The Dead Sea

The Hebrew name of the Dead Sea, Yam ha-Melaḥ, “the Salt Sea,” the standard biblical designation. It serves as a fixed point of the land’s geography: the southern and eastern boundary of the territory in the border-lists of Numbers and Joshua, the lake “into which the Jordan goes down.” The name is a single flat fact, the one quality, melaḥ, salt, that makes the water what it is.

The Hebrew Bible knows the lake by several names, the Sea of the Arabah, the Eastern Sea, but it is the salt that anchors it in the language and carries through into the Aramaic Targum’s Yammā de-Milḥā. Where the Greeks would later name the lake for the asphalt they quarried from it and the Arabs for the prophet whose people died beside it, the Hebrew names it for the brine itself. It is the plainest of the lake’s many diagnoses, and the oldest.

A second Hebrew name for the Dead Sea, ha-Yam ha-Qadmonī, “the Eastern Sea,” from qedem, “east, that which is in front.” It appears in the later prophets: Ezekiel’s vision of the healing river that flows down to it from the Temple (47:8–9), Joel’s locust-army driven into it, Zechariah’s living waters split between “the Eastern Sea” and “the Western Sea.”

The name is one half of a pair that frames the whole land by its two waters: the Dead Sea to the east and the Mediterranean, ha-Yam ha-Aḥarōn, “the Hinder” or Western Sea, to the west. It is the same orientation-by-position that the Mesopotamians used in calling the Mediterranean and the Gulf their Upper and Lower Seas, here turned through ninety degrees: a people in the Judaean hills measured their world east and west, and the salt lake was its eastern edge.

The Greek name of the Dead Sea, Límnē Asphaltîtis, “Asphalt Lake,” for the bitumen that rose in lumps to its surface and was gathered from boats. Diodorus, Strabo, and Josephus all describe the harvest: the asphalt was floated to shore, cut up, and traded across the eastern Mediterranean, used in waterproofing and, the Greeks reported, in Egyptian embalming. A parallel Greek usage, Nekrà Thálassa, “Dead Sea,” named it instead for its lifelessness.

The Greeks named the lake for what could be taken out of it. Dead Sea asphalt was a genuine commodity, fought over by the Nabataeans and the Hasmoneans, and the name records the lake as a quarry rather than a wonder. Of its two Greek names it was the other, the “Dead Sea,” that passed through Latin into the modern languages, but Asphaltîtis is the one that remembers what the lake was actually worth to the people who worked it.

The Latin name of the Dead Sea, Lacus Asphaltites, taken from the Greek; Pliny gives the famous description of the lake so dense that nothing thrown in will sink and bulls and camels float, Tacitus its seasonal slicks of bitumen. The “dead” name also appears in Latin, as Mare Mortuum.

It is through the Latin Mare Mortuum that the lake became, for the European languages, the “Dead Sea,” the asphalt-name dropping away as the lake passed from a working quarry into a biblical curiosity. The lake is one of the few features in this atlas known to the modern world by neither a local name nor the original of either tradition, but by a Roman calque of a Greek epithet, two removes from anything its own shores ever called it.

The Aramaic name of the Dead Sea, Yammā de-Milḥā, “the Sea of Salt,” the form in which the Targum renders the Hebrew Yam ha-Melaḥ. Onqelos, the authoritative Aramaic translation of the Torah, carries the biblical phrase across word for word, milḥā for melaḥ, into the language the rabbis actually spoke.

The Aramaic keeps the Hebrew diagnosis exactly, salt for salt, at the same time as the Greek and Latin traditions were naming the lake for its asphalt and its lifelessness. It is the Hebrew name continued, not re-coined: where every other culture that met the lake gave it a fresh name from a fresh impression, the Aramaic-speaking heirs of the biblical writers simply went on calling it what their scripture did. The oldest name and the most stable, salt, ran on unbroken into the spoken Aramaic of late antiquity.

The Arabic name of the Dead Sea, Baḥr Lūṭ or Buḥayrat Lūṭ, “the Sea (or Lake) of Lot,” for the prophet Lūṭ whose people, the cities of the plain, were destroyed beside it. The Qurʼanic account of their overthrow (Sūrat Hūd) is read directly onto the landscape: the barren, sulfurous lake is taken as the visible memorial of the catastrophe. Yāqūt and al-Maqdisī use the name in their geographies.

Where the Hebrews named the lake for its salt and the Greeks for its asphalt, the Arabs named it for the scripture its dead water seemed to confirm; the name turns a feature of geography into a standing sermon. The same lifeless lake the Greeks read as a quarry, the Arabic tradition read as a warning, and named accordingly. Each culture’s name for the Dead Sea is, in the end, a reading of what its lethal water meant.