Lot's Wife, the Pillar of Salt and the Cave Above the Dead Sea

The story of Lot and his family

The story is told in both the Bible and the Quran, where Lot is known as the Prophet Lut. He lived among the cities of the plain near the Dead Sea, whose people had turned to wrongdoing. Messengers came to warn Lot that the cities would be destroyed, and told him to leave at night with his family and not to look back. In the account of the Book of Genesis, Lot's wife looked back at the burning cities and was turned into a pillar of salt. The Quran tells that she remained behind with those who were destroyed. Lot and his daughters escaped into the hills, where, tradition says, they sheltered in a cave.

Salt pillars and storytellers

The Dead Sea is one of the saltiest bodies of water on Earth, and as its water evaporates, it leaves salt behind on the rocks and the shore. Over time, wind and rain carve the soft salty hills into columns and figures. Around the Dead Sea, several of these natural pillars have been called Lot's wife by local people and travellers, each one a different candidate in a very old game of imagination. These formations are natural creations of geology, and none of them can be connected to the story with any certainty. Yet standing in this bright, silent landscape, it is easy to see how the story and the land have shaped each other.

The monastery at Lot's Cave

On a steep hillside near the town of Ghor es-Safi, south of the Dead Sea, stand the ruins of a Byzantine monastery built around a natural cave. Christians of the Byzantine period honoured this cave as the place where Lot and his daughters took refuge. Archaeologists who excavated the site from the late 1980s found a church with mosaic floors, and Greek inscriptions that mention Saint Lot.

Several of the inscriptions are dated to the late sixth and seventh centuries AD. Pottery found in and around the cave shows that people used it much earlier, in the Bronze Age, thousands of years before the monastery was built. The exact location of the cities of the plain remains unknown, and scholars still discuss it. The cave, however, shows how strongly this story was rooted in the local landscape.

Visiting today

The site, known in Arabic as Deir Ain Abata, can be reached by a path and a long flight of steps that climb the hillside. The walk is short but steep and hot for much of the year, so it is best done in the morning with water and a hat. From the top, the view stretches over the farms of the southern Jordan Valley towards the Dead Sea. Nearby, the Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth displays objects from the monastery and from the wider region, including mosaics, pottery and ancient textiles. A visit to both gives you the story, the landscape and the history together.

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