Free Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler Page B

of bread.” Abraham hastens to Sarah and asks her to prepare a meal of choice cakes and curd. He then slaughters a calf, “tender and choice,” and serves it, too.
    After eating, the men ask Abraham where his wife, Sarah, is. He tells them, and one of the men announces, “I will return to you when life is due, and your wife Sarah shall have a son!” Sarah, who is then ninety and no longer having “the periods of women,” is listening and laughs out loud. She adds, to herself, “Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment—with my husband so old?” “Why did Sarah laugh?” God asks Abraham. Sarah grows frightened and denies she laughed, but God repeats, “You did laugh.”
    At this point, the men suddenly decide to leave and Abraham escorts them out. Along the way, God decides to reveal himself and the purpose of his visit. “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about todo?” he asks. God then announces that he intends to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, because “their outrage is so great, and their sin is so grave!” No explicit sin is given. Abraham, in the first instance in which he stands up to God, protests, saying, “Perhaps there are fifty righteous people in the city.” The two negotiate the number down to ten—another sign of Abraham’s growing stature—and God departs.
    In Sodom, Lot also welcomes the visitors warmly, but that night his neighbors demand the right to have sexual relations with the men. Lot resists, but the people of the town insist. “Where are the men who came to you tonight?” they ask Lot. “Bring them to us, that we may be intimate with them.” This is a clear reference to homosexuality (and the origin of the word sodomy ) and God responds by destroying the city, using what the King James Bible calls “brimstone and fire,” and what modern translations often call “sulfurous fire.” Before this happens, though, God instructs Lot and his family to flee, but not to glance behind them. When Lot’s wife does look back, she becomes a pillar of salt.
    Avner and I had now reached the bottom of the descent and he pulled to a stop once again. We stepped out of the car at the southern tip of the Dead Sea into a mixture of sulfurous air, oppressive heat, and deceptively inviting turquoise waters. The climate here is like an anti-greenhouse, with all the moisture sucked out of the air. Because of the heat, water evaporates at a faster rate here, meaning the sea contains 25 percent solids and a retching 7 percent salt—six times saltier than the ocean. People are said to be able to float in this brine, but that’s not quite true. The one time I went in, I felt like a wonton—not quite floating, not quite sinking, and covered in a fatty soup. There is one benefit to this otherwise deadly place. The thicker atmosphere prevents ultraviolet rays from reaching the ground, which means, Avner said, that the Dead Sea is the “best place to get a suntan in the world.” The sun, coupled with minerals from the water, is so effective against psoriasis that German and Austrian health plans actually pay patients to fly to Israel rather than stay at home applying lotions.
    In the ancient world, the Dead Sea, which the Bible calls the “Salt Sea,” was less of a novelty and more of a frightening marvel. To explain,Avner led me on a short hike up the cliffs. We scrambled over rocks so brittle they sometimes broke loose in our hands. After a while, we crawled through a narrow opening into a formation called the Cave of Two Chimneys. It was a cylindrical chamber about the size of a spiral staircase with matching two-story knobbly pillars that looked like drumsticks. Only these towers weren’t made of wood. They were made of salt.
    “ Entirely of salt?” I asked.
    “Lick it,” he said.
    These columns proved to be the most unexpected sideshow of the lowest place on earth. Because water evaporates so rapidly here, the floor of the Dead Sea is lined with a layer of minerals several miles