Lot Stopped to Count His Silver and the Angels Dragged Him Out

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The Door He Shut Behind Them

The men of Sodom were against the door and Lot was on the outside of it, in the street, bargaining with them.

He had two guests in the house and a crowd that wanted them, and what he offered the crowd instead was his daughters. A man is supposed to put his own body between a mob and the women of his household. Lot put his daughters there and stood behind them, and it was held against him for the rest of his life.

The guests ended the negotiation. Two hands came out of the doorway, took hold of him, pulled him inside, and shut the door. Then the crowd went blind, all of them, running through them from the smallest man to the greatest in the same order they had come. They put their hands on the wall and felt along it for the entrance they had been standing at a moment before, and it was not there. They wore themselves out looking. Then they got angry. Then something in them broke, and they were still out there in the dark going along the wall with their fingers when the night ended.

The Sons-in-Law Who Laughed

Inside, the angels told Lot what they were and what they had been sent to do. Take your wife, they said. Take your four daughters, the two who are married and the two who are promised. Get them out.

Lot went out to the two husbands.

They laughed in his face. "You fool," one of them said. "There are violins going in this city tonight. Cymbals. Flutes. Listen to it. And you stand there and tell me Sodom is going to be destroyed."

That laughter did not delay anything. It moved the schedule up.

What a Loss of Silver and Gold

Dawn came and Lot did not move.

The angels had him by the threshold and he stood in it, astonished and then astonished again, and what came out of his mouth was not fear for his children. It was an inventory. Such a loss, he said. The silver. The gold. The gems and the jewels, all of it, left here.

He had lived in that valley long enough to be judged by its standards, and by its standards he was a decent man. He kept a doorway open. He had fed two strangers and taken a crowd on for them. That was the whole weight on his side of the scale, one night of a door held open, and it was the only reason anyone had come for him at all.

The Hand on His Wrist

The angel stopped waiting.

Michael closed his hand around Lot's wrist and took his wife's hand and his daughters' hands and walked all of them out through the gate and set them down outside the city, and the mercy in it was not Lot's. It had been sent from somebody else's tent.

Then Gabriel put out one finger, the smallest one, and touched the rock the cities were built on, and turned it over. The rain that had been falling on Sodom and Gomorrah all night changed in the air as it came down, and what landed was brimstone.

He Would Not Go Up to Abraham

Run for the mountain, the angel had told him. Do not look behind you. Do not stop anywhere on the plain.

The mountain meant Abraham. It always had. Abraham was the mountain, and Lot understood the instruction perfectly, and that was the problem.

Down here, he said, God had been looking at my deeds and the deeds of the men of this city, and next to them I came out a righteous man. Put me up there next to Abraham and God will look again. I will not survive that comparison. Please. There is a small town close by, hardly a town at all. Let me have that one.

He got it. The little city stood, because a man who had once opened a door was allowed to name the terms of his own rescue.

Behind him the whole plain went up. Lot lived out his years in the shadow of the country he had been carried out of, saved by a night of hospitality he had learned from a man he could not stand to be measured against.