One Girl Gave Flour to a Starving Woman and Sodom Burned Her

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The Two Girls at the Well

Two young women went down to the well in Sodom to drink and to fill their jars.

One of them looked at the other and said, "Why does your face look like that?"

The other one answered about herself in the third person, the way people do when they cannot stand to hear it in their own mouth. "Her food has run out," she said. "She is close to death."

The first girl did not say anything. She finished filling her jar, and while she was doing it she packed it with flour instead of water, and when they stood up to go she took the empty jar out of the starving girl's hands and put the full one there and walked off with the light one.

They found out. Sodom had a way of finding these things out. They took the girl who had given the flour and they burned her alive.

Then God said, "Even if I wanted to keep quiet about this city, that girl will not let Me."

Twenty-Five Years of Warnings

Sodom had fifty-two good years in it. That was all it ever got.

For twenty-five of those years the mountains around the plain thundered and the ground moved under the houses, and the shaking was not weather. It was an invitation, repeated, for a quarter of a century, sent to a city that never once connected the noise to itself. He moves mountains and they do not know it. The whole time the door was standing open and the terms were not complicated. Stop, and the sentence changes.

They did not stop. They wrote the charity out of their law instead, and a woman who put flour in a stranger's jar was a criminal.

God announced that He would go down to see it. Not because there was anything He had not seen. It was one of ten times He is described as coming down into the world, and it was the last opening He gave them, the formal descent of a judge who wants the record to show that He came and looked before He signed.

He Told Abraham First

He would not do it behind Abraham's back.

"Shall I hide from Abraham the thing I am about to do?" He said, and then He appeared, and three men were standing at the door of the tent in the heat of the day, and Abraham ran at them with water and bread.

They gave him the good news first. This time next year, Sarah would have a son. An old man in a tent with a hundred years on him heard that his wife was going to give birth, and while he was still holding that, the visitors changed subject.

The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah, one of them said, is great.

The Young Man at the Door

Two of them went on down and reached the city in the evening, and Lot got them inside his house before anyone could stop him.

Not before anyone saw. A young man of the city had watched them come through, and he ran, and by the time the bread was on the table the men of Sodom were at Lot's door, all of them, every quarter of the city, shouting for him to send the visitors out.

Lot went out to them instead and shut the door behind him and offered them his two daughters. He handed over his own children to keep two guests off that street, the way a man throws himself in front of a crowd to buy somebody else an hour.

They refused. They wanted the strangers.

The angels reached through the door, took hold of Lot, pulled him back inside, and struck the whole crowd blind until dawn. Men who had spent their lives making sure nobody was ever taken by the hand into a house in Sodom stood in the dark feeling along a wall for a door that was right in front of them.

At first light the angels did the thing Lot had done. They took his hand, and his wife's hand, and the hands of both daughters, and pulled all four of them out of the city the same way he had pulled the strangers in.

Edith Looked Back

"Do not look behind you," they said. The Shekhinah (the Divine Presence) had come down over the plain and was already raining fire and sulfur on it.

Lot's wife was named Edith, and she had daughters in that city too, married ones, with husbands and houses of their own, and she had just been walked past their doors without being allowed to knock.

She turned her head to see whether they were coming after her.

She did not see her daughters. She saw what was standing behind her, and the thing standing behind her was the Divine Presence, and she stopped where she was on the road and turned into a pillar of salt.

Fire burns in the assembly of the wicked. In a nation that will not turn, the anger catches and goes up. Sodom went on burning in the memory of everyone who came after, a name attached to a specific way of ruining a place, and any city that runs itself the same way has been promised the same verdict. Lot came out of it alive on his brother's account. God remembered Abraham, and pulled one household out of the middle of the overthrow, and left the pillar of salt standing on the road behind them.