although God had forbidden her so to do,
was changed into a pillar of salt. For I have
seen it, and it remains at this day. Lot's wife confirmed. Yes, exactly,
Bible story confirmed. That's Josephus's headline. But I mean, WHOA,
(17:27):
that's interesting. So Josephas in the first century CE is
saying that he personally saw a Lot's wife frozen in
time as a pillar of salt, hundreds of years after
the events of this myth allegedly took place. Now, I
think we can assume that joseph Has probably wasn't lying
about having seen something here that's something that he thought
(17:49):
was Lot's wife. But at the same time, I think
we can probably safely assume that whatever he saw was
not actually a human woman who got turned into sodium chloride.
So what could he be talking about. The obvious answer
would be, if not an actual woman that was turned
into salt, something that looks like a humanoid figure, something
that looks like it could be interpreted as such. Right. Uh,
(18:12):
we need to start by stipulating again that we don't
know we don't know the answer to this. But if
we want to examine some possibilities. We can look at
modern analogies. Now today, there are at least two different
things I've found that regularly get called Lot's wife, and
these are strange geological formations or pillars in the area
of the Dead Sea. One is an odd looking rock
(18:33):
pillar standing on a cliff top that overlooks the Dead
Sea on the Jordan's side, which is over on the
eastern side, and it does have an eerily human posture it.
It looks like some local tourism concerns advertise this as
Lots wife. And I couldn't figure out how long people
have been referring to this particular formation as Lot's wife,
(18:55):
but at least today and for some years now they've
been calling it that, and it LUs look creepy. Yeah,
I'd love to hear from some of our listeners who
have visited the area or reside in the area. You
can weigh in on, you know, just what was your
experience looking at this thing that is referred to as
Lot's wife. There is a there's a kind of agony
to the posture of the mineral. I mean, uh, it does.
(19:17):
It's got some pathos to it. You can see it.
I can see Okay, I like, I get the acumen
of a poem almost out of this rock pillar. Another
thing that is often called Lot's Wife is a geological
formation on the opposite side of the Dead Sea, on
the west side, on a hilltop now known as Mount Sodom.
This formation, also called Lot's Wife, is kind of funny
(19:39):
when you actually see people approach it, Like I watched
a video of some tourists just taking video of themselves
going up to see lots Wife. And this one is
funny because it's less suggestive of human posture and and
shape than the formation on the Jordan's side, and because
it's gigantic. If it were a Lot's wife, Lot's Wife
was huge. And I should also went out that like
(20:00):
sub subsequent geologic formations in other parts of the world
have been dubbed Lot's Wife merely because they sort of
vaguely resemble a humanoid form. And I think arguably that's
I mean, that's what's happening in all of these cases.
It's like it kind of looks like a person let
and then we have this myth of a person having
turned to a salt or to some stone like substance,
(20:22):
and that is like the natural thing to call it.
Right now, Mount Sodom is interesting because it is actually
almost entirely made of salt. It's like more than salt,
with a few layers of other strata. It's got things
like limestone, and it hosts a gigantic salt cave that
is miles long. But there is no evidence whatsoever that
either of these formations were once a human. They appear
(20:45):
to be fairly normal mineral columns. But one could pretty
easily imagine one of two scenarios. You've either got the
myth already existing independently, and somebody who had both read
the story and seen the geological features put two and
two together, and then people like Josephus come along and
hear from those people and say, look, this is Lot's wife,
(21:07):
and why would you question it. Yeah, it's kind of
like the whole mermaid scenario. Did you know, to what
extent to someone see a manatee and think, oh, it's
a mermaid, or associate with the Mermaid's tale, the Tale
of the Mermaid, or is it the reverse right where
someone sees manatees and to make sense of it, they
create a story of mermaids exactly. And that second part
is the other option. I was going to say that
(21:28):
the actual geo mythology inspiration, maybe some tribe in the
ancient Dead Sea region was aware of either one of
these geological formations or another one like it that doesn't
exist anymore, that is not identified the same way now,
maybe eroded, But anyway, they were aware of some kind
of geological formation that looks kind of like a human,
and then a great storyteller comes along to come up
(21:49):
with a tale of how that person was crystallized in
place there, and that's why you're always hospitable to visitors. Well,
you know, mythologies are interesting that way because often they're
often a woven together tapestry of pre existing streams of
storytelling tradition. I can absolutely see the possibility of how
like a story that was once about, you know, showing
(22:11):
hospitality to agents of the Lord, we're just showing hospitality
in general, got woven together with like somebody just stuck
in ideological myth into part of it. Yeah. Well, I
mean we even see this, of course, with the evolution
of of modern tales that are told you know, where
there'll be one version of it, like you just look
at our comic book characters, right, the evolution of some
(22:31):
of them from characters of pure exploitation two characters that
are being used to you know, discuss some sort of uh,
you know, socially relevant topic. Uh So, I mean stories evolve.
That's that's essential to the human experience. And of course
we see that in mythology as well. Uh. You know,
we always have to remember that the myths, even though
they are often encountered in some stationary form, recorded in
(22:55):
a book that is at least presented to you as
if it has not changed over the course of millennia. Uh,
it is still a thing that is The story itself
is something that is fluid and will have changed through
time and through tellings. Yes, and as for a single
ideological element being inserted into a story that already exists,
you can see that in storytelling today. Think about how
common it is for there to be like a historical story.
(23:18):
Think the Forrest Gump, okay, movie Forrest Gump. How many
things are there in that story where you could have
the story be pretty much exactly the same without it,
except they inserted a little thing where like Forrest Gump
invented to have a nice day slogan, you know, on
a T shirt with the smiley face, or there are
a bunch of things like that in the movie where
they just insert a little fake ideology to say, oh,
(23:40):
and by the way, I remember this thing from history
Forrest Gump did that. I forgot about that, the myth
making of Forrest Gump. I don't know why people like
things like that so much, but they clearly do, because
it's in a lot of stories and movies to just
have a little thing that people recognize from the real
world and say, hey, this fictional character there. Actually the
reason it's that way, I feel like stuff is that
(24:01):
there have been films that do that with a leaning
tower of of pizza, right, yeah, yeah, where where a
character bumps into it and makes it crooked, you know,
or something that out to that effect. Yeah, totally the
Superman movie. Maybe Superman like fixes it, he fixes it.
That makes people mad? Why said always that in Superman
movies Superman is protecting monuments from destruction. I remember that,
(24:26):
especially being the case in Superman four, where like great
monuments are under attack by the villains and Superman has
to prevent them from being destroyed. Right, it should be
the people that mat are, right, Yeah, But Anyway, I
wanted to say something else about possible geological explanations for
mythology like this. Another thing has to do with salt
formations around high salinity bodies of water. And there, of
(24:46):
course is a famously salty body of water in the
vicinity here. Yeah, that's right, the Dead Sea, of course,
which is not which is not an ocean, by the way,
The Dead Sea is a is a hyper saline lake.
It is like a super salt salty locked up lake.
The water of the Dead Sea is fascinating. It is
so salty that no large life forms dwell there. No fish, no, no,
(25:10):
no insects live in there, No plants live in there.
There are some micro organisms I think that live around
vents and stuff near the bottom of it. Right, and
then in certain areas you'll find a human tourists floating
in it, right, And that's rather easily. Yes, that's one
of the fascinating things about the water there, because it's
so saline. I guess the density of the water is
(25:31):
so much higher than normal. They say, it's almost like
you can just sit on the water. You know, it's
really hard to sink. You float so easily. Most ocean
water is about three point five percent salt in solution,
the Dead Sea is something like five to ten times
as briny as normal ocean water. Yeah. Yeah, we're talking
super salty like, uh, you know, the kind of similar salinity.
(25:52):
Of course, one encounters in salt water isolation tanks, float tanks,
you know, where you're you're floating in to this highly
salty water that almost takes on this like viscous consistent consistency. Yeah.
But the first time he games it takes getting east
to well, you might wonder why is the Dead Sea
so salty? The answer is that the Dead Sea does
(26:15):
not having natural outlet. There's nowhere for the water of
the Dead Sea to drain out to. Uh. And part
of the reason for this is that the bottom of
the Dead Sea is more than fourteen hundred feet below
sea level, and the basin it sits in is just
generally one of the lowest elevations of any land area
on Earth, depending on where you're measuring. It is sometimes
(26:36):
cited as the lowest land elevation on the planet. So,
if you're the lowest elevation, where could the water drain
to if there's nothing downhill from it? Right, So, while
it doesn't have a natural outlet. It does have a
natural source, which is the Jordan River. So the Jordan
River feeds into the Dead Sea occasionally. Of course, as
you know, fresh water comes through has tiny amounts of
(26:57):
dissolved salt and mineral stuff that it carries with it.
The water in the Dead Sea just stays there, doesn't
drain away. It stays there until it evaporates. But of
course this is an extremely hot and dry desert climate,
so evaporation is extremely aggressive. But that evaporation removes water
without removing the salt. And then with anthropogenic changes to
(27:19):
the flow of the Jordan River, the Dead Sea now
gets less water fed into it ever than ever before,
and it's shrinking rapidly. I read that the water level
has been falling at a rate of something like three
feet or about a meter a year, which is fast.
But with this much salt dissolved in the water, the
water can leave deposits of crystallized salt around its edges.
(27:41):
In fact, if you walk around the shores of the
Dead Sea, you will find strange sparkling domes and piles
of salt crystals collecting on rocks due to wave action
and evaporation. Yeah, and and any of these are just
they are really alien to behold strange looking formations, which
makes one thing, Well, perhaps some formation like this could
(28:02):
have caught the eye of someone in the past, and
either it would have been exactly the sort of thing
you would incorporate into a myth, or would serve to
spin off a new myth exactly. Yeah, So salt crystals
like these, they can take on extremely bizarre shape. Sometimes
they crystallize over a over a vertical rock column, or
maybe over an old tree trunk or a post driven
into the ground or something anything that has a sort
(28:24):
of vertical form. You can see how pretty easily heavy
crystallization of salt on the outside of it could start
to take on human looking form. And there's also I
would just say something about the the nature and shapes
of salt crystals that naturally draws the eye like it
looks unusual in the landscape, It looks kind of alive.
(28:44):
Some of the salt crystals can form these large cubes
and stuff you take on angles that don't look natural. Yeah,
there's a there's a geometric quality to it. Yeah, that
that is it generally seems out of keeping with the
surrounding environment. So what was Josephus looking at when he
said he saw all Lot's wife in person. Well, we
don't know for sure, and we don't know if whatever
(29:04):
he saw was actually the inspiration for the story in
the first place. But if it were, I think it
would be in keeping with many other ideological tales in
the Bible and in human mythology. Absolutely well, on that note,
I think we should take one more break, and when
we come back, let's talk a little bit about salt
salt in the human body. And a really fabulous paper
(29:25):
that we ran across that really breaks down how an
Old Testament woman could be transformed into a pillar of
salt or salt like substance. Thank alright, we're back. So
one way that I would often that I would often
think about this story as as I would think, Okay,
(29:46):
a person being turned into just salt. That doesn't make
a lot of sense, you know, because salt salt is
is of course, you know, is the salt comes from somewhere, Like,
how do you replace all of us with salt? Certainly
our bodies contain salt. How much salt does our body?
It does our body? Do our bodies contain. Well, let's
let's let's break down this a little bit. So first
(30:07):
of all, salt is obviously sodium and chlorine, and we
need sodium for example, as a it's a key extracellular electrolyte,
and it's crucial to a number of health functions. Now,
for the for the most part, we consume way too
much salt today. Uh though the minimum consumption is roughly
I've read, uh, fifteen hundred milligrams a day, while the
(30:29):
American Heart Association says the absolute minimum is more like
five hundred milligrams a day, and the average American consumes
something like uh thirty four hundred milligrams of sodium per day.
Those are amateur numbers, um. And Now, also according to
the Salt Association, chlorine is also important preserving acid balance
in the body, aiding potassium absorption. It also contributes to
(30:51):
the hydrochloric acid in our gut, and it enhances the
blood's ability to transport carbon dioxide. UM. And so all
of this breaks down to, like is a rough average,
an adult human body contains two fifty grams of salt,
and any excess is naturally excreted by the body. Now
we we've talked about excretion of excess salt in a
(31:12):
past episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, um where
we discussed a drinking salt water. So I recommend that
one to to anyone who would like it even more
salt after this episode. So if Lot's wife, you know,
wasn't so much turned into a pillar of salt, if
we're gonna say, okay, what if the magic rays of
the city smiting taking place, what if it just reduced
(31:34):
her to her body salt content, you know, like just
you know, a holy ray that that destroys everything except salt.
How much salt would be left? It would be you know,
about two grams of salt. That's roughly what one point
to four cups what we got our cup and a
quarter of salt in our bodies. Well, I mean it's
impressive when you think about it, you know, in those terms,
(31:55):
I guess, but in terms of like a person being
reduced to that, uh, you know, it's not it's not
really a pillar of salt, they would have to say.
And then she turned back and was reduced to a
small amount of salt. Man, I love thinking about the
stuff in human bodies. In measuring quantities used for cooking. Yeah,
because according to Harvard Health that's less than nine ounces
(32:15):
and about the amount in three or four salt shakers. Wait,
do the salt shakers have a little bits of dry
rice in them? Um? I don't know if it's necessary
in such an area to environment. So that that's one
place my mind went in terms of trying to figure
out what's what's happening. Now. Obviously your mind also turns
to of course fossilization. Like fossilization is a very real
(32:38):
process by which a living body is turned into a
solid mineral form. But of course that's not going to
occur in an instant. It's something that takes place over
the course of geologic time. Uh. Likewise, I'm thinking, Okay,
Essentially what we're talking about is a pair of nuclear
blasts taking place that have been uh, you know, unleashed
(33:01):
by angelic forces. Okay, might might that's the might the
the flash of this, might the the radiation from this
have incinerated the body and reduced it to ash. Well,
you know, that's one way of looking at it. But
it wouldn't produce like a call, like a statue of ash.
It would just obliterate a body if it was turning
into ash. And then of course so one thinks to mummies,
(33:23):
but of course mummies are you know, are just examples
of body that has been when which the fluid has
been removed. Uh. And likewise, there are a number of
different you know, preservation um uh models for the human
body where you're you know, you're adding something or replacing something.
But none of these are processes that are going to
take place in an instant And there there are forms
(33:44):
of natural mummification that take place. Uh. We often think
that natural mummification in some cultures preceded deliberate mummification, But
you wouldn't normally think of that as like something that
somebody would look at and see a mummy and say
they turned to salt. Now you could, you could play
a kind of crazy jigsaw of different natural effects if
(34:04):
anything goes right. What if there was some kind of
natural mummy of a woman in the Dead Sea region
that suddenly, like because I don't know, a storm or
something blew all this salt crystal on her and then
it covered her body and salt and she glistened all
over and people said, look there's the salt woman. Yeah
you know, yeah, it's one of those where it's Altosately
a lot of steps are required to get to the
(34:24):
place you want to go, right. So I kept looking
around about this. I'm like, somebody's out there. There has
to have been a scientist, a pure scientist, who decided
to tackle this is kind of a thought experiment. One
of these great playful chemistry papers, like the like what
are the thermodynamics of Hell and all that? Right? Or
one of another favorite that I have more of a
biology paper is um like how a centaur's body work
(34:48):
run across that one where the they the authors argued
that a centaur would require two hearts in order to
power this you know, conjoined uh system. So I was
lucky enough to find just such a paper on Lot's
wife titled the Chemical Death of Lot's Wife Discussion Paper.
This was published in the Journal of the Royal Society
(35:10):
of Medicine in July of and it was by Irving M. Clots,
pH d, Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University. And I want
to note here that the Clots was not some like
weird quack right in a bunch of like biblical papers,
uh you know, which I think should be obvious given
the details of not only you know his his employment,
(35:32):
but also the publication. But I should stress that during
his lifetime he authored more than two hundred scientific articles
and pure view journals, and he also wrote numerous books,
including one titled Diamond Dealers and Feather Merchants Tales from
the Sciences, which sounds sounds quite good. I meant to
hunt up a copy of it. So anyway, he's I
(35:53):
feel like he's very much engaging on a thought experiment here,
but his his science cred is is ultimately above reproach it.
But so he's going to take this from a like
biochemistry point of view and say, all right, if a
person was turned into salt, how would that work? What
would that mean exactly? So, first of all, he reminds
us that we shouldn't take salt too literally. Rather, he says,
(36:14):
it's likely, you know, used in a generic sense to
refer to any solid with mineral characteristics to it and
perhaps a salt like taste. So he's not necessarily talking
about sodium chloride. But he says that in the Bible,
if they said salt, they probably mins just any kind
of crystalline mineral. A lot of things taste vaguely salty. Uh.
(36:34):
And he uses the point of comparison to the way
the Bible uses the word plague to refer to basically anything,
you know, anything that's like an epidemic. So he writes quote,
A particularly likely candidate for the salt that caused the
death of Mislot is calcite. This mineral is very susceptible
to a precipitation in the presence of low concentrations of
(36:56):
free calcium and carbonate, both of which are present ubiquitously
in all human tissues. And there he's talking about calcium
ions and carbonate ions. So what must have happened, he argues,
is something something occurred to overwhelm the homeostatic systems that
maintain calcium and carbonate levels below critical values, thus leading
(37:19):
to the onset of calcite formation. Uh. And this would
have been due to some sort of sort of you know,
catastrophic stress. And so what could have could have caused
this to happen? Well, Clots looks to the text and
considers that they were running from a powerful firestorm radiating
outward from the from this side of destruction, and that
as she stops and looks back, perhaps she's then hit
(37:42):
by a powerful blast of hot air with high c
O two content along with heat and radiation. So it
would be the hot air coming in with the pressure
and the CEO two, the chemical properties of the CEO
two content, and how that would affect the pH of
the blood and the body, and then the heat and radiation. Now,
I think I understand from his analysis that it doesn't
(38:04):
actually matter that she's looking back at the city. He's saying, like,
maybe it's just that she stopped running away, right, It's
more that she stopped and looked back, or perhaps kept
stopping and looking back, So you know, it's not about
like your eyes beholding the thing, right, So it's not
the Josephus issue. Remember Josephas says the problem is that
she thought too kindly of of Sodom and that she
(38:25):
should have been I guess colder in her in her
condemnation of it. Right, This is basically this Claus's argument
is that she's still in the danger zone from a
terrific blast that's taking place. So Clots goes on from
here to do a lot of chemical analysis on how
all this would break down. And I'm not going to
attempt to summarize that here. If you're if you're more
(38:46):
of a chemistry whiz, I suggest looking up this paper.
It's available for free online and a PDF form, But
I am going to skip ahead to his final summary quote. Thus,
by turning around in her direction of flight, Miss Lot
exposed herself instantly to stresses that generated immediate enormous escalations
in concentrations of calcium and carbonate, so that the critical
(39:10):
limits specified by equation six, which was something he uh
uh he covered earlier in the paper, were exceeded overwhelmingly
and instantaneously. Internal massive pervasive crystallization of calcite followed. Immediately,
Misslat died instantly of rigor calcium carbonitus and turned into
(39:31):
a rigid block of calcite. Since the prevailing winds from
the Dead Sea always carry along a spray of salt
which is accumulated on this pillar, succeeding generations to modern
times have testified that this column is a block of salt. Okay,
So he lays out a process by which, in the
presence of of certain chemical pressures and you know, high
(39:54):
pressure and temperature from this blast, the body could conceivably
undergo rapid crystallization s of its calcium content. Because like
the some of the calcium containing compounds in the body,
like the albumen he refers to, like those good d nature.
The calcium gets freed, it joins up with the carbonate,
you get rapid crystallization, and you get a calcite body.
(40:16):
It's pretty creepy. Yeah, it is. It's tremendously creepy. I
don't know if he makes the case really that this
could happen in reality. One thing I wasn't quite clear
on is whether he's just saying, like, Okay, what's the
most plausible possible, like chain of of chemical things you're
leading to the crystallization of the body like this, or
if he's actually saying, oh, yeah, given the right circumstances,
(40:38):
this couldn't happen to a human body. Yeah. Yeah, it's um.
You know, it's it's a playful article, I feel, but
it's not. It doesn't have an obvious like wink moment.
You know. It's it's very um, you know, it's it's
very professional. It's delivery. I feel like modern papers of this, uh,
this variety would tend to have a few more winks
towards the fact that it is a thought experiment, if
(40:58):
not outright saying a thought experiment, and he's a little
more I guess in since he's a little more playful
with how he's framing it. But but yeah, I love
this this idea of that the chemical death of miss
Loot and he always refers to her as misslot instead
of just lots wife in the paper. Yeah, so, uh,
you know, again, not not a situation where where this
(41:21):
paper is confirming a biblical account, Bible story confirmed, but
the crystallization of calcite in the blood. But but it is.
It is another one of the examples of like, what's
a what's a completely outrageous scenario from you know, from
from myth and then and then trying to sort of
recreate it to reverse engineering using science and it's it's
(41:41):
fascinating how sometimes you can you can just recreate how
something like that could occur. And it makes me want
to see more like calcite death rays in our science fiction.
This has been interesting, Robert, Yeah, yeah, I had. I
had a lot of fun uh researching and reading about
Lots wife. I'm also reminded how in um Our Scott Baker,
there's a second Apocalypse saga. He has a bit about
(42:03):
wizards that come into contact with a particular uh, substance,
it causes their bodies to essentially turn into a pillar
of salt um and then it's uh, it's hinted that
that salt can then be used for for other purposes.
So I'll leave leave that out there for anyone who
wants to explore those books on their own. In the meantime,
(42:24):
if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, heading over to stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find them. Uh.
And if you want to support our show, the best
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(42:47):
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(43:10):
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listen to your favorite shows.
My welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick in today. You know, I didn't
think about this until just this moment. But this is
(00:21):
another geo mythology episode, isn't it? It ultimately is. Yeah,
we are, of course talking about an often overlooked figure
from from the Old Testament and from from from from
Jewish myth and legend. We're going to be talking about
lots wife. That's right. The story of Lot's wife is
a traditional Jewish story that comes from the Torah. It's
(00:43):
from the Book of Genesis, chapter nineteen. So I guess
we should explain the context of the story before we
read the relevant passage. All right, So we're in the
part of the Book of Genesis after God has revealed
himself to Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish religion, and
so Abraham now has a relationship with God, and we're
learning about Abraham and Uh and some of his relatives,
(01:05):
and one of his relatives is his nephew Lot. That's right.
So basically what happens is Abraham catches wind that three
angels are about to smite the cities of Sodom and gomor. Yeah.
The reasoning is that these cities are very bad and
God doesn't like them, and they're full of wicked people.
But Abraham tries to reason with God. He says, now,
wait a minute, are you going to destroy all the
(01:25):
good people in these cities along with all the wicked people?
So he begins to wade into theologically murky waters, right, like,
if if bad things must happen to the bad people,
what about the good people in those cities, what should
we do about them? Right? And he actually is successful
in negotiating with God because he argues him down, basically
because God, at first it's like, okay, what if they're
(01:46):
fifty people, fifty good people in the city, would that
be enough to spare the city? And God says yes, sure, yeah,
that's okay, you make a good point, he's like. But
then Abraham starts hedging, right, He's like, I don't wait,
I don't know if I can find fifty good people.
I mean, that's that's a lot, right, But yeah, it
begins talking him down, Well, what about forty five? What
about forty etcetera. Ultimately brings it down to a mere
ten righteous individuals in the city. And uh, and God agrees, Okay,
(02:10):
if you can find ten righteous people, I'll spare these cities, right,
And so then a couple of angels are sent to
the city presumably I guess to like do some recon
to figure it out. Yeah, yeah, we're dealing with you know,
this is the Old Testament God, whose powers are at
once like more like dramatic and cataclysmic, but also requires
(02:30):
like foot soldiers to literally go to the town to
conduct some surveillance, a little recon. Yeah, there's less of
a sense of sort of automatic omniscitions. It's more like,
you know, he gets information from beings that work for him, right,
And so he sends these two angels down to to
scope things out, to do the count, and they visit
Abraham's nephew a lot. Now the angels are in disguise,
(02:51):
of course, and and this is ultimately a trope that
you've seen a lot of different myths and legends throughout history,
the idea that the people that are coming to to
pay you visit, whether you're having a chance encounter with
might actually be divine beings in disguise. Uh yeah, I
mean this does show up a lot in the Bible.
In fact, it also shows up later in in Christian
(03:12):
mythology with like the Parables of Jesus where he talks
about like, you know, the person who you show a
kindness to or you shoot you do not show a
kindness to might have been me, right. Yeah, But but
then also there are other tales and other traditions that
involved like a mysterious stranger who turns out to be
a powerful being of some sort of the other. And
as this tale makes clear, one of the most important
(03:35):
ways of being righteous in the ancient world was showing hospitality. Actually,
this is something that I think is under emphasized in
a lot of the like morality tales of today. You
see it hugely important in the mythology and religion of
the ancient world, is like being a good host. Yeah,
especially with the story of Lot's wife. Like growing up,
(03:56):
I vaguely remember it being brought up in in church
from time to time, but more more to the point,
you would see it in like like Chit tracks like
some sort of you know, you know, cartoon that is
ultimately kind of like wallowing an awfulness and and trying
and and using the story to spin off a really
(04:16):
um homophobic message. Oh yeah, that's weird, like I think,
especially in the twentieth century, for some reason, the Sodom
and Gomorrah story came to be associated with condemnations of homosexuality,
which is not really what what the story and the
Bible is focused on. Right, Yeah, Ultimately there's a story
about hospitality, and as it turns out, you know, Lots,
(04:37):
a Lot and his wife are really the only people
that are that show any hospitality to these two angels
in disguise, right, They take the angels in hosts them
at their house, and then the story turns fairly horrific,
like a mob shows up outside the house demanding to
rape the angels that are staying there with him, and
Lot tries to offer up his daughters instead to the mob,
(04:58):
and the mob does not acquiesce to this, and then
the angels instruct a Lot to take his wife and
his children and flee the city because the city is
going to be destroyed. Yeah. Basically, they're like, look, we're
not gonna hit our tin righteous individual quota here, but
you two seem all right, so you should clear out,
and so they do. They attempt to clear out, to
flee the city right as it's about to be smited,
(05:19):
and uh and and but they warned them like, look,
you cannot turn around, You cannot look back at the
city while it is a mid smite, or it's gonna
be very unpleasant for you. Uh. And so they they're
heading out, they're fleeing the destruction. But then Lot's wife
either she doesn't listen or she can't help herself, but
she turns around and looks backward at the city as
(05:43):
it is destroyed by the divine fire. And then this
turns her into a pillar of salt. Yeah, so I
want to read this passage from the King James translation.
It goes, the sun was risen upon the earth when
Lot entered into Zoar, and that's like another village that
they were fleeing to a small place. Then the Lord
reigned upon Sodom and upon Gomor a brimstone and fire
(06:06):
from the Lord out of heaven, and he overthrew those
cities and all the plane and all the inhabitants of
the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But
his wife looked back from behind him, and she became
a pillar of salt, a pillar of salt. This always uh, this,
this is the detail that always captivated me the most.
It's this strange, It's like an intriguing, sad, tragic story.
(06:29):
It doesn't you know, it doesn't really explain her motives. Uh.
And that's something that a lot of people have been
able to read back into with like literature about this story.
The one main thing that comes to mind for me
is the poem by the Russian poet and Akamatva called
Lot's Wife. Do you mind if I read this here?
This is the translation by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.
(06:51):
It goes, and the just man trailed God's shining agent
over a black mountain in his giant track, while a
restless voice kept harrying his woman. It's not too late.
You can still look back at the red towers of
your native Sodom, the square where once you sang, the
spinning shed, at the empty windows set in the tall
(07:11):
house where sons and daughters blessed your marriage bed. A
single glance, a sudden dart of pain stitching her eyes
before she made a sound, Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground. Who will
grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant
for our concern? Yet in my heart I'll never deny
(07:33):
her who suffered death because she chose to turn. Oh
that's beautiful and sad, and it captures, you know, ultimately
a lot of the feelings one has when you encounter this,
this passage where yes, she seems to to perish. Um,
you know for the smallest slite. You know, all she
did is glance backwards. Well yeah, And the what I
love about this poem is it emphasizes not the external
(07:56):
view of the city as this place of wickedness that
must be destroy aid, but the view of it as
her home. You know, she's looking back to the place
where her home that she loved all you know, all
her good memories are there. Yeah. Because one of the
things it kind of comes back to our discussions about um,
you know, identity and like what makes a person who
they are? Is it internal or is it external? And
(08:19):
you know, if if a righteous person was able to
live in this city, it stands to reason that the
place was not like otherwise completely um, you know, exotically evil. Well, yeah,
I mean that that gives it obviously the character of myth,
Like this doesn't read like a historical account because you
cannot plausibly imagine a city in which everybody except one
(08:40):
family is just evil to the core. Right, Uh, yeah,
that's pure myths spinning. Even though that kind of myth
spinning still goes on today, um as we consider other
places and and then and people from other places, etcetera.
But of course this hasn't stopped numerous You see a
lot of efforts, especially if you're just searching around online,
people looking for historical accuracy of of Sodom and gomorrah
(09:04):
um and you know, in in similar cases from the
Old Testament. Well, yeah, I think that's a good thing
to note, because we're gonna be talking about some geomethology
in today's episode, possible connections between between mythology and geological
facts about the world. But those those connections are always hypothetical.
We can just discuss possible ways that they line up.
(09:24):
But I just want to say is a note that
when you're reading articles about this kind of thing, you
always have to be wary and try to separate out,
like what are the facts that are being reported versus
what are the conclusions you're being invited or even explicitly
told to draw from them, because they're just all kinds
of reports about archaeological or geological findings from the ancient
(09:45):
levant with headlines like Bible story confirmed. You know. Uh,
And then actually when you read, okay, well, what are
the facts they're talking about? It might be something like,
for example, there was a settlement in the Dead Sea
region that was depopulated at some point, and therefore this
settlement must be the Sodom from the Bible, and it
confirms the Bible story is true about the brimstone and
(10:08):
the angels and all that. Yeah, I feel like reads
like this they tend to, you know, completely discredit the
power of mythology, like it's it's he, it's everything has
to be considered as a as as a potential historical reality,
whereas mythology is this thing that you know, resides between
objective reality and our perception. It is this, I mean,
(10:30):
but it's it's not just mirror, you know, made up
stuff like mythology. You know, it is essentially the skeletal
system on which we we build ourselves in our culture. Well,
an important part of culture, I think is is conceiving
of mythology is perhaps true without being factual, maybe meaning
it somehow contains wisdom, but it is not like an
(10:51):
accurate description of things that happened. Uh, And and the
emphasis on like people this must be an accurate description
of things that happened. First of all, it's such a
confused way of looking at archaeology. I don't think we
can even be confident that the people originally telling stories
like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot's Wife
and the Pillar of Salt meant for the stories to
(11:13):
be taken as literal fact. Maybe they did, but I'm
not so sure they meant that right, Because, as we've
said plenty of times before, we don't want to discredit
the creative abilities of ancient people's and we also don't
want to discredit like things like dreams or certainly um
in cultures where there was some sort of a tradition
of you know, hallucinatory or psychedelic substance use, like that
(11:36):
could have been a factor as well. Like there there
are there are various ways that one can acquire the
elements of these stories, and then of course they're build
upon them through Uh. The oral tradition. Yeah exactly. But
I mean even even if you think about sometimes myths
just being stories that people made up for a reason.
(11:57):
The reason might have been something like to convey up point,
to explain the origin of something, to emphasize some kind
of moral value that you wanted people to take away.
Now that this story is kind of a jumble of
things that are morally absolutely horrific to us today, but
also like in there there is some stuff about that
that's worth thinking about, about hospitality, about like taking people
(12:19):
in and protecting them under your roof. But yeah, so
it just gets so weird when we modern people look
at like scientific evidence and then we say, aha, it
confirms the story from mythology is true. Uh, It's like
it's an impulse that leads to bad reasoning and over
interpretation of little bits of physical evidence. But I think
(12:39):
it also most of the time just completely misses the
point of the story, right, and then you end up
kind of like busting your own myth right, kind of
like like bye bye. So you know, veheminently attempting to
connect mythology with objective reality, like it more often than not,
it just it feels fake. It feels like you're trying
too hard to make this magical unreality real, and in
(13:03):
doing so, you just make it feel like it's just
made up stuff. Yeah, totally. Should we take a break
and then come back and talk about what kind of
myth this might be? Let's do it. Thank Alright, we're
back here on this episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind.
We were talking about lots wife looking enough for looking
at this as a story of geo mythology, and later
(13:24):
we'll even get into a little bit of chemistry. All right,
So there's the question of what kind of myth this
is the idea that Lot's wife turned and looked back
at her home and then turned into a pillar of salt.
A lot of the myths from the ancient Neres and
actually from all over the world I think, can can
be interpreted as origin myths, also known as ideological myths.
(13:45):
We've talked about this on the show before, but this
means that they explain the beginning or the cause of something,
and there are a lot of different forms this can take.
One of the most common kinds of ideological myths is
the myth that explains the name used for something. Ancient
people usually didn't have the tools to study etymology and
understand the origins of words and names that passed down
(14:07):
through the culture. So a lot of ideological myths I
think are built around false cognates, words that sound similar
but aren't actually related. And this would be like if
I said the capital, why is the capital of the
United States called Washington? Well, once there was a man
who lived there and he washed himself in the Potomac
River all the time. He washed himself so much that
(14:31):
he that they would walk by and they would say,
there's old Washington washing himself in a way that never ceases.
And that's where the town gets its name. Obviously that
would be untrue, but that's that's kind of like a
name based adeological myth. A lot of other ideological myths
I think explain the origins of cultural practices or rituals.
(14:53):
So why do we cut a branch of mistletoe and
bring two bulls on the solstice to do this ritual? Well,
it's because once the god thought or was standing under
some mistletoe and it felt, you know, like, so they
come up with something that weaves together all of these
practices or elements of a ceremony that you don't remember
the actual origins of because it's been passed down for generations, right,
(15:14):
and these are the these would be the kind of
stories that would give your everyday rituals and even just
every day you know, sort of vaguely ritualized activities, meaning
because you are embodying some sort of mythic motif. Right,
you're recreating the actions of the gods when you do
this thing now, And so a similar thing happens for
natural phenomenon and natural objects. Why do we have thunder
(15:37):
and lightning? It's because of a storm god throwing angry
bolts of lightning, or fighting a war in the heavens.
Why do we have four seasons and we can't grow
crops in the winter, Well because in the fall and
winter Persephone has to live in Hades and her mother Demeter,
the goddess of the harvest. She mourns her absence and
won't allow crops to grow. But then the spring and summer,
Persephony can come up again and Demeanor rejoy ses and
(16:00):
nourishes or crops. And there are also versions of these
natural ideologies just for objects in the world. When you know,
there will sometimes be a myth explaining the existence of
a mountain or of a giant crater or something like that. Yeah,
And we've discussed some of these on the show before,
like ideas of basically topography being formed from the say,
the bodies of fallen gods, and like, yeah, and so
(16:22):
could the story of Lot's wife be a myth like
this existing to explain the origin of something we don't know?
But I do think it's possible, And so I want
to look at a passage from Josephus, the first century
Jewish historian. He wrote about the story of Lot's Wife
and his work known as the Antiquities of the Jews.
And this is from book one, chapter eleven, translated by
(16:45):
William Wiston, and it starts off talking about the wickedness
of the people who lived in Sodom, saying that Lot
fled the city with his wife and daughters. And then
Josephus writes, God then cast a thunderbolt upon the city
and set it on fire with its inhabitants, and laid
way the country with the like burning, as I formerly
said when I wrote the Jewish War. But Lot's wife
(17:05):
continually turning back to view the city as she went
from it, and being too nicely inquisitive what would become
of it, although God had forbidden her so to do,
was changed into a pillar of salt. For I have
seen it, and it remains at this day. Lot's wife confirmed. Yes, exactly,
Bible story confirmed. That's Josephus's headline. But I mean, WHOA,
(17:27):
that's interesting. So Josephas in the first century CE is
saying that he personally saw a Lot's wife frozen in
time as a pillar of salt, hundreds of years after
the events of this myth allegedly took place. Now, I
think we can assume that joseph Has probably wasn't lying
about having seen something here that's something that he thought
(17:49):
was Lot's wife. But at the same time, I think
we can probably safely assume that whatever he saw was
not actually a human woman who got turned into sodium chloride.
So what could he be talking about. The obvious answer
would be, if not an actual woman that was turned
into salt, something that looks like a humanoid figure, something
that looks like it could be interpreted as such. Right. Uh,
(18:12):
we need to start by stipulating again that we don't
know we don't know the answer to this. But if
we want to examine some possibilities. We can look at
modern analogies. Now today, there are at least two different
things I've found that regularly get called Lot's wife, and
these are strange geological formations or pillars in the area
of the Dead Sea. One is an odd looking rock
(18:33):
pillar standing on a cliff top that overlooks the Dead
Sea on the Jordan's side, which is over on the
eastern side, and it does have an eerily human posture it.
It looks like some local tourism concerns advertise this as
Lots wife. And I couldn't figure out how long people
have been referring to this particular formation as Lot's wife,
(18:55):
but at least today and for some years now they've
been calling it that, and it LUs look creepy. Yeah,
I'd love to hear from some of our listeners who
have visited the area or reside in the area. You
can weigh in on, you know, just what was your
experience looking at this thing that is referred to as
Lot's wife. There is a there's a kind of agony
to the posture of the mineral. I mean, uh, it does.
(19:17):
It's got some pathos to it. You can see it.
I can see Okay, I like, I get the acumen
of a poem almost out of this rock pillar. Another
thing that is often called Lot's Wife is a geological
formation on the opposite side of the Dead Sea, on
the west side, on a hilltop now known as Mount Sodom.
This formation, also called Lot's Wife, is kind of funny
(19:39):
when you actually see people approach it, Like I watched
a video of some tourists just taking video of themselves
going up to see lots Wife. And this one is
funny because it's less suggestive of human posture and and
shape than the formation on the Jordan's side, and because
it's gigantic. If it were a Lot's wife, Lot's Wife
was huge. And I should also went out that like
(20:00):
sub subsequent geologic formations in other parts of the world
have been dubbed Lot's Wife merely because they sort of
vaguely resemble a humanoid form. And I think arguably that's
I mean, that's what's happening in all of these cases.
It's like it kind of looks like a person let
and then we have this myth of a person having
turned to a salt or to some stone like substance,
(20:22):
and that is like the natural thing to call it.
Right now, Mount Sodom is interesting because it is actually
almost entirely made of salt. It's like more than salt,
with a few layers of other strata. It's got things
like limestone, and it hosts a gigantic salt cave that
is miles long. But there is no evidence whatsoever that
either of these formations were once a human. They appear
(20:45):
to be fairly normal mineral columns. But one could pretty
easily imagine one of two scenarios. You've either got the
myth already existing independently, and somebody who had both read
the story and seen the geological features put two and
two together, and then people like Josephus come along and
hear from those people and say, look, this is Lot's wife,
(21:07):
and why would you question it. Yeah, it's kind of
like the whole mermaid scenario. Did you know, to what
extent to someone see a manatee and think, oh, it's
a mermaid, or associate with the Mermaid's tale, the Tale
of the Mermaid, or is it the reverse right where
someone sees manatees and to make sense of it, they
create a story of mermaids exactly. And that second part
is the other option. I was going to say that
(21:28):
the actual geo mythology inspiration, maybe some tribe in the
ancient Dead Sea region was aware of either one of
these geological formations or another one like it that doesn't
exist anymore, that is not identified the same way now,
maybe eroded, But anyway, they were aware of some kind
of geological formation that looks kind of like a human,
and then a great storyteller comes along to come up
(21:49):
with a tale of how that person was crystallized in
place there, and that's why you're always hospitable to visitors. Well,
you know, mythologies are interesting that way because often they're
often a woven together tapestry of pre existing streams of
storytelling tradition. I can absolutely see the possibility of how
like a story that was once about, you know, showing
(22:11):
hospitality to agents of the Lord, we're just showing hospitality
in general, got woven together with like somebody just stuck
in ideological myth into part of it. Yeah. Well, I
mean we even see this, of course, with the evolution
of of modern tales that are told you know, where
there'll be one version of it, like you just look
at our comic book characters, right, the evolution of some
(22:31):
of them from characters of pure exploitation two characters that
are being used to you know, discuss some sort of uh,
you know, socially relevant topic. Uh So, I mean stories evolve.
That's that's essential to the human experience. And of course
we see that in mythology as well. Uh. You know,
we always have to remember that the myths, even though
they are often encountered in some stationary form, recorded in
(22:55):
a book that is at least presented to you as
if it has not changed over the course of millennia. Uh,
it is still a thing that is The story itself
is something that is fluid and will have changed through
time and through tellings. Yes, and as for a single
ideological element being inserted into a story that already exists,
you can see that in storytelling today. Think about how
common it is for there to be like a historical story.
(23:18):
Think the Forrest Gump, okay, movie Forrest Gump. How many
things are there in that story where you could have
the story be pretty much exactly the same without it,
except they inserted a little thing where like Forrest Gump
invented to have a nice day slogan, you know, on
a T shirt with the smiley face, or there are
a bunch of things like that in the movie where
they just insert a little fake ideology to say, oh,
(23:40):
and by the way, I remember this thing from history
Forrest Gump did that. I forgot about that, the myth
making of Forrest Gump. I don't know why people like
things like that so much, but they clearly do, because
it's in a lot of stories and movies to just
have a little thing that people recognize from the real
world and say, hey, this fictional character there. Actually the
reason it's that way, I feel like stuff is that
(24:01):
there have been films that do that with a leaning
tower of of pizza, right, yeah, yeah, where where a
character bumps into it and makes it crooked, you know,
or something that out to that effect. Yeah, totally the
Superman movie. Maybe Superman like fixes it, he fixes it.
That makes people mad? Why said always that in Superman
movies Superman is protecting monuments from destruction. I remember that,
(24:26):
especially being the case in Superman four, where like great
monuments are under attack by the villains and Superman has
to prevent them from being destroyed. Right, it should be
the people that mat are, right, Yeah, But Anyway, I
wanted to say something else about possible geological explanations for
mythology like this. Another thing has to do with salt
formations around high salinity bodies of water. And there, of
(24:46):
course is a famously salty body of water in the
vicinity here. Yeah, that's right, the Dead Sea, of course,
which is not which is not an ocean, by the way,
The Dead Sea is a is a hyper saline lake.
It is like a super salt salty locked up lake.
The water of the Dead Sea is fascinating. It is
so salty that no large life forms dwell there. No fish, no, no,
(25:10):
no insects live in there, No plants live in there.
There are some micro organisms I think that live around
vents and stuff near the bottom of it. Right, and
then in certain areas you'll find a human tourists floating
in it, right, And that's rather easily. Yes, that's one
of the fascinating things about the water there, because it's
so saline. I guess the density of the water is
(25:31):
so much higher than normal. They say, it's almost like
you can just sit on the water. You know, it's
really hard to sink. You float so easily. Most ocean
water is about three point five percent salt in solution,
the Dead Sea is something like five to ten times
as briny as normal ocean water. Yeah. Yeah, we're talking
super salty like, uh, you know, the kind of similar salinity.
(25:52):
Of course, one encounters in salt water isolation tanks, float tanks,
you know, where you're you're floating in to this highly
salty water that almost takes on this like viscous consistent consistency. Yeah.
But the first time he games it takes getting east
to well, you might wonder why is the Dead Sea
so salty? The answer is that the Dead Sea does
(26:15):
not having natural outlet. There's nowhere for the water of
the Dead Sea to drain out to. Uh. And part
of the reason for this is that the bottom of
the Dead Sea is more than fourteen hundred feet below
sea level, and the basin it sits in is just
generally one of the lowest elevations of any land area
on Earth, depending on where you're measuring. It is sometimes
(26:36):
cited as the lowest land elevation on the planet. So,
if you're the lowest elevation, where could the water drain
to if there's nothing downhill from it? Right, So, while
it doesn't have a natural outlet. It does have a
natural source, which is the Jordan River. So the Jordan
River feeds into the Dead Sea occasionally. Of course, as
you know, fresh water comes through has tiny amounts of
(26:57):
dissolved salt and mineral stuff that it carries with it.
The water in the Dead Sea just stays there, doesn't
drain away. It stays there until it evaporates. But of
course this is an extremely hot and dry desert climate,
so evaporation is extremely aggressive. But that evaporation removes water
without removing the salt. And then with anthropogenic changes to
(27:19):
the flow of the Jordan River, the Dead Sea now
gets less water fed into it ever than ever before,
and it's shrinking rapidly. I read that the water level
has been falling at a rate of something like three
feet or about a meter a year, which is fast.
But with this much salt dissolved in the water, the
water can leave deposits of crystallized salt around its edges.
(27:41):
In fact, if you walk around the shores of the
Dead Sea, you will find strange sparkling domes and piles
of salt crystals collecting on rocks due to wave action
and evaporation. Yeah, and and any of these are just
they are really alien to behold strange looking formations, which
makes one thing, Well, perhaps some formation like this could
(28:02):
have caught the eye of someone in the past, and
either it would have been exactly the sort of thing
you would incorporate into a myth, or would serve to
spin off a new myth exactly. Yeah, So salt crystals
like these, they can take on extremely bizarre shape. Sometimes
they crystallize over a over a vertical rock column, or
maybe over an old tree trunk or a post driven
into the ground or something anything that has a sort
(28:24):
of vertical form. You can see how pretty easily heavy
crystallization of salt on the outside of it could start
to take on human looking form. And there's also I
would just say something about the the nature and shapes
of salt crystals that naturally draws the eye like it
looks unusual in the landscape, It looks kind of alive.
(28:44):
Some of the salt crystals can form these large cubes
and stuff you take on angles that don't look natural. Yeah,
there's a there's a geometric quality to it. Yeah, that
that is it generally seems out of keeping with the
surrounding environment. So what was Josephus looking at when he
said he saw all Lot's wife in person. Well, we
don't know for sure, and we don't know if whatever
(29:04):
he saw was actually the inspiration for the story in
the first place. But if it were, I think it
would be in keeping with many other ideological tales in
the Bible and in human mythology. Absolutely well, on that note,
I think we should take one more break, and when
we come back, let's talk a little bit about salt
salt in the human body. And a really fabulous paper
(29:25):
that we ran across that really breaks down how an
Old Testament woman could be transformed into a pillar of
salt or salt like substance. Thank alright, we're back. So
one way that I would often that I would often
think about this story as as I would think, Okay,
(29:46):
a person being turned into just salt. That doesn't make
a lot of sense, you know, because salt salt is
is of course, you know, is the salt comes from somewhere, Like,
how do you replace all of us with salt? Certainly
our bodies contain salt. How much salt does our body?
It does our body? Do our bodies contain. Well, let's
let's let's break down this a little bit. So first
(30:07):
of all, salt is obviously sodium and chlorine, and we
need sodium for example, as a it's a key extracellular electrolyte,
and it's crucial to a number of health functions. Now,
for the for the most part, we consume way too
much salt today. Uh though the minimum consumption is roughly
I've read, uh, fifteen hundred milligrams a day, while the
(30:29):
American Heart Association says the absolute minimum is more like
five hundred milligrams a day, and the average American consumes
something like uh thirty four hundred milligrams of sodium per day.
Those are amateur numbers, um. And Now, also according to
the Salt Association, chlorine is also important preserving acid balance
in the body, aiding potassium absorption. It also contributes to
(30:51):
the hydrochloric acid in our gut, and it enhances the
blood's ability to transport carbon dioxide. UM. And so all
of this breaks down to, like is a rough average,
an adult human body contains two fifty grams of salt,
and any excess is naturally excreted by the body. Now
we we've talked about excretion of excess salt in a
(31:12):
past episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, um where
we discussed a drinking salt water. So I recommend that
one to to anyone who would like it even more
salt after this episode. So if Lot's wife, you know,
wasn't so much turned into a pillar of salt, if
we're gonna say, okay, what if the magic rays of
the city smiting taking place, what if it just reduced
(31:34):
her to her body salt content, you know, like just
you know, a holy ray that that destroys everything except salt.
How much salt would be left? It would be you know,
about two grams of salt. That's roughly what one point
to four cups what we got our cup and a
quarter of salt in our bodies. Well, I mean it's
impressive when you think about it, you know, in those terms,
(31:55):
I guess, but in terms of like a person being
reduced to that, uh, you know, it's not it's not
really a pillar of salt, they would have to say.
And then she turned back and was reduced to a
small amount of salt. Man, I love thinking about the
stuff in human bodies. In measuring quantities used for cooking. Yeah,
because according to Harvard Health that's less than nine ounces
(32:15):
and about the amount in three or four salt shakers. Wait,
do the salt shakers have a little bits of dry
rice in them? Um? I don't know if it's necessary
in such an area to environment. So that that's one
place my mind went in terms of trying to figure
out what's what's happening. Now. Obviously your mind also turns
to of course fossilization. Like fossilization is a very real
(32:38):
process by which a living body is turned into a
solid mineral form. But of course that's not going to
occur in an instant. It's something that takes place over
the course of geologic time. Uh. Likewise, I'm thinking, Okay,
Essentially what we're talking about is a pair of nuclear
blasts taking place that have been uh, you know, unleashed
(33:01):
by angelic forces. Okay, might might that's the might the
the flash of this, might the the radiation from this
have incinerated the body and reduced it to ash. Well,
you know, that's one way of looking at it. But
it wouldn't produce like a call, like a statue of ash.
It would just obliterate a body if it was turning
into ash. And then of course so one thinks to mummies,
(33:23):
but of course mummies are you know, are just examples
of body that has been when which the fluid has
been removed. Uh. And likewise, there are a number of
different you know, preservation um uh models for the human
body where you're you know, you're adding something or replacing something.
But none of these are processes that are going to
take place in an instant And there there are forms
(33:44):
of natural mummification that take place. Uh. We often think
that natural mummification in some cultures preceded deliberate mummification, But
you wouldn't normally think of that as like something that
somebody would look at and see a mummy and say
they turned to salt. Now you could, you could play
a kind of crazy jigsaw of different natural effects if
(34:04):
anything goes right. What if there was some kind of
natural mummy of a woman in the Dead Sea region
that suddenly, like because I don't know, a storm or
something blew all this salt crystal on her and then
it covered her body and salt and she glistened all
over and people said, look there's the salt woman. Yeah
you know, yeah, it's one of those where it's Altosately
a lot of steps are required to get to the
(34:24):
place you want to go, right. So I kept looking
around about this. I'm like, somebody's out there. There has
to have been a scientist, a pure scientist, who decided
to tackle this is kind of a thought experiment. One
of these great playful chemistry papers, like the like what
are the thermodynamics of Hell and all that? Right? Or
one of another favorite that I have more of a
biology paper is um like how a centaur's body work
(34:48):
run across that one where the they the authors argued
that a centaur would require two hearts in order to
power this you know, conjoined uh system. So I was
lucky enough to find just such a paper on Lot's
wife titled the Chemical Death of Lot's Wife Discussion Paper.
This was published in the Journal of the Royal Society
(35:10):
of Medicine in July of and it was by Irving M. Clots,
pH d, Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University. And I want
to note here that the Clots was not some like
weird quack right in a bunch of like biblical papers,
uh you know, which I think should be obvious given
the details of not only you know his his employment,
(35:32):
but also the publication. But I should stress that during
his lifetime he authored more than two hundred scientific articles
and pure view journals, and he also wrote numerous books,
including one titled Diamond Dealers and Feather Merchants Tales from
the Sciences, which sounds sounds quite good. I meant to
hunt up a copy of it. So anyway, he's I
(35:53):
feel like he's very much engaging on a thought experiment here,
but his his science cred is is ultimately above reproach it.
But so he's going to take this from a like
biochemistry point of view and say, all right, if a
person was turned into salt, how would that work? What
would that mean exactly? So, first of all, he reminds
us that we shouldn't take salt too literally. Rather, he says,
(36:14):
it's likely, you know, used in a generic sense to
refer to any solid with mineral characteristics to it and
perhaps a salt like taste. So he's not necessarily talking
about sodium chloride. But he says that in the Bible,
if they said salt, they probably mins just any kind
of crystalline mineral. A lot of things taste vaguely salty. Uh.
(36:34):
And he uses the point of comparison to the way
the Bible uses the word plague to refer to basically anything,
you know, anything that's like an epidemic. So he writes quote,
A particularly likely candidate for the salt that caused the
death of Mislot is calcite. This mineral is very susceptible
to a precipitation in the presence of low concentrations of
(36:56):
free calcium and carbonate, both of which are present ubiquitously
in all human tissues. And there he's talking about calcium
ions and carbonate ions. So what must have happened, he argues,
is something something occurred to overwhelm the homeostatic systems that
maintain calcium and carbonate levels below critical values, thus leading
(37:19):
to the onset of calcite formation. Uh. And this would
have been due to some sort of sort of you know,
catastrophic stress. And so what could have could have caused
this to happen? Well, Clots looks to the text and
considers that they were running from a powerful firestorm radiating
outward from the from this side of destruction, and that
as she stops and looks back, perhaps she's then hit
(37:42):
by a powerful blast of hot air with high c
O two content along with heat and radiation. So it
would be the hot air coming in with the pressure
and the CEO two, the chemical properties of the CEO
two content, and how that would affect the pH of
the blood and the body, and then the heat and radiation. Now,
I think I understand from his analysis that it doesn't
(38:04):
actually matter that she's looking back at the city. He's saying, like,
maybe it's just that she stopped running away, right, It's
more that she stopped and looked back, or perhaps kept
stopping and looking back, So you know, it's not about
like your eyes beholding the thing, right, So it's not
the Josephus issue. Remember Josephas says the problem is that
she thought too kindly of of Sodom and that she
(38:25):
should have been I guess colder in her in her
condemnation of it. Right, This is basically this Claus's argument
is that she's still in the danger zone from a
terrific blast that's taking place. So Clots goes on from
here to do a lot of chemical analysis on how
all this would break down. And I'm not going to
attempt to summarize that here. If you're if you're more
(38:46):
of a chemistry whiz, I suggest looking up this paper.
It's available for free online and a PDF form, But
I am going to skip ahead to his final summary quote. Thus,
by turning around in her direction of flight, Miss Lot
exposed herself instantly to stresses that generated immediate enormous escalations
in concentrations of calcium and carbonate, so that the critical
(39:10):
limits specified by equation six, which was something he uh
uh he covered earlier in the paper, were exceeded overwhelmingly
and instantaneously. Internal massive pervasive crystallization of calcite followed. Immediately,
Misslat died instantly of rigor calcium carbonitus and turned into
(39:31):
a rigid block of calcite. Since the prevailing winds from
the Dead Sea always carry along a spray of salt
which is accumulated on this pillar, succeeding generations to modern
times have testified that this column is a block of salt. Okay,
So he lays out a process by which, in the
presence of of certain chemical pressures and you know, high
(39:54):
pressure and temperature from this blast, the body could conceivably
undergo rapid crystallization s of its calcium content. Because like
the some of the calcium containing compounds in the body,
like the albumen he refers to, like those good d nature.
The calcium gets freed, it joins up with the carbonate,
you get rapid crystallization, and you get a calcite body.
(40:16):
It's pretty creepy. Yeah, it is. It's tremendously creepy. I
don't know if he makes the case really that this
could happen in reality. One thing I wasn't quite clear
on is whether he's just saying, like, Okay, what's the
most plausible possible, like chain of of chemical things you're
leading to the crystallization of the body like this, or
if he's actually saying, oh, yeah, given the right circumstances,
(40:38):
this couldn't happen to a human body. Yeah. Yeah, it's um.
You know, it's it's a playful article, I feel, but
it's not. It doesn't have an obvious like wink moment.
You know. It's it's very um, you know, it's it's
very professional. It's delivery. I feel like modern papers of this, uh,
this variety would tend to have a few more winks
towards the fact that it is a thought experiment, if
(40:58):
not outright saying a thought experiment, and he's a little
more I guess in since he's a little more playful
with how he's framing it. But but yeah, I love
this this idea of that the chemical death of miss
Loot and he always refers to her as misslot instead
of just lots wife in the paper. Yeah, so, uh,
you know, again, not not a situation where where this
(41:21):
paper is confirming a biblical account, Bible story confirmed, but
the crystallization of calcite in the blood. But but it is.
It is another one of the examples of like, what's
a what's a completely outrageous scenario from you know, from
from myth and then and then trying to sort of
recreate it to reverse engineering using science and it's it's
(41:41):
fascinating how sometimes you can you can just recreate how
something like that could occur. And it makes me want
to see more like calcite death rays in our science fiction.
This has been interesting, Robert, Yeah, yeah, I had. I
had a lot of fun uh researching and reading about
Lots wife. I'm also reminded how in um Our Scott Baker,
there's a second Apocalypse saga. He has a bit about
(42:03):
wizards that come into contact with a particular uh, substance,
it causes their bodies to essentially turn into a pillar
of salt um and then it's uh, it's hinted that
that salt can then be used for for other purposes.
So I'll leave leave that out there for anyone who
wants to explore those books on their own. In the meantime,
(42:24):
if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, heading over to stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find them. Uh.
And if you want to support our show, the best
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Also rate and review wherever you have the power to
do so, and don't forget about invention. That's our other
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continuous examination of human techno history. Huge thanks as always
(42:47):
to our excellent audio producer Maya Cole. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
(43:10):
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Joe McCormick
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