The Tar Pits That Swallowed the Kings of Sodom

The vale of Siddim was not a place a man wanted to retreat into. The ground was honeycombed with tar, slick black wells of bitumen that breathed up heat and stench, and the streams of the plain emptied their mineral water into the great sea of salt. Bera ruled Sodom and Birsha ruled Amorah, and even their names carried verdicts against them, the one whose name meant in evil, the other whose name meant in wickedness. Their fellow kings of the plain were no better. They had served Kedorlaomer of Elam twelve years and rebelled in the thirteenth, and now in the fourteenth the eastern army had come down to collect.

Five Kings Against Four in the Valley of Tar

Five kings of the plain drew up their lines in Siddim against four kings of the east. The numbers favored the locals. The land did not. Kedorlaomer had already smashed the giants of Ashteroth-Karnaim and the Rephaim and the Emim, had cut his way through Seir and turned back at the spring of Mishpat. By the time he reached the salt valley his army was a blade that had already proven it could cut. The men of Sodom and Amorah and Admah and Zeboiim and Bela faced soldiers who knew exactly what they were doing on ground the defenders should have known better than to choose.

The battle did not last the way songs say battles last. The line of the plain broke. And when men break and run, they run the way fear sends them, not the way wisdom would. The kings of Sodom and Amorah turned and fled across the one stretch of earth that could not be crossed at a sprint.

The Ground Opens Beneath the Fleeing Kings

They fell there. The Aramaic keeps it as bare as a wound. The kings of Sodom and Amorah fled away, and they fell there. Into the pits. The same bitumen that men cut from the valley to mortar their walls and seal their boats now closed over the heads of the kings who ruled those walls. The tar did not care that they wore crowns. It pulled them down the way it would pull down a dog or a stone, slow and black and without sound except the sound a thick thing makes when it swallows.

The storytellers who came after could not agree on who died in the pits. Some said the king of Sodom himself went under with his men and the plain lost its master in the muck. Others said he climbed out, fouled and stinking, because the chapter needs him alive a little longer, and it was his soldiers who stayed down in the tar. The Aramaic refuses to settle it. The names of the drowned do not matter. What matters is the picture: a king of a wicked city, running from a war he started, sinking into the very poison his own ground had stored up against him.

There is a cold justice in the geography. The streams of Sodom ran to the salt sea, where nothing lives. The wells of Sodom ran with tar that burns. Every feature of that valley was a feature of death dressed up as wealth, and on the day the kings ran, the wealth came due. The land itself refused to carry them. Not fire from above. Not yet. Just the ground, opening like a mouth.

The Old Man in Hebron Hears the News

The eastern kings took the spoil of Sodom and Amorah, all the food and goods, and they took the people. Among the captives walked Lot, who had pitched his tent toward Sodom because the valley looked like the garden of the Lord, well watered everywhere, green as Egypt. A fugitive escaped the slaughter and ran south to a grove of oaks at Hebron, where an old man lived who had no quarrel with any king of the east. The fugitive told him his nephew was taken.

The old man did not send a letter of complaint. He armed three hundred and eighteen men born in his own house, chased the four kings the length of the land to Dan, divided his force in the dark, and fell on them by night. He drove them past Damascus and brought back Lot and the women and the goods and every captive. The war of the five and the four had ended in a tar pit. It found its real ending in a tent at Hebron, where the covenant first showed its teeth.

The Plain That Melted Like a Snail in the Sun

The pits were a rehearsal. The valley got its master back, and its wickedness back, and went on as before, until the morning the Lord rained on Sodom and Amorah brimstone and fire out of heaven. Then the whole plain did what the kings had done, only faster and from above instead of below. It dissolved.

The sages reached for a strange verse to say how. Like a snail that melts as it goes, sang the psalm, like the untimely birth of a woman that has never seen the sun. That is how Sodom went. Like the snail that leaves a smear of itself behind on the stone and shrinks until there is nothing left, dissolving away into its own slime as it crawls. Like the mole that burrows in the dark and never lives long enough to break the surface and see daylight before it sinks back into its dust. The kings had sunk into tar and left only the question of their names. The cities sank into smoke and left only salt and a pillar that had once been a woman looking back.

The valley that looked like the garden of the Lord became the sea of salt that men still avoid. Nothing grows there. The tar pits are gone under the water now, and the cities under them, and the kings under the tar, layer on layer of a plain that swallowed everything that trusted it.