Dead Sea Trivia
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99 free Dead Sea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Dead Sea is not a sea at all but a landlocked lake, and almost everything about it is extreme. Its shores are the lowest dry land on Earth, its water is nearly ten times saltier than the ocean, nothing bigger than a microbe lives in it, and it is dropping by more than a metre a year. This quiz covers the numbers (depth, salinity, density, elevation, shrinkage), the science (why you float, why it turned red in 1980, why the two water layers suddenly mixed in 1979, where the sinkholes come from) and the geology of the Sedom Lagoon, Lake Lisan and Mount Sodom. It also covers the human story: Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot's wife, David hiding at Ein Gedi, the Nabatean asphalt trade that supplied Egyptian mummies, Herod's fortress at Masada and the siege of 73 CE, the Essenes of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Vespasian's buoyancy test, the potash industry, the modern resorts and the abandoned plan to refill the lake from the Red Sea. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Dead Sea and its surroundings, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Israel, Jordan and Bible quizzes next.
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Q 01Which city just north-west of the Dead Sea is among the oldest continuously settled places on Earth?
Jericho
Jericho grew up around a copious spring, which drew settlers so early that by about 8000 BCE they had ringed the town with a stone wall and tower.
Q 02Josephus says which preacher was imprisoned and executed at Machaerus, a fortress above the Dead Sea?
John the Baptist
John the Baptist was held in the fortress by Herod Antipas, who, Josephus writes, feared the preacher's hold on the crowds could raise a rebellion and had him put to death.
Q 03What is the Dead Sea's main tributary?
Jordan River
The Jordan River flows south out of the Sea of Galilee and ends in the Dead Sea, which has no outlet, so the water it brings can leave only by evaporating.
Q 04As of 2025, roughly how far below sea level is the surface of the Dead Sea?
440 metres
At about 440 metres below sea level in 2025, the Dead Sea's shore is the lowest land on Earth, and the record keeps moving: the surface drops by roughly a metre a year.
Q 05Compared with ordinary seawater, the Dead Sea is roughly how much saltier?
About tenfold
About tenfold: the brine is roughly one-third salt by weight, and its deep water is so saturated that salt crystallises out and settles on the lake bed.
Q 06Why can anyone float effortlessly in the Dead Sea?
The water's high density
The water's high density, about 1.24 kg per litre, comes from the salt dissolved in it, so a bather's body is lighter than the brine it pushes aside and cannot sink.
Q 07What is potash, the chief mineral product of the Dead Sea, mainly used to make?
Fertiliser
Fertiliser takes most of the world's potash because crops need its potassium to grow; the Dead Sea firms win it by letting the sun evaporate brine in shallow pans.
Q 08Why is the Dead Sea called 'dead'?
Almost nothing can live in it
Almost nothing can live in it: fish swept in by floods die quickly in the brine, and only salt-loving bacteria and fungi survive.
Q 09What is the ancient trail that climbs the eastern face of Masada called?
The Snake Path
The Snake Path twists so tightly up the cliff that climbers once had to go single file; visitors can now ride a cable car to the top instead.
Q 10Yam HaMelah, the Dead Sea's name in the Bible and in modern Hebrew, translates as what?
Sea of Salt
Sea of Salt is the lake's name in the Hebrew text, which never calls it 'dead': that name comes from later Greek and Latin writers.
Q 11Greek and Roman geographers named the Dead Sea after which substance that floats up in it?
Asphalt
Asphalt still rises in black lumps from seeps in the lake bed, and the ancient Egyptians bought it to embalm their mummies, so the classical world called the water Lake Asphaltites.
Q 12The Dead Sea's Arabic name, 'Sea of Lot', refers to whose nephew?
Abraham
Abraham was Lot's uncle: Genesis has the two part ways after their herdsmen quarrel, with Lot choosing the well-watered plain where tradition sets the lake.
Q 13Which UNESCO site just north of the Dead Sea is venerated as the place of Jesus's baptism?
Al-Maghtas
Al-Maghtas, on the river's east bank, drew pilgrims and hermits from Roman times: digs have found their churches, cave cells and the pools where baptisms were held.
Q 21Dead Sea brine is exceptionally rich in which ion, the basis of a chemical industry on its shores?
Bromide
Bromide makes up about 0.4 percent of the brine, dozens of times its level in the ocean, so plants on both shores extract bromine from the lake.
Q 22What happened to the Dead Sea's water column in the winter of 1978-79?
Its two layers mixed into one
Its two layers mixed into one: the upper layer had grown saltier than the deep water, so when it cooled that winter it sank, and the lake overturned for the first time in centuries.
Q 23After an unusually rainy winter, the Dead Sea has been known to turn which colour?
Red
Q 14The Dead Sea lies on the boundary between which two tectonic plates?
African and Arabian
The African and Arabian plates meet here along the Dead Sea Transform, and the strip of crust caught between its faults has sunk, which is why the lake's basin lies so far below sea level.
Q 15Which ridge of rock salt rises along the Dead Sea's south-western shore?
Mount Sodom
Mount Sodom is salt squeezed up from the valley floor by the weight of the sediment above it; one weathered pillar on its flank is nicknamed Lot's wife.
Q 16Millions of years ago, the Dead Sea valley was a long lagoon fed by which sea?
The Mediterranean
The Mediterranean reached inland through today's Jezreel Valley, and each time the lagoon dried out it left salt behind, building beds about two kilometres thick.
Q 17The Dead Sea is the last remnant of a much larger prehistoric body of water known by what name?
Lake Lisan
Lake Lisan filled the valley in the last ice age, then shrank and grew saltier as the climate dried and evaporation outran the rain, leaving the Dead Sea behind.
Q 18What Köppen climate type does the Dead Sea have?
Hot desert
Hot desert: only about 5 cm of rain falls in a year, and the basin lies so low and sheltered that winters stay mild and frost never comes.
Q 19Why is there slightly more oxygen to breathe on the Dead Sea's shore than at sea level?
Higher air pressure
Higher air pressure: the shore lies so far below sea level that extra atmosphere presses down on it, packing a few percent more oxygen into every breath.
Q 20Which metal's chloride makes up about half of the Dead Sea's dissolved salt, unlike the ocean's sodium salt?
Magnesium
Magnesium chloride made up about half the lake's salt in a 1980s analysis, against under a third for sodium chloride, and it is what gives the water its loathsome, bitter taste.
Red: the rain dilutes the surface brine enough for an alga to bloom, and the salt-loving microbes that feed on it carry a red pigment that tints the whole lake.
Q 24Sunbathing cures at the Dead Sea, where the air filters ultraviolet light, are best known for treating which skin condition?
Psoriasis
Psoriasis: the thick air over the lake filters out much of the sun's burning UVB, so patients can lie in the sun for far longer than they could elsewhere.
Q 25In Genesis 14, the kings of which two cities are routed in a battle in the Dead Sea valley?
Sodom and Gomorrah
Sodom and Gomorrah were plundered after the rout, Genesis says, and Lot was carried off with the spoils until a night raid won him back.
Q 26According to the Book of Samuel, where beside the Dead Sea did David hide from King Saul?
Ein Gedi
Ein Gedi: the Book of Samuel has Saul step into the very cave where David was hiding, and David, urged to kill him, only cut a corner from the king's robe.
Q 27Which people monopolised the Dead Sea's trade in the Hellenistic period?
Nabateans
The Nabateans, Arab traders based at Petra, gathered what the lake cast up and sold it on to Egypt, a trade that Greek and Jewish writers say they kept to themselves.
Q 28Which king built the lavish palaces of Masada above the Dead Sea's western shore?
Herod the Great
Herod the Great made Masada his bolt-hole, Josephus says, fearing both a revolt by his own subjects and the ambitions of Cleopatra, and he stocked it with food and weapons.
Q 29Per Josephus, how many Masada defenders died by suicide when the Roman siege ended in 73/74 CE?
960
Josephus puts the dead at 960 men, women and children; the only survivors, he says, were two women and five children who had hidden in an underground water channel.
Q 30How did the Roman commander Vespasian test the Dead Sea's buoyancy?
He threw in bound non-swimmers
He threw in bound non-swimmers: men who could not swim were thrown in with their hands tied, Josephus records, and all bobbed up as if a wind had forced them upwards.