[Serious] A Literal Bible. Answering questions

[Belacqua]

What we can learn from other disciplines shows that at least one city with surrounding towns, was wiped out by a comet airburst around 1500bc, at a site now called Tall El-Hamman, just north of the Dead Sea. The flash from the airburst is calculated to have been around 8000c, burning pottery. If you also understand the perspective of the people doing the writing, then it looks much more likely that the 'pillar of salt' is a visceral personal description of seeing another human getting evaporated by a brief moment of very intense light, as the result of a comet strike in the next valley. 

There might be some connection between the Bible story and the airburst. The author might be setting this event during a known natural disaster, or he just might be taking advantage of the fact that people know such things happen. Either seems plausible to me. (Or there might be no connection -- we really don't know the author's thinking.) 

As for the salt, there are famous salt formations around there, some of which look a bit human-like. 

https://www.geologyin.com/2019/07/myster...ls-in.html

So a combination of an impressive event, with a just-so story concerning strange salt formations -- it's as good a guess as any, I suppose. 

Probably you know that in Greek mythology, explanations like this are called "euhemerist." It's named for a Greek guy named Euhemerus, who lived in the late 4th century BC, and tried to explain the origins of Greek myths as exaggerated natural events. So maybe Hercules really was a tough guy, whose exploits got exaggerated over time.

Maybe the most famous example is in Plato's Phaedrus. Socrates and the title character are walking along, and Phaedrus asks isn't this the place where the wind god abducted that girl? Socrates says no, it was more over there. Then Phaedrus asks if Socrates believes stories like that. Socrates says it might be true as told, or it might be that a gust of wind knocked a girl off a rock and she died, and then the story got exaggerated. (The euhumerist position.) The important thing, though, is that he doesn't really care what's true about it. He knows that myths are not recorded for historical accuracy, but for other purposes. 

To me, the Bible stories are the same way. Parts of them are rooted in real events, but the real events are seldom the reason they are selected, narrated from a certain viewpoint, and preserved as scripture. There must have been lots and lots of terrible fires and plagues and deaths in those days which weren't recorded in the Bible. When people chose which ones to include, they no doubt had a motive. 

And I think the stories in the Bible are nearly always motivated by mythical, spiritual, moral, or other non-accurate-history goals. (Whether we like these messages is a separate question.) So I think the attempt to pin down the destruction of Sodom, or Noah's flood, or the parting of the Red Sea, as inspired by some specific historical event is interesting but mostly missing the point. 

Remember that when Augustine used the word "literal," he didn't use it as we do. He used it to mean "the original message intended by the original authors." So oddly enough, if the original authors meant a story to be metaphorical, then the literal meaning is metaphorical.