Lot Lived Among People Who Burned From Inside

There is a text in the Psalms of Solomon, a collection from the 1st century BCE attributed to Solomonic wisdom but composed during the crisis of Roman encroachment on Judea, that describes the wicked in a way that stops the breath. In the congregation of the wicked a fire burns; and in an ungodly nation wrath is kindled. Not a fire set from outside. A fire that burns from within. The wicked are not merely people who do wrong. They are people who carry their own combustion.

The text continues: God spared not the princes of old time who ruled the world by their power. He spared not those who sojourned with Lot, who transgressed in their pride. He spared not the people of perdition who were dispossessed in their iniquity.

The Sodomites sojourned with Lot. That phrase is careful. They were Lot's neighbors, his community, the people whose city he had chosen when he separated from Abraham. The separation itself, recorded in Jubilees, a text from the 2nd century BCE, is already a warning: Lot parted from Abraham in the fourth year and dwelt in Sodom, and the men of Sodom were sinners exceedingly. Abraham grieved. He had no children of his own then, and his brother's son had parted from him. He looked north and south and east and west, and God said: all the land you see I give to you and to your seed.

But Lot was already in Sodom.

The Midrash Aggadah and the wisdom literature circle Sodom from different angles, but they agree on one thing: the Sodomites were not simply cruel. They were systematically, philosophically cruel. When strangers arrived, they offered hospitality with one hand and terror with the other. The men of Sodom said to Lot: Where are the men? Bring them out so that we may know them (Genesis 19:5). This was not impulse. It was policy. A city that had decided, collectively, that the outsider had no claim on protection.

The Psalms of Solomon draws a direct line from that policy to its punishment. The six hundred thousand footmen, the text says, taken away in the arrogancy of their heart. Six hundred thousand is the number of Israel who left Egypt. The comparison is deliberate and disturbing: the generation that died in the wilderness after leaving Egypt is placed alongside Sodom, alongside the princes of old who ruled by power, alongside those who sojourned with Lot. All of them fell to the same principle: God forgave and pardoned where there was repentance, and his indignation rested on the wicked where there was none.

If even one stiffens his neck, it were a marvel should he be unpunished. For mercy and wrath are with him; he forgives and pardons, but upon the wicked his indignation shall rest.

The fire in the congregation of the wicked is pride. The Kabbalistic commentary on Shabbat and judgment, drawing from the framework of Zeir Anpin and the balance of mercy and judgment in the sefirot, describes the wicked as those who deviate from the middle column, who choose the left path of severity without the counterbalancing right of lovingkindness. Sodom was a city that had chosen severity as its organizing principle. It had made judgment without mercy into law.

Lot was inside that city. He had chosen it with his eyes: Lot lifted up his eyes and saw the whole plain of the Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere (Genesis 13:10). The seeing again. The fertile plain, the beautiful water, the city that looked like abundance from the outside. Lot looked at the surface and saw what Balak's descendants would later recognize about the power of a single fatal look.

But Lot also, when the angels came, ran toward them. He bowed with his face to the ground. He insisted they stay in his house rather than in the town square, because he knew what the town square meant. He tried to protect them and failed. He argued with his sons-in-law and they laughed at him. He lingered even after the angels grabbed his hand and ran.

The Psalms of Solomon does not excuse Lot's neighbors. The fire that burns in the congregation of the wicked consumed Sodom. But Lot, the man who had chosen to sojourn among them, the man who had made the wrong choice with his eyes when the land was divided, was pulled out by the hand. Not because he was righteous enough to earn it. Because of the mercy that stands alongside the wrath, the forgiveness that God extends even to the one who lingered too long in the wrong city.

Mercy and wrath are with him. The fire in the congregation of the wicked burns. The angels grasp the hand of the one who hesitates at the gate. Both of these are true at the same time, and the Psalms of Solomon makes no attempt to resolve the tension between them.