SIDDIM, VALE OF sĭd’ ĭm (עֵ֖מֶק הַשִּׂדִּ֑ים). The Heb. siddîm may be derived from the Hitt. siyantas, “salt.” If so, it would describe the salt flats and bitumen pits of a valley bordering the Dead Sea. There is only one reference to the valley in the Bible, the place where Chedorlaomer and his allies defeated the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah and the other cities of the Jordan pentapolis (Gen 14:3, 10). The date of this expedition was prob. about the 20th cent. b.c. in the Middle Bronze Age, and the armies followed the King’s Highway in Trans-Jordan to the field of battle somewhere in the locality of the Dead Sea. Harland has suggested this site was the plain S of El-Lisan which has been down-faulted and submerged beneath the lake. Certainly, the lake terrain around the shores of the Dead Sea indicate that as a consequence of climatic oscillations, drainage evolution and faulting, possibly twenty-five distinct lake levels have occurred in the Dead Sea trough since Pleistocene times. Only preliminary investigations of these lake level changes have yet been undertaken. Until more research is made, the exact locale of the Vale of Siddim will remain speculative.