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313 where in the plain," they instructed him; “unto the mountains es- cape, lest thou perish." But Lot. afraid that they would not reach the mountains in time and "would be overtaken by the Evil and die," had a suggestion: Could the uphcavaling of Sodom be de- layed until he had reached the town of Zoar, the farthest one away from Sodom? Agreeing, one of the emissaries asked him to hurry there: "Haste thee to escape thither, for I will be unable to do any- thing until thou hast arrived there." The calamity was thus not only predictable and avoidable but also postponable; and it could be made to afflict various cities at different times. No natural catastrophe could have featured all The sun was risen over the Earth when Lot arrived at Zoar; And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah, from the skies. brimstone and fire that had come from Yahweh. And He upheavaled those cities and the whole plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities The cities, the people, the vegetation—everything was "upheav- aled" by the gods' weapon. Its heat and fire scorched all before it: its radiation affected people even at some distance away: Lot's wife, ignoring the admonition not to stop to look back as they were fleeing away from Sodom, turned to a "pillar of vapor."* The "Evil" Lot had feared had caught up with her... . *The traditional and literal translation of the Hebrew term Netsiv melah has been "pillar of salt," and tracts have been written in the Middle Ages explaining the process whereby a person could turn into crystalline salt. However, if—as we believe—the mother tongue of Abraham and Lot was Sumerian. and the event was first recorded not in a Semitic language but in Sumerian. an entirely dif- ferent and more plausible understanding of the fate of Lot's wife be- comes possible. In a paper presented to the American Oriental Society in 1918 and in a followup article in Beitrage zur Assyriologie, Paul Haupt had shown conclusively that because the early sources of salt in Sumer were swamps near the Persian Gulf, the Sumerian term NIMUR branched off to mean both salt and vapor. Because the Dead Sea has been called, in Hebrew, The Salt Sea. the biblical Hebrew narrator probably misinterpreted the Sumerian term and wrote "pillar of salt" when in fact Lot's wife became a "pillar of vapor." In this The Nuclear Holocaust these aspects. and all the vegetation that grows from the ground.