Lot, the Man Who Kept Choosing Sodom

There is a line in the Ginzberg tradition that lands quietly and does not let go: when the two angels set out toward Sodom, they went with distinct missions. One was sent to destroy it. The second was sent to save Lot. The third angel, who had announced to Abraham that Sarah would bear a son, turned back to heaven. His work was done. The other two still had theirs to do.

This accounting of angelic assignments comes from the classical midrashic tradition, preserved in Legends of the Jews (compiled 1909) and traceable through earlier rabbinic sources. It frames Lot's rescue not as an afterthought to the city's destruction but as a parallel operation requiring equal divine attention. Destroying Sodom needed an angel. So did saving Lot. The two tasks are presented as morally equivalent in the demands they place on heaven.

Lot had been living at the gate of Sodom when the angels arrived. Sitting at the city gate was the traditional position of a judge, an elder, a man of standing. He had built something there. The Ginzberg account presents the Sodomites as people who had perfected the architecture of cruelty -- beds that stretched or compressed strangers to death, laws that made mercy a capital crime, feasts in the valley where collective transgression was conducted four times a year with civic ceremony. Lot sat at the gate of all of this. He saw it. He knew it. He stayed.

This was not the first time Lot had chosen Sodom over the alternative. The Book of Jubilees, composed in the second century BCE, records that Lot parted from Abraham in the fourth year of a particular week, chose the well-watered plain, and settled in Sodom. The text notes that this grieved Abraham, who had no children. Lot had been the closest thing to family Abraham carried through Canaan. When he left, Abraham was alone in a way that no amount of servants and students could entirely remedy.

After the separation came the war of the four kings -- and Lot was taken captive, rescued by Abraham, returned with his property and his household intact. He had been given back everything. He walked back into Sodom.

The Ginzberg tradition explains what had driven the original separation. The strife had begun between servants and extended to the masters. Abraham had called Lot to account for his unbecoming behavior and Lot had not been willing to change. When they separated, Lot departed not only from Abraham but from the God of Abraham. He chose a district where immorality and sin reigned, and in time his own flesh seduced him into sin. The text says this calmly, as if it were simply the mechanism of bad choices working itself out over decades.

By the night the angels came, Lot recognized them for what they were, or sensed something in them that required protection. He pressed them urgently to come into his house. He fed them. He would not let them sleep in the street. The tradition reads this as a remnant of Abraham's hospitality working in Lot even after years among the Sodomites. He could not entirely extinguish what he had learned in his uncle's tent. When the men of the city surrounded his house that night demanding to take the angels, Lot went out and stood in the doorway. The Ginzberg tradition notes the detail without editorial comment: he shut the door behind him and stood between the mob and his guests.

The angels pulled him back inside and struck the crowd with blindness. Then they told Lot to gather his family and flee before morning. He went to the men who had married his daughters and told them what was coming. They laughed at him. He returned without them.

At dawn the angels physically took hold of Lot's hands and his wife's hands and his daughters' hands and brought them outside the city. Even then Lot hesitated. The angels had to urge him: flee for your life, do not look back, do not stop in the plain. Lot bargained even as the fire was preparing to fall. Let me go to the small city of Zoar instead of the mountain, he said. It is only a small city. Let it be spared for my sake. The angels agreed. They waited until he reached Zoar before they let the fire fall.

Lot's wife looked back. The Book of Jasher explains that she turned because her daughters were still in Sodom. Her compassion moved her at the worst moment. She became a pillar of salt. The oxen came each day to lick the salt away and each morning it grew back.

In Zoar, Lot was afraid to stay. He went to the cave in the mountains with his two surviving daughters. There, in the cave, believing the world had ended, his daughters reasoned that there was no man left on earth to give them children. They made their father drunk two nights in succession. From those nights came Moab and Ammon. These nations would be neighbors to Israel for centuries -- sometimes enemies, sometimes kin, always present at the edge of the story, descended from the man who kept choosing Sodom and the daughters who survived it.

The second angel's mission was accomplished. Lot was saved. Whether he was saved into anything is a question the texts leave open. He came out of the cave and settled east of the Jordan. He planted. He built. His sons grew up and took wives from Canaan. The tradition does not follow him further. He passes out of the story the way people do when the story moves on without them -- not dead, just done.