by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright 2010
This is not a faith-promoting story.
The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.
Genesis 19:23–26, KJV
She trudged wearily. She had been walking without rest since midnight. Now the sun topped the eastern mountain crests and the chill dawn wind was blowing fiercely. It whipped her bed robe about her legs and threatened to trip her. She stumbled heavily over the sparse clumps of sagebrush that seemed to spring up in her path and curl around her scratched and bloody feet. The alkali dust that coated every twig and leaf worked into the wounds and made them sting and fester. She had been walking so long that her mind had numbed to the passing of time. It had also been numbed by the fantastic events of the previous day that had brought her here—fifty yards from the gates and through them to the safety of the tiny city of Zoar.
She started momentarily out of her reverie. Behind her, though she dare not look, came a mighty roar that signaled the beginning of the end for the city she was leaving. She couldn’t hear the screams but she half expected to. The roar, and soon following deep-throated explosions, drowned out the padding of her feet. She looked up. In front of her the nearby walls of Zoar flickered, bathed in the light of the mighty flashes coming from behind her. The gate was open and into it she saw Lot and their daughters trudging—she’d fallen behind again.
She was alone outside the gate. She felt vaguely bothered that she couldn’t see what was happening. She’d been warned not to look by those strange men and her husband. She was an obedient wife. But that didn’t stop her from questioning what was happening, and why.
As the strangers had foretold the Lord had sent a mighty angel to wipe out the twin towns—that angel was now systematically laying waste to the buildings, crops, animals, and people of Sodom and Gomorrah.
But why? What had these people done that was so heinous as to warrant this drastic a response? She had asked.
“They are irredeemably immoral,” was the cold reply from the strangers. “They will not honor the Lord; they will not fear him; they must be taught a lesson.”
But what had they done? As it happened she had been talking to Muriel, her friend and native-born Sodomite, about morality just yesterday while shopping in the market.
“It’s true. We are immoral,” she said. She said it smiling and happily. There was great assurance in her voice. “We are because we’ve lost our fear of the consequences of immorality.
“We know what nature has in store for us. We know that disease and discomfort exist and we know that morality will not prevent these facts of life from afflicting us. We know that unrighteousness exists, and we know that morality will not prevent it from causing personal catastrophe. It will only make us worry about something we can do nothing to stop.
“So knowing these tenets to be true we no longer need morality. We’ve given it up and in so doing we’ve prospered. We no longer worry about the rightness or wrongness of what we do, we just do it. It takes far less energy to do things than it does to worry about whether or not it is okay to do them.
“As a result we’ve prospered and grown after our own fashion. And see what our beliefs have gained us.”
She waved her hand around to indicate the prospering streets and marketplaces of the town. There were all manner of goods and merchants here and the people walking the streets were well-fed and well-clothed.
“See what man can make for himself when he ceases to worry about whether what he is doing is right or not?
“We’ve built fine cities. The fountains flow with sparkling water. The squares are filled with trading merchants whose stalls are filled with fine goods. The city is filled with fine buildings.
“True, there are some problems. The water isn’t always pure, the buildings fall down occasionally, we’ve lost battles as well as won them, and there are disagreements about who owns what. But compare all this to what those silly, straitlaced nomads have that came with you as far as Bethel—people like your brother-in-law Abraham. They’re still living in tents!”
At this point she was distracted by a pleasant but pushy merchant hawking fine towels—each offered with a fine massage tossed in. After some bartering Muriel acquiesced to the merchant’s advances, purchased a towel, and went into the shop to collect her massage. Lot’s wife continued shopping on her own. Despite the few years she had lived there she still recoiled at the idea of personally indulging fully in Sodom’s normal lifestyles. The merchant moved on to other more interested prospects.
Sometime later Muriel reappeared rushing up with a look that spoke surely of hot gossip.
“Nice massage?” queried Lot’s wife.
“Huh? … Incredible! Remind me to get a half dozen towels the next time he has a sale. But that’s not news, what I overheard is: There are messengers coming to town; they’re coming from the east, from Abraham’s hills. It’s said they’re angels, messengers from the Lord!
“Coming here? To Sodom?”
“Yes, isn’t it strange? Why would an angel come here? They know they won’t find the blind bowing and scraping here that they do in the hills … most peculiar. What’s worse is, I heard it from Mary. And if she’s heard it the whole town’s heard it. And while we won’t bow and scrape to them we will certainly be curious enough to come see what they look like.”
Lot’s wife quickly finished her shopping and as the sun settled into the western hills, she hurried home. There she found her husband and family hiding behind a bolted door. She knocked and yelled to be let in.
When the door opened she was facing Lot, his face filled with a wild-eyed grimness that she had never liked to see in him. Without a word of explanation he grabbed her inside, then told her in deadly earnest to quickly prepare a feast for the two strangers she saw in the parlor. He didn’t introduce them, he just hustled her into the kitchen where she found her daughters had already washed the men’s feet and were ready to serve the meat and bread. They motioned her to be quiet and join them in making the preparations. The silence had a queer, hair-raising feeling to it. Normally the kitchen bubbled with song and laughter as much as it did with soups and sauces.
In the silence she overheard Lot speaking loudly and earnestly with the men. He was obviously quite nervous and agitated and not aware of either how nervous he was acting or how loud he was talking.
“Lords, I beg you. Please don’t destroy this city. I’ve made my home here. I’ve prospered here—even as my brother Abraham has prospered over the hills to the east. Some of my daughters are married. My cattle are plentiful. If you destroy all this, I’ll have to start from scratch. I’m an old man.”
He rambled on. But it was clear from his tone that the messengers were not moved with his arguments.
When the men had finished their dining there came a loud commotion from the street and banging on the door. Slowly Lot went to answer it, but his hands were shaking and his voice cracking. He opened the door and stepped out. There he started yelling and babbling incoherently. At first the people at the door laughed at him; the babbling was amusing. But the mob was curious about angels, not Lot’s ravings. They pressed him for a look. Lot grew desperate; he started offering up his daughters—a strange notion to people that were here to see the unusual, not the mundane. A few in the mob finally took this as an insult. They grabbed Lot. There was yelling and shuffling. Finally the strange visitors grabbed Lot back and dragged him inside—now totally shaken.
A couple of the mob members began beating on the door again; the angels discouraged them quickly by casting upon them a spell of blindness.
The night turned into a siege. Lot’s wife never felt so alone. No one inside knew whether the mob would return or seek other, easier diversions. Lot sent servants to his sons-in-law telling them what the angels had said. But she expected they would pay him no mind. They must have heard of his conduct at the door; he was obviously off the deep end. She loved him but this kind of thing had happened before, and every time it did it cost her and her daughters more friends and acquaintances. She thanked her stars that they were already rich and that most of their daughters were already married. But at this rate, even with their money and well-connected daughters, there would soon be no one left in the town who would talk with them. At last Lot’s wife settled into a short uneasy sleep marred with bad dreams of people forever walking by her and never taking notice.
The next thing she remembered was being dumped unceremoniously on the hard earth in the dark. Struggling to her feet, still in her night garments, she saw Lot standing in the light of a single torch talking to the two strangers. Sitting near her were her two daughters, also looking newly awakened and confused.
With no more words and no more preparation, the family abandoned the house and jogged out of the city. Why no one was watching and why they were not challenged at the gate she had no idea. What she did know was that it was painfully uncomfortable to be jogging out in the night with no more than night clothes on. The party left the city walls and moved on and on.
Finally they stopped for a moment—she was relieved. But the relief didn’t last for more than a moment. One of the strangers was speaking. He said, “Leave the city now! Don’t look back; don’t stay on the plains; head straight for the mountains. They will be your new home.”
Lot objected, “We’ll never survive in the mountains. I may be faithful, and I appreciate our Lord’s mercy in your leading me out, but I’m also old and need time to prepare. Let me go instead to the nearby town of Zoar. It’s a small town. Certainly it’s not necessary to destroy it as well to make your point, is it?”
On this one point the angels relented. The speaker said, “I will accept your entreaties. Go to Zoar, but hurry. We cannot begin the destruction until you are safe but we are in no mood to tarry.”
With that they parted company. The angels turned back towards Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot’s wife noticed that they now carried strange symbol-covered devices strapped to their hips—those had to be angelic weapons. Lot and his family walked now, still half-dressed in the cold night, towards Zoar. Lot spent the night urging the women on in a desperate way.
And now Lot was inside the gates. At the last moment he had hurried on ahead and rushed their daughters to safety. But she was still twenty feet from the gate! The flashing and thunder were now quite intense, even the ground was shaking, and the walls of Zoar were bathed in a fierce, steady blue-white sheen. She blinked. There was a bent woman hobbling beside her. She looked again. It was her shadow moving on the wall.
When she looked again to the gate she was alone. Lot and her daughters were inside. Over the roar she could hear Lot yelling back to her, but he dared not look to see her.
How could he do it? How could the Lord be so jealous? Just because these people had found a different way to adapt to the harsh world we all live in, he was taking special pains to destroy them utterly. How could they be that much of a threat?
Suddenly the truth struck her. She stopped walking and stretched her tired back as if she had dropped a great load from it.
If the Sodomites were wrong in their beliefs, then the natural forces should eliminate them in natural ways. Plague, pestilence, famine, whatever, would strike them down harder than they would strike down the righteous. But that’s not what was happening. The Sodomites were prospering the same or more than the righteous. By sending his angels the Lord was saying they, the Sodomites, were right!
The Sodomites would be successful. The Lord was admitting the natural ways would not finish them off—they would grow and prosper without morality. In fact, they might grow and prosper so much that moral people wouldn’t. The fear of God would die, withered by the success of amoral prosperity. God was protecting his people, all right. He was protecting them by brutally killing off competitors.
Is this what it meant to be part of the chosen people? To live a hard life just because God thought life ought to be hard? And if you didn’t live a hard life, to be struck down by unnatural forces just to make the point that life ought to be hard?
She thought she heard His voice back in the thunder and He was saying, “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and God’s way.”
“What a jerk!” was her next thought. “I don’t have to put up with this kind of abuse, and I won’t.”
She turned to face the blinding blue light and walk back home.
The End