The Girl Whose Cry Brought Down Wicked Sodom

The men of Sodom had a question about the beggar in their street, and the question was why he had not died yet.

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He should have. The fruit trees in that city were fenced in over the top of the branches so that nothing could be taken off them, not by a traveler, not by a neighbor, not even by the bird of heaven. At the gates sat judges the city had appointed over itself, and every stranger who walked in through those gates walked back out naked, because the court found against him and took the cloak as part of the finding. Then somebody made a proclamation, and after that the arrangement had teeth: whoever strengthens the hand of the poor or the needy with a loaf of bread shall be burned by fire.

What She Carried Under the Water

Peletith, daughter of Lot, had been married to one of the great men of Sodom, so there was food in her house and there was a starving man in her street. He was folded into the dust where the wall met the ground. She went past him in the morning and she went past him at dusk, and her soul was grieved on his account.

Bread in a hand is evidence, though, and everyone in that city had reason to look. So she went out to draw water like every other woman in Sodom, with the jar on her shoulder and the bucket swinging, and at the bottom of the bucket, under the rope, went provisions out of her own kitchen. She did it in front of witnesses. The witnesses saw a woman going to the well.

She fed him that way day after day, and the days showed on him. His face filled out. He stopped folding himself down at midday, and he was still in the street the next week and the week after that, and this was the thing that killed her. He lived.

The City Follows the Bucket

"How does this poor man live?" the men said, since they knew what their own laws did to a man with nothing. They watched the street. They followed the bucket to the well and the bucket back from the well, and when they had the facts they went to the house of a magnate and brought his wife out to be burned with fire.

Nobody argued the charge, because the charge was true and everybody standing there knew it was true. They built the fire in the open where the city could see it, the same way they fenced the orchards in the open and gave their verdicts in the open. A place that would not let a bird onto a fig was not going to lose its nerve over one woman and a loaf.

Sovereign of All Worlds

They stood her in front of the flames. She did not look at the men who had brought her out and she did not answer them, and what she did with the last of her voice was lift it clean over their heads to the only court that had not already ruled. "Sovereign of all worlds! Maintain my right and my cause at the hands of the men of Sodom."

The cry went up and it did not scatter in the air. It came before the Throne of Glory.

"I will now descend, and I will see," the Holy One said, and what He was going down to see was whether the men of Sodom had done according to the cry of this young woman. Not according to their cry. Hers. A city with judges at its gates and fences over its orchards would be measured against the voice of one woman burning in its square.

The Door That Stayed Open Until Morning

The sentence was not finished, though. "If they have wrought repentance," He said, "shall they not be as innocent before Me? As one who does not know, I will not punish." The cry of a girl torn away had gone up and the case was made, but the verdict waited while the plain went about its business.

Nobody in Sodom unbolted an orchard that night. Nobody at the gate went out to the road with a cloak over his arm to find the man it had been taken from. The judges slept in their own beds and got up and sat down again in the same seats.

So He turned its foundations upward and its surface downward. The orchards went over with everything else, and the fences that had kept the birds off the fruit came up out of the ground with the roots still attached to them.