Each year, the Torah repeats the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and each year I am puzzled by the same thing: why did Lot delay leaving the city, why did Lot’s wife look back, and why did she turn into a pillar of salt?
Almost every traditional and modern commentary offers the same explanation for these events: Lot was a relatively pious man (he is called a tzaddik once), and his piety is shown by his insistence on hosting the two mysterious guests. He is favorably contrasted with his sons-in-law, who refuse to heed his warning and choose to stay in Sodom instead. And his fidelity is also contrasted with the behavior of his wife, who disobeys the angels’ explicit orders. While taking Lot and his family from the condemned city, the angels issue the order: “Do not look behind you, nor stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, lest you be swept away!” Lot, obedient servant that he is, marches resolutely forward. Lot’s wife, an anonymous rebel, looks back and suffers the consequences.
The Rabbis of Midrash Bereshit Rabbah extend the contrast between the two spouses even further. They claim that while Lot was pleading with the two men to become his guests so he could fulfill the mitzvah of hakhnasat orhim (welcoming guests), his wife tried to frustrate his generosity. But she had to rely on a ploy, so she went to all her neighbors asking to borrow some salt because there were some guests in her house. She appeared to be on a mission of generosity, but in reality was alerting her neighbors with the hope that they would intervene. In the words of Rabbi Isaac, she was turned into a pillar of salt “because she sinned through salt.”
We know virtually nothing about Lot’s wife: we don’t know her name, her family, her personality. All we have is this story of her looking back, her transformation into stone, and the rabbinic justification of that punishment through a midrash recounting her act of treason and inhospitability. Yet Christian and Moslem tradition both seem to accept that rabbinic reading, viewing this nameless woman as a foil for her husband’s goodness and generosity, a woman who paid the just penalty for rebellion against the will of God.
Actually, we know one other fact about Lot’s wife: she is the mother of four daughters. Two were married, as we know from the fact that Lot consults his sons-in-law, “who had married his daughters” and they refused to take his warning seriously. In addition to those two married daughters were two others, the “two remaining daughters.”
When the angels came to take Lot and his family out of the condemned city, they actually left two of Lot’s daughters behind with their husbands.
That tragic family rupture allows us to account for the story in a way that diverges from the traditional account.
After Lot tried to convince his sons-in-law that he wasn’t joking, after he realized that they would compel his married daughters to remain in Sodom, he must have been despondent. It isn’t hard to imagine that Lot’s wife would have shared his horror. The next morning, when the fatal rain of sulfurous fire and brimstone was about to engulf the city, the Torah recounts, “the angels urged Lot on, saying, ‘Up, take your wife and your two remaining daughters, lest you be swept away because of the iniquity of the city.’ Still, he delayed.”
The only traditional explanation for his delay, in Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, is that “he kept on delaying, exclaiming, ‘What a loss of gold and silver and precious stones!’” I prefer a different motivation: Lot was slow in leaving because he could not make his peace with leaving his married daughters behind. The angels had to physically take him from Sodom; he couldn’t abandon his own children voluntarily.
Once he had left the city and the fire and sulfur began to pour down, he must have decided that the survival of his remaining two daughters was primary, so he purposely marched them forward toward safety.
But the mother’s heart could not let go. Mrs. Lot couldn’t choose between her children, couldn’t bear that two of her daughters were trapped in the flames. Her head knew it had to fight to live for her surviving children, but her mother’s heart tugged her toward Sodom, toward the children left behind.
“Just one more look, maybe it’s not to late to help them,” she might have reasoned. And so, imperiling her own life, like countless mother’s have done for their children throughout the ages, she stopped, and she looked back, desperately trying to see her children one last time.
And that moment of turning cost her her life—the advancing sulfur, the streaming lava, immediately engulfed her.
Which parent was right: the father, who loved his daughters so much that he delayed leaving and then loved his surviving daughters so much that all he thought about was there survival? Or the mother, whose love could not be severed in two, whose connection to her married daughters cost her her life?
On that point, the Torah is silent. Perhaps we should be too.
Shabbat shalom.