Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

MEDIEVAL GROWTH OF THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS. 227
In the second century that great father of the Church,
bishop and martyr, Irenaeus, not only vouched for it, but
gave his approval
to the belief that the soul of Lot's wife
still lingered in the statue, giving it a sort of organic
life :
thus virtually began in the Church that amazing devel-
opment of the legend which we shall see taking various
forms through the Middle Ages the story that the salt
statue exercised certain physical functions which in these
more delicate days can not be alluded to save under cover
of a dead language.
This addition to the legend, which in these signs of life,
as in other things, is developed almost exactly on the same
lines with the legend of the Niobe statue in the rock of
Mount Sipylos and with the legends of human beings transformed
into boulders in various mythologies, was for cen-
turies regarded as an additional confirmation of revealed
truth.
In the third century the myth burst into still richer bloom
in a poem long ascribed to Tertullian. In this poem more
miraculous characteristics of the statue are revealed. It
could not be washed away by rains ; it could not be overthrown
by winds ; any wound made upon it was miraculously
healed ; and the earlier statements as to its physical functions
were amplified in sonorous Latin verse.
With this appeared a new legend regarding the Dead
Sea ;
it became universally believed, and we find it repeated
throughout the whole mediaeval period, that the bitumen
could only be dissolved by such fluids
animated nature came from the statue.
as in the processes of
The legend thus amplified we shall find dwelt upon by
pious travellers and monkish chroniclers for hundreds of
years : so it came to be more and more treasured versal
by the uni-
Church, and held more and more "
firmly always,
everywhere, and by all."
' In the two following centuries we have an overwhelming
mass of additional authority for the belief that the very statue
of salt into which Lot's wife was transformed was still exist-
ing.
In the fourth, the continuance of the statue was vouched
she could
for by St. Silvia, who visited the place : though
not see it, she was told by the Bishop of Segor that it had