The Angels Who Took Credit for Sodom Came Home on Jacob's Ladder

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The Door That Would Not Hold

The men of Sodom had Lot's door in their hands. They had come for the two strangers eating at his table, the whole town of them, young and old, pressing against the wood while Lot stood outside on the step and offered them anything else he owned. They told him to get out of the way. They said he had come to live here as a foreigner and now he wanted to judge them, and they turned on him and started to break the door down.

A hand came out of the house, caught Lot by the shirt, and pulled him inside. The two guests shut the door. Then they struck the crowd blind, every man of them, and the men of Sodom groped along the wall in the dark, still trying to find the latch, and could not find it.

One Word at Dawn

Inside, the guests told Lot to gather whoever belonged to him and get them out. Then one of them said the sentence that would cost both angels more than they knew.

"For we are destroying this place."

Rabbi Levi, in the name of Rav Nahman, stopped there. The plan had been in heaven. It had been given to them the way a courier is given a sealed order, and they had opened their mouths and spread it across a stranger's floor. Rabbi Hama bar Hanina put the charge differently and made it worse. Listen to the pronoun, he said. We are destroying. The fire was not theirs. The decision was not theirs. They were the hand, and the hand had just called itself the king.

God made the first man out of two worlds at once, out of the creatures above who do not die and the creatures below who do, so that the man would live if he kept his place and die if he did not. The two at Lot's door were made only of the world above. Nothing in them was built to fall. They fell anyway, and they fell over a single word.

Harps and Flutes in a Doomed City

Lot had four daughters. Two were already married and two were promised, and the four men attached to them were asleep somewhere in a city with hours left. He went out into the streets before dawn to find them.

He shook them awake. Get up, he told them. Get out of this place. The Lord is destroying the city.

They laughed at him. Not cruelly, at first. They laughed the way people laugh at a man who has clearly had a strange night.

"Harps and flutes are in the province," they said, "and the province is about to be overturned?"

The music was still going somewhere behind them. That was the whole of their argument, and it was not a bad one. Lot went back to the house without them. When the sun came up over the plain, the two guests took him and his wife and the two daughters still under his roof by the hands and hauled them out through the gate, and the fire came down on the harps and the flutes and the four men who had gone back to sleep.

A Hundred and Thirty-Eight Years Outside

The sentence on the messengers came down as soon as the ash cooled. They were pushed out of their own enclosure and barred from the place where they had stood among the hosts. The gate they had come through closed on them, and they were left on the earth they had just burned, with nothing to carry and no one to carry it to.

They waited a hundred and thirty-eight years.

They watched Abraham bury Sarah. They watched Isaac take a wife from a caravan out of Haran. They watched two boys grow up in one tent and stop speaking to each other. Nowhere in any of it was there a door back up.

The Ladder at Beth El

Jacob left Beer Sheva alone, with his brother behind him swearing to kill him and his father's blessing still warm on his head. He walked until the sun went down, took a stone from the ground, put it under his cheek, and slept.

A ladder stood on the earth with its top in the sky. Rabbi Elazar, in the name of Rabbi Yose ben Zimra, said its foot was planted in Beer Sheva where Jacob had started and its slope came down over the mountain where the Temple would stand. Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon turned it the other way and set its foot in the Temple with the slope reaching out to Beth El, so that the sleeping man had the whole future of the house of God leaning over him while he lay in the dirt.

And on it the messengers of God were climbing.

Not a crowd. Not the ordinary traffic of heaven. The two who had said we at Lot's door went up that ladder in front of a sleeping man who had no idea he was watching a sentence end.

Jacob woke and said the Lord was in this place and he had not known it. He was afraid, and he said the place was terrible, and he called it the house of God and the gate of heaven. Rav Aha heard that and said the gate would open again for many righteous men like him. Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai measured the distance and said the Temple above hangs only eighteen mil over the Temple below, which is close enough that a man asleep on a stone is nearly touching it. Then God showed Jacob the house standing, and the house burned, and the house standing again, and Jacob poured oil on the stone and went on walking toward Haran.

Behind him the ladder stayed a while longer, with two figures on it going up, and no one at Beth El to see them arrive.