07 Dec




















some pious generalities. Four years later another French ecclesiastic, Jacques Goujon, referring in his published travels to the legends of the salt pillar, says: "People may believe these stories as much as they choose; I did not see it, nor did I go there." So, too, in 1697, Morison, a dignitary of the French Church, having travelled in Palestine, confesses that, as to the story of the pillar of salt, he has difficulty in believing it. The same current is observed working still more strongly in the travels of the Rev. Henry Maundrell, an English chaplain at Aleppo, who travelled through Palestine during the same year. He pours contempt over the legends of the Dead Sea in general: as to the story that birds could not fly over it, he says that he saw them flying there; as to the utter absence of life in the sea, he saw small shells in it; he saw no traces of any buried cities; and as to the stories regarding the statue of Lot's wife and the proposal to visit it, he says, "Nor could we give faith enough to these reports to induce us to go on such an errand." The influence of the Baconian philosophy on his mind is very clear; for, in expressing his disbelief in the Dead Sea apples, with their contents of ashes, he says that he saw none, and he cites Lord Bacon in support of scepticism on this and similar points. But the strongest effect of this growing scepticism is seen near the end of that century, when the eminent Dutch commentator Clericus (Le Clerc) published his commentary on the Pentateuch and his Dissertation on the Statue of Salt. At great length he brings all his shrewdness and learning to bear against the whole legend of the actual transformation of Lot's wife and the existence of the salt pillar, and ends by saying that "the whole

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