> > The dead Sea has been filled since long before the 2nd Century.
>
> The second after I posted, I ran across this factoid I had recorded in some notes concerning the Dead Sea: The Bible calls it the "Salt Sea" and Josephus called it "Lake Asphaltitis."
>
> If Josephus called it *anything*, obviously it had to *be* there in his time, in the first century A.D. Yet Josephus also said one could verify that Lot's wife was still there, and, as a respected historian, if he had been wrong about that, he would have been discredited. So something is clearly amiss.

The vast majority of his readers would have been far too far away to make such a journey to verify his claims, and those who lived nearby were, for the most part, not "respected historians", and thus easy to ignore. Consider Pliny's accounts of the Mines of Soloman. Again, he said that their location could be easily verified by anyone will to make the journey. And he was wrong.

Medieval biologists believed that beavers would bite off their testes as an offering to predators. This belief lasted hundreds of years, without anyone being "discredited".

> In rereading the biblical text, God told Lot and his wife to flee to a *mountain* (Gen. 19:17), because he was going to destroy not just the city but the whole plain. Genesis 19:25-26 says that God overthrew the city and the plain, and *then* Lot's wife looked back. So they had to have been out of the plain and on the mountain by that point, and that means that the biblical account, as well as the geological account and Josephus's writings, make it doubtful that Lot's wife would now be submerged in the Dead Sea.

If Sodom and Gomorrah were on a plain, they weren't where the Dead Sea is now, or near its shores. The Dead Sea is very steep-sided, all the way to the bottom. Dry, it could be called a valley, but never a plain.

And, if I recall correctly, Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by fire rather than by water. There is certainly no evidence of intense heat in the area. Though, of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

> So what you say here makes sense. I appear to be wrong in assuming Lot's wife is now submerged, as neither the biblical account nor Josephus's account would support that.
>
> So I take that part back and thank you for bringing it up. What *did* happen to Lot's wife, I don't know: anything can happen in 1800 years.

True. And salt isn't the most permanant of media.

> Of course, that still leaves the fact that Josephus and the Bishop of Lyons were telling people to go down and look at her if they wanted verification of the story, which is the main thing I was trying to get across.

I understood that. I was just trying to correct factual errors. And on that note, you use "factoid" above to mean "small fact", when it actually means "fact-shaped". Which is to say, something that is false, but commonly believed to be true.

winter"Yes, I am a pedant"mute