God and the angels arrive in Sodom and Lot is there to greet them at the city gates. The Bible itself mentions only the two angels arriving at the city but the textual notes of both books indicate that God was present but was unseen by Lot because of his less than faithful nature. Lot offers the angels protection in his home and a somewhat meager repast. They initially refuse stating they will spend the night in the town square. Lot manages to talk them out of this.
The angels don’t even make it to bed before the men of Sodom are banging as an angry mob at Lot’s door looking to ‘be intimate’ with the apparently handsome newcomers. Lot tries to fend them off by offering them the intimacy of his two unwed daughters but is nearly pummeled before the angels intervene to save his skin. The angels deter the mob with a blinding light and make haste to evacuate Lot’s household as the wrath of God is about to descend upon the city. Lot can’t convince his sons-in-law to flee with his married daughters as they won’t take him seriously so in the end he makes his exit with only his wife and his two virgin daughters. The angels caution the fleeing party not to stop in their flight or look back.
Lot and family arrive later at the city of Zoar and thence the bombardment begins. “Sulfurous fire” rains down on Sodom and Gomorrah and they are destroyed utterly along with most of the surrounding plain. Lot’s poor wife is given but a single sentence, “Lot’s wife looked back, and thereupon turned into a pillar of salt.” From that single sentence, one of the most well-known Bible stories springs. Both books allude to this transformation as an explanation for salt formations currently in existence in this area of the world. Thus was Lot saved from destruction by the Lord because of his promise to Abraham.
Lot later moves from Zoar into a cave in the surrounding hills with his daughters. Lonely, and lamenting that, “there is not a man on earth to consort with us,” Lot’s daughters get him drunk and “lay” with him. Both end up pregnant by their own father and later give birth to Moab and Ben-ammi, progenitors of a long line of enemies of Israel, the Moabites and the Ammonites. The two texts have somewhat differing viewpoints on who exactly is at fault in the last episode of incest. The NASB argues that Lot is at fault because he allowed himself to get drunk. It’s amusing to note that this is the same text that defended Noah over Ham for a similar offense. The JSB takes the opposite view blaming the girls for getting their father intoxicated but mitigates the act by stating that perhaps the girls plausibly believed they were the last people on Earth and they felt they should repopulate the planet any way they could. The cities where they just lived as well as much of the plain around them were recently decimated by a God-sent torrent of fire so it does make some amount of sense. Either way, by today’s standards this is somewhat less than wholesome.
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