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.

Meanwhile Abraham had quitted Mamre and again turned his steps towards
the south. This time it was at Gerar, between the sanctuary of
Kadesh-barnea and Shur the "wall" of Egypt that he sojourned. Kadesh has