Lot Took the Bench Among Sodom's Chief Liars

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The Day They Seated Him

Lot took the high seat in Sodom on the morning of the last day the city had. Four judges sat with him and every one of them was named for what he did. Ketz Sheker, Ultimate in Lies. Rav Sheker, Chief of Lies. Rav Masteidin, Chief Perverter of Justice. Rav Naval, Chief Scoundrel. Klepander, the Abductor. Lot was made chief justice over the lot of them.

The work went well while he agreed with them. "Gesh hala," they would call out when a ruling pleased them. Rise to the top.

When he ruled against them the room turned. "This one came here to sojourn," they said, "and he sits in judgment?"

He had picked the plain years earlier because it looked green and well watered, like a garden, like Egypt. Now the green was a courthouse full of thieves and he was the newest thing in it.

The sun went down on Sodom early that evening, and the sentence on the city was already sealed.

Two Guests Under His Roof

Two men came through the gate at dusk. Lot got up from his seat, bowed his face to the ground, and pressed them to turn aside into his house. They said they would sleep in the square. He pressed harder until they came.

He baked flat bread for them and they ate. His wife had opinions about it. "If you want to take them in," she told him, "take them in on your side of the house." So the strangers were moved to his half. My roof, he would say later. Mine, not hers.

Before anyone lay down, the men of the city ringed the house, young and old, the whole population of it, and shouted for Lot to send the visitors out to them.

Lot went out the door and pulled it shut behind him.

"Please, my brothers," he said. "Do not do evil."

Then he offered the thing the tradition has never smoothed over. "I have two daughters who have never been with a man. Let me bring them out to you and do to them whatever is right in your eyes. Only do nothing to these men, because they came under the shadow of my roof."

Hands at the Door

The crowd would not take the trade. "Stand back," they told him. "This one came to sojourn and he keeps judging us." They pressed hard against Lot, the same man who had been calling out rulings that morning, and moved to break the door down.

The two guests reached out, caught him by the arms, hauled him inside, and shut the door. Then they struck every man at the entrance blind, small and great, and the mob groped along the wall all night looking for a handle they could no longer find.

The new chief justice of Sodom could not clear his own threshold. The roof he had claimed as his own had never been the thing protecting anybody in that house. The merit holding the door was older than Lot and it belonged to Abraham, out on his hill, far from the plain.

Before dawn the men took Lot by the hand, and his wife, and his two daughters, and dragged them out of the city because the Lord had spared him.

Fire on the Plain

Sulphur and fire came down on Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain and everything growing in the ground. Lot's wife looked back and stood there as a pillar of salt.

Lot was afraid to stay in the little town they had let him run to, so he went up into the hill country with his two daughters and they lived in a cave.

From the mouth of it the plain smoked for days.

Wine in the Cave

The elder daughter said to the younger, "Our father is old, and there is not a man left on the earth to come to us in the way of the whole world." She meant it. They had watched fire fall over everything they knew and they believed the world had ended the way it ended in the generation of the Flood, and that the three of them were what was left.

"Come, let us give our father wine to drink and lie with him, and we will keep offspring alive from our father."

There was wine because the people of Sodom had drunk so much of it that they hid the surplus away in caves, and it had been set there for the two of them like a sample of the world to come, so that a line would run out of that cave through Moab to Ruth and on to David. On the day that comes, the mountains will drip with juice.

They poured it that night. The elder lay with her father. He did not know when she lay down. He knew when she got up.

The next day she told her sister what she had done, and they poured again, and the younger went in.

Two nations came out of that cave, Moab and Ammon. The daughters thought they were saving the last seed on earth. Heaven was already counting further than their fear.

What the Bench Could Not Save

Lot had sat among liars and tried, for one afternoon, to judge. By dark he was bargaining daughters against a mob. By dawn he was being dragged out of a burning city by the wrist. He woke in a cave with his head full of stolen Sodomite wine and a future moving in two bodies he could not see yet.

The bench was ash. The house was ash. His wife stood white on the road behind him and did not come.