Lot’s wife | Pillar of Salt, Sodom & Gomorrah (2024)

FAQs

What was Lot's wife's sin? ›

The story is recounted in Genesis 19: 1–38. Lot, his wife and two daughters were visited by two angels who urged them to flee the city of Sodom before its imminent destruction by God. As they fled, Lot's wife disobeyed the angels' command to not look back and was turned into a pillar of salt.

Today Lot's Wife stands on the nearly 300-foot-high eastern escarpment of the Mt. Sedom diapir. Long before the roof collapse, the pillar had been part of the wall of the cave. The creation of the cave left this wall on the eastern escarpment of Mt.

Lot's wife is the only one of the escaping family to disobey the warning. When God sends “brimstone and fire” (Gen 19:24) on sinful Sodom, its sister city Gomorrah, and all the cities in the area, Lot's wife looks back. Because she disobeys the warning, she becomes “a pillar of salt” (Gen 19:26).

It is a reminder that everything in this world is temporary, flimsy, and will rust and decay. In essence, those who look back are those who put their faith, their hope, and their love in the material and physical world rather than the eternal things of God.

She was deemed unworthy to be saved and thus was turned to a pillar of salt. Another view in the Jewish exegesis of Genesis 19:26, is that when Lot's wife looked back, she turned to a pillar of salt upon the "sight of God" descending to rain destruction upon Sodom and Gomorrah.

Lot's wife does not turn to salt as a supernatural punishment for ignoring a divine command, but as a repercussion of her lack of faith in the angels' words. Lot's wife's death is simply the consequence of her own slowing down.

Har Sedom (Arabic: Jabal Usdum), or Mount Sodom, at the southwestern end of the sea, reflects Sodom's name. The present-day industrial site of Sedom, Israel, on the Dead Sea shore, is located near the presumed site of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Almost all agree that the Cities of the Plain were located in the Ghor or valley of the Jordan. It is to be noted that this designation embraces not only the Jordan valley proper but also the Dead Sea and the bordering land in this mountain-hemmed region.

Historicity. Sodom and Gomorrah are possibly located under or adjacent to the shallow waters south of Al-Lisān, a former peninsula in the central part of the Dead Sea in Israel that now fully separates the sea's northern and southern basins.

In the Book of Genesis, God “rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven,” and “the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.” According to the Gospel of Luke, “on the day that Lot left Sodom, it rained fire and sulfur from heaven and destroyed all of them.”

What did Lot's daughters do? ›

Paltith

Lot's older daughter

Lot's younger daughter

Plausible historical evidence that Sodom and Gomorrah were actual places was discovered in 1976, when the Italian scholar Giovanni Pettinato said clay tablets found in the previously unknown Kingdom of Ebla, in what is now Syria, list Sodom and Gomorrah.

Through Lot's wife we learn that sometimes following God's will for our lives will force us out of our comfort zones. For example, it may cause us to have to make sacrifices that we are unused to; walk away from loved ones and/or relocate, just as it did in her life.

After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot was afraid to stay in Zoar and so he and his two daughters resettled into the hills, living in a cave.

He cries out to us, "Remember Lot's wife." It is a solemn warning, when we consider the subject Jesus is addressing. He is speaking of his own second coming to judge the world: he is describing the awful state of unpreparedness in which many will be found. Judgment is on his mind when he says, "Remember Lot's wife."

Notable events in his life recorded in Genesis include his journey with his uncle Abraham; his flight from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, during which his wife became a pillar of salt, and being intoxicated by his daughters so they could have incestuous intercourse with him to continue their family line.

Lot thought that if he were to dwell in Sodom, he could engage in licentious behavior without anyone's knowledge. He accordingly was punished by his daughters engaging in intercourse with him; this episode became common knowledge and is read each year during the public.

According to Esther Fuchs, the text presents Lot's daughters as the "initiators and perpetrators of the incestuous 'rape'". Alter agrees, adding that when the elder daughter says "let us lie with him", the meaning of the Hebrew verb in this context "seems close to 'rape'".

Lot's wife, biblical character, a disobedient woman who was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back to see the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as she and her family were fleeing. Her story is seen as an example of what happens to those who choose a worldly life over salvation.