The vale of Siddim, and “the cities of the plain,” stood at the northern end of the Dead Sea.  Here were the “slime-pits” from which the naphtha was extracted, and which caused the defeat of the Canaanitish princes by the Babylonian army.  The legend which placed the pillar of salt into which Lot’s wife was changed at the southern extremity of the Dead Sea was of late origin, probably not earlier than the days when Herod built his fortress of Machaerus on the impregnable cliffs of Moab, and the name of Gebel Usdum, given by the modern Arabs to one of the mountain-summits to the south of the sea proves nothing as to the site of the city of Sodom.  Names in the east are readily transferred from one locality to another, and a mountain is not the same as a city in a plain.

There are two sufficient reasons why it is to the north rather than to the south that we must look for the remains of the doomed cities, among the numerous tumuli which rise above the rich and fertile plain in the neighbourhood of Jericho, where the ancient “slime-pits” can still be traced.  Geology has taught us that throughout the historical period the Dead Sea and the country immediately to the south of it have undergone no change.  What the lake is to-day, it must have been in the days of Abraham.  It has neither grown nor shrunk in size, and the barren salt with which it poisons the ground must have equally poisoned it then.  No fertile valley, like the vale of Siddim, could have existed in the south; no prosperous Canaanitish cities could have grown up among the desolate tracts of the southern wilderness.  As we are expressly told in the Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), the Canaanites dwelt only “by the coast of Jordan,” not in the desert far beyond the reach of the fertilizing stream.

But there is another reason which excludes the southern site.  “When Abraham got up early in the morning,” we are told, “he looked towards Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.”  Such a sight was possible from the hills of Hebron; if the country lay at the northern end of the Dead Sea, it would have been impossible had it been south of it.

Moreover, the northern situation of the cities alone agrees with the geography of Genesis.  When the Babylonian invaders had turned northwards after smiting the Amalekites of the desert south of the Dead Sea, they did not fall in with the forces of the king of Sodom and his allies until they had first passed “the Amorites that dwelt in Hazezon-tamar.”  Hazezon-tamar, as we learn from the Second Book of Chronicles (xx. 2), was the later En-gedi, “the Spring of the Kid,” and En-gedi lay on the western shore of the Dead Sea midway between its northern and southern extremities.

In the warm, soft valley of the Jordan, accordingly, where a sub-tropical vegetation springs luxuriantly out of the fertile ground and the river plunges into the Dead Sea as into a tomb, the nations of Ammon and Moab were born.  It was a fitting spot, in close proximity as it was to the countries which thereafter bore their names.  From the mountain above Zoar, Lot could look across to the blue hills of Moab and the distant plateau of Ammon.