Remember Lot’s wife. (Jesus, Luke 27:32)
And the men said unto Lot, Hast thou here any besides? son in law, and thy sons, and thy daughters, and whatsoever thou hast in the city, bring them out of this place: For we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the face of the Lord; and the Lord hath sent us to destroy it. And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons in law, which married his daughters, and said, Up, get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city. But he seemed as one that mocked unto his sons in law. And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying, Arise, take thy wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city. And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters; the Lord being merciful unto him: and they brought him forth, and set him without the city. And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. 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 19:12-17, 24-26)
Most of us likely remember the story of Lot, his wife, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities — killing all living things, except Lot and his two virgin daughters. Every person, including babies, children, and the unborn died. Every animal died. All the vegetation died. According to many Evangelicals, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah and its inhabitants because of rampant homosexuality. However, Ezekiel 16:48-50 says:
As I live, saith the Lord God, Sodom thy sister hath not done, she nor her daughters, as thou hast done, thou and thy daughters. Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.
As you can see, the sins of Sodom were more than just men having sex with each other. The Lord also destroyed them for pride, hoarding food, idleness, and not caring for the poor and needy. Why don’t Evangelical preachers mention the rest of the story?
The Contemporary English version puts it like this:
They were arrogant and spoiled; they had everything they needed and still refused to help the poor and needy. They thought they were better than everyone else, and they did things I hate. And so I destroyed them.
I was an Evangelical pastor for twenty-five years. I was the ONLY preacher I ever heard mention ALL the sins of Sodom. My fellow clerics were obsessed with anal sex, so they didn’t have time to tell the rest of the story.
Back to Lot’s wife.
When the appointed day of destruction came, the angels made Lot, Mrs. Lot, and their two daughters leave the city, warning them not to turn around and look at what was happening behind them. As they left the city, fire and brimstone fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah. Imagine the noise and the smell as the equivalent of an atomic bomb being dropped on the cities. Lot’s wife turned to look at what was happening to her home, and when she did, God killed Mrs. Lot and turned her into a pillar of salt.
Most Evangelicals are taught that God killed Lot’s wife because of disobedience/lack of faith. If she had only lived, she would have been alive to see “righteous” Lot get drunk and have sex with both of his virgin daughters — impregnating them. Genesis 19: 30-36 says in the Contemporary English Version:
Lot was afraid to stay on in Zoar. So he took his two daughters and moved to a cave in the hill country. One day his older daughter said to her sister, “Our father is old, and there are no men anywhere for us to marry. Let’s get our father drunk! Then we can sleep with him and have children.” That night they got their father drunk, and the older daughter got in bed with him, but he was too drunk even to know she was there. The next day the older daughter said to her sister, “I slept with my father last night. We’ll get him drunk again tonight, so you can sleep with him, and we can each have a child.” That night they got their father drunk, and this time the younger sister slept with him. But once again he was too drunk even to know she was there. That’s how Lot’s two daughters had children. The older daughter named her son Moab, and he is the ancestor of the Moabites. The younger daughter named her son Benammi, and he is the ancestor of the Ammonites.
In light of this story, please explain 2 Peter 2:6-8:
And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly; And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: (For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds.)
Lot, a man who had incestuous sex with his daughters and impregnated them; a just and righteous man? No wonder Donald Trump and his merry band of degenerates think they are Christians.
Back to Lot’s wife.
Why did God really kill Mrs. Lot and turn her into a Sunday school lesson? I’m inclined to think God turned her into a five-foot, two-inch pillar of coarse salt because she was curious. She heard the sounds and smelled the acrid smoke, and, yes, wondered about what had become of her home of twenty years, according to some scholars. Because she dared to turn her head and look, God killed her and sent her to Hell with the rest of the people of the plains.
Let’s face it, no verse in the Bible commends curiosity. Nope, God demands obedience, under penalty of judgment, death, and eternal torture in the Lake of Fire. Curiosity killed the cat, and it killed Lot’s wife too.
Jesus said to remember Lot’s wife, and so I have with this post. I have concluded that this God is not worthy of my worship. Why would I worship a deity who killed a woman for being curious? And does anyone really think Lot and his two daughters didn’t turn their heads too or look out of the corner of their eyes? Why single out Lot’s wife? For one reason . . . this is a fictional story written by a patriarchal man. There’s no evidence for the existence of Lot, Lot’s wife, or the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Just wait, renowned Bible archeologist Dr. David Tee is preparing a response to this post, declaring it is all lies, lies, lies. Here’s what actual experts think, according to Smithsonian Magazine:
The destruction of Tall el-Hammam, a Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley, by an exploding comet or meteor may have inspired the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, a new study suggests. (“[N]otoriously sinful cities,” Sodom and Gomorrah’s devastation by sulfur and fire is recorded in the Book of Genesis, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.)
At the time of the disaster, around 1650 B.C.E., Tall el-Hammam was the largest of three major cities in the valley. It likely acted as the region’s political center, reports Ariella Marsden for the Jerusalem Post. Combined, the three metropolises boasted a population of around 50,000.
Tall el-Hammam’s mudbrick buildings stood up to five stories tall. Over the years, archaeologists examining the structures’ ruins have found evidence of a sudden high-temperature, destructive event—for instance, pottery pieces that were melted on the outside but untouched inside.
The new paper, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, examined possible causes of the devastation based on the archaeological record. The researchers concluded that warfare, a fire, a volcanic eruption or an earthquake were unlikely culprits, as these events couldn’t have produced heat intense enough to cause the melting recorded at the scene. That left a space rock as the most likely cause.
Because experts failed to find a crater at the site, they attributed the damage to an airburst created when a meteor or comet traveled through the atmosphere at high speed. It would have exploded about 2.5 miles above the city in a blast 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima, writes study co-author Christopher R. Moore, an archaeologist at the University of South Carolina, for the Conversation.
“Air temperatures rapidly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit,” Moore explains. “Clothing and wood immediately burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks, and pottery began to melt. Almost immediately, the entire city was on fire.”
Seconds after the blast, a shockwave ripped through the city at a speed of roughly 740 miles per hour—faster than the worst tornado ever recorded. The cities’ buildings were reduced to foundations and rubble.
“None of the 8,000 people or any animals within the city survived,” Moore adds. “Their bodies were torn apart and their bones blasted into small fragments.”
Corroborating the idea that an airburst caused the destruction, the researchers found melted metals and unusual mineral fragments among the city’s ruins.
“[O]ne of the main discoveries is shocked quartz,” says James P. Kennett, an emeritus earth scientist at the University of California Santa Barbara, in a statement. “These are sand grains containing cracks that form only under very high pressure.”
The archaeologists also discovered high concentrations of salt in the “destruction layer” of the site, possibly from the blast’s impact on the Dead Sea or its shores. The explosion could have distributed the salt across a wide area, possibly creating high-salinity soil that prevented crops from growing and resulted in the abandonment of cities along the lower Jordan Valley for centuries.
Moore writes that people may have passed down accounts of the spectacular disaster as oral history over generations, providing the basis for the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah—which, like Tall el-Hammam, were supposedly located near the Dead Sea.
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.”
Whether Tall el-Hammam and Sodom were actually the same city is an ongoing debate. The researchers point out that the new study does not offer evidence one way or the other.
“All the observations stated in Genesis are consistent with a cosmic airburst,” says Kennett in the statement, “but there’s no scientific proof that this destroyed city is indeed the Sodom of the Old Testament.”
So there ya have it. An ancient religious text or a modern scientific theory? I know which one I am going with.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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