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Updated: May 2, 2025
"The city of Salem" could easily be abbreviated into "Salem" only; and it is accordingly Salem which alone is used in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis as well as in the inscriptions of Ramses II. and Ramses III. The name of Rethpana, which follows that of Salem, is faultily written in the list of Ramses II., and it is from that of Ramses III. that we have to recover its true form.
Ramses III., moreover, tells us that Rethpana was a lake, and since its name comes between those of Jerusalem and the Jordan it must represent the Dead Sea. The name was appropriate to a region which was believed to have been smitten with a tempest of flames, and of which we are told that "the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire."
In both cases it is associated with "the Lake of Rethpana," which must accordingly be the Egyptian name of the Dead Sea. Rethpana might correspond with a Hebrew Reshphôn, a derivative from Resheph, the god of fire. Eastward of the Dead Sea and the Jordan the country is again mountainous and bare.
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