August 15, 2020 • 44 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. (Originally published 8/20/2019)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
Time to go into the old Vault. Today we're doing
an episode on Lot's Wife and the idea of turning
an animal into a pillar of salt. This episode originally
published on August nineteen. All right, let's dive right in.
(00:29):
Welcome to 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
another geo mythology episode, isn't it It ultimately is. Yeah,
(00:52):
we are, of course talking about an often overlooked figure
from from the Old Testament and from from from from
Jewish smith 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
from the Book of Genesis, chapter nineteen. So I guess
(01:12):
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,
and one of his relatives is his nephew Lot. That's right.
(01:34):
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
good people in these cities along with all the wicked people?
(01:55):
So it begins to wade into theologically murky waters. It like,
if if bad things must happen to the bad people,
what about the good people in those cities? What should
we do about that? 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
fifty people, fifty good people in the city, would that
be enough to spare the city, and God says, yes, sure, yeah,
(02:18):
that's okay, you make a good point. He's like, but
the neighborhood starts hedging, right, He's like, I 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 and God agrees, Okay, if you
can find ten righteous people, I'll spare these cities, right.
(02:39):
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
like foot soldiers to literally go to the town to
conduct surveillance a little recon. Yeah, there's less of a
(03:03):
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,
of course, and and this is ultimately a trope that
you've seen a lot of different myths and legends throughout history,
(03:24):
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
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
(03:46):
kindness too? Might have been me right, yeah. But but
then also there are other tales and other traditions that involved,
like this, 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
ways of being righteous in the ancient world was showing hospitality. Actually,
this is something that I think is under emphasized in
(04:09):
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,
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 chick tracks, like
(04:31):
some sort of you know, you know, cartoon that is
ultimately kind of like wallowing an awfulness and and trying
and using the story to spin off a really 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,
(04:54):
which is not really what what the story in the
Bible is focused on, right, Yeah, Ultimately there is a
story about hospitality, and as it turns out, you know, Lots,
a Lot and his wife are really the only people
that are the 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,
(05:15):
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,
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 ten righteous individual quota here, but
(05:37):
you two seem alright, 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, 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,
(05:59):
they're fleeing the instruction. 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 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,
(06:22):
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 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
(06:45):
of salt, A pillar of salt. This always, uh, this,
this is the detail that always captivated me the most.
It's a strange It's like an intriguing, sad, tragic story.
It doesn't, you know, it doesn't really explain her motives. Uh.
And that's thing that a lot of people have been
able to read back into with like literature about this story.
(07:05):
The one main thing that comes to mind for me
is the poem by the Russian poet and Chamadeva called
Lot's Wife. Do you mind if I read this here?
This is the translation by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.
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.
(07:28):
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
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,
(07:49):
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
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,
(08:13):
you know, for the smallest shite. You know, all she
did is glance backwards. Well yeah, And the what I
love about this poem is it emphasizes not the external
view of the city as this place of wickedness that
must be destroyed, but the view of it as her home.
You know, she's looking back to the place where her home,
the way that she loved all, you know, all her
good memories are there. Yeah, because one of the things
(08:36):
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
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
(08:58):
character of myth like this doesn't need like a historical
account because you cannot plausibly imagine a city in which
everybody except one family is just evil to the core. Right. Uh, yeah,
that's pure mythspinning. Even though that kind of myth spinning
still goes on today, um as we consider other places
and and and then and people from other places, etcetera.
(09:20):
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 the historical accuracy of of Sodom and
gomorrah 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
(09:43):
geological facts about the world. But those those connections are
always hypothetical. We can just discuss possible ways that they
line up. 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
(10:04):
told to draw from them, because they're just all kinds
of reports about archaeological or geological findings from the ancient
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
(10:25):
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
the angels and all that. Yeah. I feel like reads
like this they tend to, you know, can completely discredit
the power of mythology, like it's it's he, it's everything
has to be considered as as as a potential historical reality,
(10:49):
whereas mythology is this thing that you know, resides between
objective reality and our perception. It is this I mean,
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
(11:10):
of mythology is perhaps true without being factual, maybe meaning
it somehow contains wisdom, but it is not like an
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
(11:31):
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
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 it to
discredit the creative abilities of ancient people's and we also
(11:53):
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 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.
(12:16):
But I mean even even if you think about sometimes
myths just being stories that people made up for a reason,
the reason might have been something like to convey a 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
(12:39):
also like in there there is some stuff about that
that's worth thinking about, about hospitality, about like taking people
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
(13:00):
it's an impulse that leads to bad reasoning and over
interpretation of little bits of physical evidence. But I think
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, you're kind
of like like bye bye. So, you know, veheminently attempting
to connect mythology with objective reality, like it more often
(13:22):
than not, it just it feels fake. It feels like
you're trying too hard to make this magical unreality real
and in 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, all right,
we're back here on this episode of Stuff to Blow
(13:43):
your Mind. We were talking about lots wife looking you know,
for looking at this as a story of geo mythology,
and later 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
(14:03):
ancient Neis and actually from all over the world I
think can can be interpreted as origin myths, also known
as etiological myths. 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 etiological myths is the myth that explains the name
(14:26):
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 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
(14:46):
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 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
(15:08):
that's kind of like a name based ideological myth. A
lot of other ideological myths I think explain the origins
of cultural practices or rituals. 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 Thor was standing under some mistletoe and it felt,
(15:28):
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, 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
(15:52):
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 natural phenomenon and natural objects.
Why do we have thunder 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,
(16:13):
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 in the spring and summer persephony can come
up again and demeanter rejoices and nourishes or crops. And
there are also versions of these natural ideologies just for
objects in the world. When you know, there will sometimes
(16:34):
be a myth explaining the existence of a mountain or
of a giant crater or something like that. Yeah, we've
discussed some of these in the show before, like ideas
of basically topography being formed from the say, the bodies
of fallen gods, and like, yeah, and so could the
story of Lot's wife be a myth like this existing
to explain the origin of something we don't know? But
(16:57):
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 in his
work known as the Antiquities of the Jews. And this
is from book one, chapter eleven, translated by William Wiston,
And it starts off talking about the wickedness of the
people who lived in Sodom, saying that Lot fled the
(17:17):
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 waste the
country with the like burning, as I formerly said when
I wrote the Jewish War. But Lot's wife, continually turning
back to view the city as she went from it,
and being too nicely inquisitive what would become of it,
(17:39):
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,
that's interesting. So Josephas in the first century CE is
(17:59):
saying that he personally saw lots 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 was
Lot's wife. But at the same time, I think we
can probably safely assume that whatever he saw was not
(18:20):
actually a human woman who got turned into sodium chloride.
So what could he be talking about, Well, 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,
we need to start by stipulating again that we don't know.
(18:40):
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 pillar standing on a
(19:01):
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 advertised this as Lot's wife. And I
couldn't figure out how long people have been referring to
this particular formation as Lot's wife, but at least today
(19:23):
and for some years now, they've been calling it that,
and it does 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. It's got some
(19:44):
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 when you actually
(20:06):
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 point out that, like sub subsequent geologic
(20:29):
formations in other parts of the world have been dubbed
lots 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 salt
or to some stone like substance, and that is like
(20:49):
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
(21:10):
once a human. They appear 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
Josephas come along and hear from those people and say, look,
(21:32):
this is Lot's wife, and why would you question it? Yeah,
it's kind of like the whole mermaid scenario. DIDs you know,
to what extent to someone see a manatee and think, oh,
it's a mermaid, or associate with the mermaid's tail the
tale of the Mermaid, or is it the reverse right
where someone sees manatees and it makes sense of it,
they create a story of mermaids exactly. And that second
(21:52):
part is the other option. I was going to say
that the actual geo mythology inspiration, maybe some tribe in
the ancient Dead Sea Reden 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,
(22:13):
and then a great storyteller comes along to come up
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 they're often
they're often a woven together tapestry of pre existing streams
of storytelling tradition. I can absolutely see the possibility of
(22:35):
how like a story that was once about you know,
showing hospitality to agents of the Lord, were 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
(22:58):
some of them from the 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
(23:21):
recorded in a book that is at least presented to
you as if it has not changed over the course
of millennia, 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
(23:43):
a historical story. I 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, the T shirt with smiley face, or there
are a bunch of things like that in the movie
(24:04):
where they just insert a little fake ideology to say, oh,
and by the way, I remember this thing from history
Forest Gump did that? Wow, I forgot about that, the
myth making of Forest 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
(24:25):
the reason that's that way I feel like stuff is
that there have been films to do that with a
leaning tower of of pizza. Oh yeah, yeah, where where
a character bumps into it and makes it crooked, you know,
or something that out to that effect. Yeah, totally Superman movie,
maybe Superman like fixes it. Oh he fixes it. That
makes people mad. Why is it always that in Superman
(24:48):
movies Superman is protecting monuments from destruction? I remember that,
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 destroys. Right, it should be
there the people in that 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
(25:09):
salt formations around high salinity bodies of water. And there,
of course is a famously salty body of water in
the vicinity here. Yeah, that's right. That 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 salty locked
up lake. The water of the Dead Sea is fascinating.
(25:30):
It is so salty that no large life forms dwell there.
No fish, no, no, 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,
(25:51):
that's one of the fascinating things about the water there,
because it's so saline. I guess the density of the
water is so much higher than normal. They say, it's
almost like you can 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
(26:12):
as briny as normal ocean water. Yeah. Yeah, we're talking
super salty like, uh, you know, the kind of similar
salinity of course one encounters in saltwater um isolation tanks
of float tanks, you know, where you're you're floating in
a highly salty water that almost takes on this like
viscous consistent consistency. Yeah, but the first time he games,
(26:35):
it takes getting used to. Well, you might wonder why
is the Dead Sea so salty. The answer is that
the Dead Sea does 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
(26:55):
is just generally one of the lowest elevations of any
land area on Earth, depending on where you're measuring. It
is sometimes 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
(27:17):
Jordan River feeds into the Dead Sea occasionally. Of course,
as you know, fresh water comes through, it has tiny
amounts of 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
(27:42):
without removing the salt. And then with anthropogenic changes to
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 this much salt dissolved in the water, the water
(28:04):
can leave deposits of crystallized salt around its edges. 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 any of these are just they are really alien
to behold the strange looking formations, which makes one think, well,
(28:27):
perhaps some formation like this could 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 over
a vertical rock column, or maybe over an old tree
trunk or a post driven into the ground or something
(28:49):
anything that has a sort 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. Some of the salt crystals can
(29:12):
form these large cubes and stuff to take on angles
that don't look natural. Yeah, there's a there's a geometric
quality to it. Yeah, that that is that generally seems
out of keeping with the surrounding environment. So what was
Josephus looking at when he said he saw a Lot's
wife in person? Well, we don't know for sure, and
we don't know if whatever he saw was actually the
inspiration for the story in the first place. But if
(29:35):
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 that we ran across that
really breaks down how an Old Testament woman could be
(29:58):
transformed into a pillar of salt or a salt like substance.
All right, we're back. So one way that I would
often that I would often think about this story as
as I would think, okay, 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
(30:20):
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 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
(30:42):
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
D milligrams a day, while the American Heart Association says
the absolute minimum is more like five hundred milligrams a day,
and the average American consumes something like thirty four hundred
(31:04):
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 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 it
(31:26):
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 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 even more salt after this episode. So if Lot's wife,
(31:50):
you know, wasn't so much turned into a pillar of salt,
and we're gonna say, okay, what if the magic rays
of the city smiting taking place, What if it just
reduced 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 of salt. That's roughly what one
(32:13):
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, 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
(32:33):
about the stuff in human bodies in measuring quantities used
for cooking. Yeah, because according to Harvard Health that's less
than nine ounces 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 arid environment. So
(32:53):
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 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
(33:14):
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 you know,
unleashed 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,
(33:38):
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
it to ash. And then, of course so one thinks
to mummies, 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 uh models for the
(34:02):
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 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
(34:23):
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 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
(34:44):
all over, and people said, look, there's the salt woman. Yeah,
you know. Yeah, it's one of those where it's also
a lot of steps are required to get to the
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 to to
I had to tackle. This is kind of a thought experiment.
One of these great playful chemistry papers, like the like
(35:06):
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 of 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
(35:28):
on lots wife titled the Chemical Death of Lot's Wife
Discussion Paper. This was published in the Journal of the
Royal Society 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
(35:49):
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, but also the location. But I should
stress that during his lifetime he authored more than two
hundred scientific articles and pure viewed journals. And he also
wrote numerous books, including one titled Diamond Dealers and Feather
(36:11):
Merchants Tales from the Sciences, which sounds sounds quite good.
I meant to hunt up a copy of it. So anyway,
he's I feel like he's very much engaging on a
thought experiment here, but his his science cred is ultimately
above reproach. Okay, 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?
(36:33):
What would that mean exactly? So, first of all, he
reminds us that we shouldn't take salt too literally. Rather,
he says, 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
(36:53):
the Bible, if they said salt, they probably meant just
any kind of crystalline mineral. A lot of things taste
vague salty. Uh. 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
(37:13):
salt that caused the death of mislot is calcite. This
mineral is very susceptible to a precipitation in the presence
of low concentrations of 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
(37:37):
overwhelm the homeostatic systems that maintain calcium and carbonate levels
below critical values, thus leading 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
(38:00):
a powerful firestorm radiating outward from this from this side
of destruction, and that as she stops and looks back,
perhaps she's then hit by a powerful blast of hot
air with high CEO 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
(38:21):
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 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
(38:43):
the thing, right, So it's not the Josephus issue. Remember,
Josephas says the problem is that she thought too kindly
of of Sodom, right, and that she 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 dangers own from a terrific blast that's taking place.
So Clots goes on from here to do a lot
(39:06):
of chemical analysis on how all this would break down.
And I'm not going to attempt to summarize that here. Uh.
If you're if you're more of a chemistry whiz, I
suggest looking up. This paper is 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 Latt exposed herself instantly
(39:28):
to stresses that generated immediate enormous escalations in concentrations of
calcium and carbonate, so that the critical 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, Miss Latt died
(39:53):
instantly of rigor calcium carbonatus and turned into 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 he lays out a process by which, in
(40:16):
the presence of of certain chemical pressures and you know,
high pressure and temperature from this blast, the body could
conceivably undergo rapid crystallization 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,
(40:39):
you get rapid crystallization, and you get a calcite body.
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 here
(40:59):
leading to the crystallization of the body like this, or
if he's actually saying, oh, yeah, given the right circumstances,
this could 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 in this delivery. I feel like modern papers
of this, uh, this variety would tend to have a
(41:21):
few more winks towards the fact that it is a
thought experiment, if not outright saying, here's a thought experiment.
And he's a little more I guess in a since
he's a little more playful with how he's framing it.
But but yeah, I love this, this idea of the
chemical death of miss Loot and he always refers to
her as miss Loot instead of just lots wife in
(41:41):
the paper. Yeah, so you know, again, not not a
situation where where this paper is confirming a biblical account
Bible story confirmed, but 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 n
areo from you know, for from myth and then and
(42:03):
then trying to sort of recreate it to reverse engineering
using science, and it's it's 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 Lot's wife. I'm also reminded how in
(42:25):
um Our Scott Baker's Second Apocalypse saga, he has a
bit about 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
(42:47):
anyone who wants to explore those books on their own.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head don't over
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(43:08):
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(43:37):
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(44:00):
to hand my bot
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
Time to go into the old Vault. Today we're doing
an episode on Lot's Wife and the idea of turning
an animal into a pillar of salt. This episode originally
published on August nineteen. All right, let's dive right in.
(00:29):
Welcome to 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
another geo mythology episode, isn't it It ultimately is. Yeah,
(00:52):
we are, of course talking about an often overlooked figure
from from the Old Testament and from from from from
Jewish smith 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
from the Book of Genesis, chapter nineteen. So I guess
(01:12):
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,
and one of his relatives is his nephew Lot. That's right.
(01:34):
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
good people in these cities along with all the wicked people?
(01:55):
So it begins to wade into theologically murky waters. It like,
if if bad things must happen to the bad people,
what about the good people in those cities? What should
we do about that? 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
fifty people, fifty good people in the city, would that
be enough to spare the city, and God says, yes, sure, yeah,
(02:18):
that's okay, you make a good point. He's like, but
the neighborhood starts hedging, right, He's like, I 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 and God agrees, Okay, if you
can find ten righteous people, I'll spare these cities, right.
(02:39):
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
like foot soldiers to literally go to the town to
conduct surveillance a little recon. Yeah, there's less of a
(03:03):
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,
of course, and and this is ultimately a trope that
you've seen a lot of different myths and legends throughout history,
(03:24):
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
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
(03:46):
kindness too? Might have been me right, yeah. But but
then also there are other tales and other traditions that involved,
like this, 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
ways of being righteous in the ancient world was showing hospitality. Actually,
this is something that I think is under emphasized in
(04:09):
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,
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 chick tracks, like
(04:31):
some sort of you know, you know, cartoon that is
ultimately kind of like wallowing an awfulness and and trying
and using the story to spin off a really 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,
(04:54):
which is not really what what the story in the
Bible is focused on, right, Yeah, Ultimately there is a
story about hospitality, and as it turns out, you know, Lots,
a Lot and his wife are really the only people
that are the 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,
(05:15):
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,
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 ten righteous individual quota here, but
(05:37):
you two seem alright, 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, 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,
(05:59):
they're fleeing the instruction. 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 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,
(06:22):
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 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
(06:45):
of salt, A pillar of salt. This always, uh, this,
this is the detail that always captivated me the most.
It's a strange It's like an intriguing, sad, tragic story.
It doesn't, you know, it doesn't really explain her motives. Uh.
And that's thing that a lot of people have been
able to read back into with like literature about this story.
(07:05):
The one main thing that comes to mind for me
is the poem by the Russian poet and Chamadeva called
Lot's Wife. Do you mind if I read this here?
This is the translation by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.
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.
(07:28):
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
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,
(07:49):
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
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,
(08:13):
you know, for the smallest shite. You know, all she
did is glance backwards. Well yeah, And the what I
love about this poem is it emphasizes not the external
view of the city as this place of wickedness that
must be destroyed, but the view of it as her home.
You know, she's looking back to the place where her home,
the way that she loved all, you know, all her
good memories are there. Yeah, because one of the things
(08:36):
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
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
(08:58):
character of myth like this doesn't need like a historical
account because you cannot plausibly imagine a city in which
everybody except one family is just evil to the core. Right. Uh, yeah,
that's pure mythspinning. Even though that kind of myth spinning
still goes on today, um as we consider other places
and and and then and people from other places, etcetera.
(09:20):
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 the historical accuracy of of Sodom and
gomorrah 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
(09:43):
geological facts about the world. But those those connections are
always hypothetical. We can just discuss possible ways that they
line up. 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
(10:04):
told to draw from them, because they're just all kinds
of reports about archaeological or geological findings from the ancient
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
(10:25):
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
the angels and all that. Yeah. I feel like reads
like this they tend to, you know, can completely discredit
the power of mythology, like it's it's he, it's everything
has to be considered as as as a potential historical reality,
(10:49):
whereas mythology is this thing that you know, resides between
objective reality and our perception. It is this I mean,
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
(11:10):
of mythology is perhaps true without being factual, maybe meaning
it somehow contains wisdom, but it is not like an
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
(11:31):
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
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 it to
discredit the creative abilities of ancient people's and we also
(11:53):
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 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.
(12:16):
But I mean even even if you think about sometimes
myths just being stories that people made up for a reason,
the reason might have been something like to convey a 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
(12:39):
also like in there there is some stuff about that
that's worth thinking about, about hospitality, about like taking people
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
(13:00):
it's an impulse that leads to bad reasoning and over
interpretation of little bits of physical evidence. But I think
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, you're kind
of like like bye bye. So, you know, veheminently attempting
to connect mythology with objective reality, like it more often
(13:22):
than not, it just it feels fake. It feels like
you're trying too hard to make this magical unreality real
and in 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, all right,
we're back here on this episode of Stuff to Blow
(13:43):
your Mind. We were talking about lots wife looking you know,
for looking at this as a story of geo mythology,
and later 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
(14:03):
ancient Neis and actually from all over the world I
think can can be interpreted as origin myths, also known
as etiological myths. 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 etiological myths is the myth that explains the name
(14:26):
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 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
(14:46):
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 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
(15:08):
that's kind of like a name based ideological myth. A
lot of other ideological myths I think explain the origins
of cultural practices or rituals. 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 Thor was standing under some mistletoe and it felt,
(15:28):
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, 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
(15:52):
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 natural phenomenon and natural objects.
Why do we have thunder 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,
(16:13):
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 in the spring and summer persephony can come
up again and demeanter rejoices and nourishes or crops. And
there are also versions of these natural ideologies just for
objects in the world. When you know, there will sometimes
(16:34):
be a myth explaining the existence of a mountain or
of a giant crater or something like that. Yeah, we've
discussed some of these in the show before, like ideas
of basically topography being formed from the say, the bodies
of fallen gods, and like, yeah, and so could the
story of Lot's wife be a myth like this existing
to explain the origin of something we don't know? But
(16:57):
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 in his
work known as the Antiquities of the Jews. And this
is from book one, chapter eleven, translated by William Wiston,
And it starts off talking about the wickedness of the
people who lived in Sodom, saying that Lot fled the
(17:17):
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 waste the
country with the like burning, as I formerly said when
I wrote the Jewish War. But Lot's wife, continually turning
back to view the city as she went from it,
and being too nicely inquisitive what would become of it,
(17:39):
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,
that's interesting. So Josephas in the first century CE is
(17:59):
saying that he personally saw lots 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 was
Lot's wife. But at the same time, I think we
can probably safely assume that whatever he saw was not
(18:20):
actually a human woman who got turned into sodium chloride.
So what could he be talking about, Well, 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,
we need to start by stipulating again that we don't know.
(18:40):
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 pillar standing on a
(19:01):
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 advertised this as Lot's wife. And I
couldn't figure out how long people have been referring to
this particular formation as Lot's wife, but at least today
(19:23):
and for some years now, they've been calling it that,
and it does 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. It's got some
(19:44):
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 when you actually
(20:06):
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 point out that, like sub subsequent geologic
(20:29):
formations in other parts of the world have been dubbed
lots 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 salt
or to some stone like substance, and that is like
(20:49):
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
(21:10):
once a human. They appear 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
Josephas come along and hear from those people and say, look,
(21:32):
this is Lot's wife, and why would you question it? Yeah,
it's kind of like the whole mermaid scenario. DIDs you know,
to what extent to someone see a manatee and think, oh,
it's a mermaid, or associate with the mermaid's tail the
tale of the Mermaid, or is it the reverse right
where someone sees manatees and it makes sense of it,
they create a story of mermaids exactly. And that second
(21:52):
part is the other option. I was going to say
that the actual geo mythology inspiration, maybe some tribe in
the ancient Dead Sea Reden 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,
(22:13):
and then a great storyteller comes along to come up
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 they're often
they're often a woven together tapestry of pre existing streams
of storytelling tradition. I can absolutely see the possibility of
(22:35):
how like a story that was once about you know,
showing hospitality to agents of the Lord, were 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
(22:58):
some of them from the 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
(23:21):
recorded in a book that is at least presented to
you as if it has not changed over the course
of millennia, 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
(23:43):
a historical story. I 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, the T shirt with smiley face, or there
are a bunch of things like that in the movie
(24:04):
where they just insert a little fake ideology to say, oh,
and by the way, I remember this thing from history
Forest Gump did that? Wow, I forgot about that, the
myth making of Forest 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
(24:25):
the reason that's that way I feel like stuff is
that there have been films to do that with a
leaning tower of of pizza. Oh yeah, yeah, where where
a character bumps into it and makes it crooked, you know,
or something that out to that effect. Yeah, totally Superman movie,
maybe Superman like fixes it. Oh he fixes it. That
makes people mad. Why is it always that in Superman
(24:48):
movies Superman is protecting monuments from destruction? I remember that,
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 destroys. Right, it should be
there the people in that 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
(25:09):
salt formations around high salinity bodies of water. And there,
of course is a famously salty body of water in
the vicinity here. Yeah, that's right. That 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 salty locked
up lake. The water of the Dead Sea is fascinating.
(25:30):
It is so salty that no large life forms dwell there.
No fish, no, no, 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,
(25:51):
that's one of the fascinating things about the water there,
because it's so saline. I guess the density of the
water is so much higher than normal. They say, it's
almost like you can 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
(26:12):
as briny as normal ocean water. Yeah. Yeah, we're talking
super salty like, uh, you know, the kind of similar
salinity of course one encounters in saltwater um isolation tanks
of float tanks, you know, where you're you're floating in
a highly salty water that almost takes on this like
viscous consistent consistency. Yeah, but the first time he games,
(26:35):
it takes getting used to. Well, you might wonder why
is the Dead Sea so salty. The answer is that
the Dead Sea does 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
(26:55):
is just generally one of the lowest elevations of any
land area on Earth, depending on where you're measuring. It
is sometimes 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
(27:17):
Jordan River feeds into the Dead Sea occasionally. Of course,
as you know, fresh water comes through, it has tiny
amounts of 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
(27:42):
without removing the salt. And then with anthropogenic changes to
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 this much salt dissolved in the water, the water
(28:04):
can leave deposits of crystallized salt around its edges. 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 any of these are just they are really alien
to behold the strange looking formations, which makes one think, well,
(28:27):
perhaps some formation like this could 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 over
a vertical rock column, or maybe over an old tree
trunk or a post driven into the ground or something
(28:49):
anything that has a sort 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. Some of the salt crystals can
(29:12):
form these large cubes and stuff to take on angles
that don't look natural. Yeah, there's a there's a geometric
quality to it. Yeah, that that is that generally seems
out of keeping with the surrounding environment. So what was
Josephus looking at when he said he saw a Lot's
wife in person? Well, we don't know for sure, and
we don't know if whatever he saw was actually the
inspiration for the story in the first place. But if
(29:35):
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 that we ran across that
really breaks down how an Old Testament woman could be
(29:58):
transformed into a pillar of salt or a salt like substance.
All right, we're back. So one way that I would
often that I would often think about this story as
as I would think, okay, 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
(30:20):
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 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
(30:42):
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
D milligrams a day, while the American Heart Association says
the absolute minimum is more like five hundred milligrams a day,
and the average American consumes something like thirty four hundred
(31:04):
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 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 it
(31:26):
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 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 even more salt after this episode. So if Lot's wife,
(31:50):
you know, wasn't so much turned into a pillar of salt,
and we're gonna say, okay, what if the magic rays
of the city smiting taking place, What if it just
reduced 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 of salt. That's roughly what one
(32:13):
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, 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
(32:33):
about the stuff in human bodies in measuring quantities used
for cooking. Yeah, because according to Harvard Health that's less
than nine ounces 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 arid environment. So
(32:53):
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 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
(33:14):
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 you know,
unleashed 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,
(33:38):
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
it to ash. And then, of course so one thinks
to mummies, 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 uh models for the
(34:02):
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 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
(34:23):
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 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
(34:44):
all over, and people said, look, there's the salt woman. Yeah,
you know. Yeah, it's one of those where it's also
a lot of steps are required to get to the
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 to to
I had to tackle. This is kind of a thought experiment.
One of these great playful chemistry papers, like the like
(35:06):
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 of 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
(35:28):
on lots wife titled the Chemical Death of Lot's Wife
Discussion Paper. This was published in the Journal of the
Royal Society 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
(35:49):
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, but also the location. But I should
stress that during his lifetime he authored more than two
hundred scientific articles and pure viewed journals. And he also
wrote numerous books, including one titled Diamond Dealers and Feather
(36:11):
Merchants Tales from the Sciences, which sounds sounds quite good.
I meant to hunt up a copy of it. So anyway,
he's I feel like he's very much engaging on a
thought experiment here, but his his science cred is ultimately
above reproach. Okay, 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?
(36:33):
What would that mean exactly? So, first of all, he
reminds us that we shouldn't take salt too literally. Rather,
he says, 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
(36:53):
the Bible, if they said salt, they probably meant just
any kind of crystalline mineral. A lot of things taste
vague salty. Uh. 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
(37:13):
salt that caused the death of mislot is calcite. This
mineral is very susceptible to a precipitation in the presence
of low concentrations of 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
(37:37):
overwhelm the homeostatic systems that maintain calcium and carbonate levels
below critical values, thus leading 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
(38:00):
a powerful firestorm radiating outward from this from this side
of destruction, and that as she stops and looks back,
perhaps she's then hit by a powerful blast of hot
air with high CEO 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
(38:21):
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 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
(38:43):
the thing, right, So it's not the Josephus issue. Remember,
Josephas says the problem is that she thought too kindly
of of Sodom, right, and that she 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 dangers own from a terrific blast that's taking place.
So Clots goes on from here to do a lot
(39:06):
of chemical analysis on how all this would break down.
And I'm not going to attempt to summarize that here. Uh.
If you're if you're more of a chemistry whiz, I
suggest looking up. This paper is 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 Latt exposed herself instantly
(39:28):
to stresses that generated immediate enormous escalations in concentrations of
calcium and carbonate, so that the critical 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, Miss Latt died
(39:53):
instantly of rigor calcium carbonatus and turned into 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 he lays out a process by which, in
(40:16):
the presence of of certain chemical pressures and you know,
high pressure and temperature from this blast, the body could
conceivably undergo rapid crystallization 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,
(40:39):
you get rapid crystallization, and you get a calcite body.
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 here
(40:59):
leading to the crystallization of the body like this, or
if he's actually saying, oh, yeah, given the right circumstances,
this could 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 in this delivery. I feel like modern papers
of this, uh, this variety would tend to have a
(41:21):
few more winks towards the fact that it is a
thought experiment, if not outright saying, here's a thought experiment.
And he's a little more I guess in a since
he's a little more playful with how he's framing it.
But but yeah, I love this, this idea of the
chemical death of miss Loot and he always refers to
her as miss Loot instead of just lots wife in
(41:41):
the paper. Yeah, so you know, again, not not a
situation where where this paper is confirming a biblical account
Bible story confirmed, but 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 n
areo from you know, for from myth and then and
(42:03):
then trying to sort of recreate it to reverse engineering
using science, and it's it's 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 Lot's wife. I'm also reminded how in
(42:25):
um Our Scott Baker's Second Apocalypse saga, he has a
bit about 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
(42:47):
anyone who wants to explore those books on their own.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head don't over
to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where
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That's our other show comes out once a week. It
(43:08):
is a continuous examination of human techno history. Huge thanks
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