Punished for looking back, Lot's wife may fall forward

MOUNT SODOM, ISRAEL — An article in The Sun yesterday incorrectly identified Lot as the son of Abraham. He was Abraham's nephew.

The Sun regrets the errors.

MOUNT SODOM, Israel -- Pity the most famous woman of Sodom, for whom the end may be near.

She is known by the name of her husband, the man called Lot. She is said to have been disobedient and was severely punished. The punishment never ends since she was turned into a pillar of salt.

That is the Old Testament version, a part of the book of Genesis with lessons about obedience and trust. The religious have been able to bolster their faith by visiting the southwestern shore of the Dead Sea. If they gaze upward, they see an altogether real pillar of salt. From certain angles, it resembles a woman. Everyone calls it -- or her -- Lot's wife.

The modern version has less to do with faith than with fault lines, earth tremors and the effects of wind and water. In the scientific version, Lot's wife is a geologic freak of salt and limestone, and she is coming unglued. After roughly 20,000 years, the pillar is in danger of falling off the equally freakish Mount Sodom, of which it is a part, and tumbling onto the ground.

It is a problem not only because of the potential loss of a tourist attraction. If Lot's wife falls, she probably will land on a highway. She is the size of a three- or four-story townhouse. As if in warning, a half-dozen chunks of mountain, each the size of a car, have fallen to the ground in the last several weeks.

"The whole area is unstable," said Yossi Harash, chief geologist at an industrial complex that refines potash from the Dead Sea and mines minerals from Mount Sodom.

"Things are cracked and tilted because the whole of the mountain is moving," he said.

It is moving up and slightly to the north. "It's not like in the textbooks," said David Meneger, district ranger for the Nature Reserves, Israel's national park service. "It's all happening awfully fast."

The changes to the salt pillar were first noticed by the rangers. The structure appeared to be leaning out a little farther from the rest of Mount Sodom, as if Lot's wife wanted a better view of the shore. Measurements determined the pillar had shifted 15 degrees.

Her movements do no real damage to the Old Testament explanations, or to explanations based on the mostly invisible workings of geology. Lot's wife is one item in a large inventory of oddities in the southern half of the Judean Desert.