When Sodom Went Blind Groping for the Door That Vanished

The strangers came at evening, and Lot rose from the seat of judgment in the gate of Sodom to bring them home. He had been chief judge of the city for exactly one day. He knew what his court did to men who fed the hungry. He knew the law his predecessors had written, that any stranger who entered the gates was to be seized and abused, young and old together, and that no citizen was permitted to show him bread. He bowed to the two travelers anyway and begged them to lodge under the shadow of his roof.

The City Comes to the Door

They had not yet lain down when the knocking began. Not one fist. Many. Lot opened the latch a hand's width and the noise that came through was not a gang's noise. It was a crowd's. He looked out and saw the whole of Sodom pressed into the street, from the youngest boys to the gray old men, every corner of the city emptied into one mob with one appetite. There were not ten righteous men hiding among them to pray over. There was no remnant. The wickedness had recruited the entire population, and every age had answered the call.

"Where are the men who came to you tonight?" they shouted. "Bring them out to us."

Inside, the two travelers said nothing. They had come to Sodom inclined to listen. When the angels first arrived they had been willing to weigh Lot's pleas for the sinners, to let him intercede a little longer, to wait and see whether even now the city might turn. The crowd at the door was their answer.

Lot Steps Onto the Threshold

Lot did the unthinkable thing. He went out to the mob and shut the door behind him, putting his own body between the strangers and the city. He spoke to them as a judge speaks, reaching for the only argument Sodom might fear.

"My brethren," he said, "the generation of the flood was wiped from the earth for sins like the ones you mean to commit tonight. Would you go back to them?"

For a breath, the flattery worked. He offered them a thing pleasing in their eyes. He had two daughters, he told them, who had never known a man, and he would bring them out instead, do to them what seemed right, only let the travelers alone, for they had come in under the shadow of his roof. The mob did not recoil. They considered it. A man who would spend his daughters to keep the law of hospitality was a man still speaking their language, still bargaining, still one of them. And then Lot crossed the line they could not forgive. He told them they were wrong.

The Foreigner Who Dared to Judge

The street turned on him in an instant. "Stand back!" they roared. "This one came alone to sojourn among us, and now he makes himself a judge, and judges the whole of us. Would you set aside a law your own predecessors administered? Now we will do worse to you than to them."

Two crimes, in their eyes, and neither was the one Lot had named. He was an outsider, a single wanderer who had drifted in from Hebron with nothing, and outsiders had no standing to speak. Worse, he had judged them. He had stood in their gate and called their cruelty cruelty. That was the unforgivable thing. "And though Abraham himself came hither," they cried, "we should have no consideration for him." They pressed forward against the door, against Lot, hands out to drag him down and break in.

Above his prayers, the travelers spoke at last, and their words were not for the mob. "Hitherto you could intercede for them," they told Lot. "But now no longer." The case was closed. A verdict that destroyed five cities could not rest on the crime of a few, and Sodom had volunteered the whole.

Heaven Removes the Door

The two reached past Lot, pulled him through the doorway by the hand, and shut him safe inside. Then they struck.

They did not blind the mob the way a sword blinds. The Aramaic word for what fell on the crowd is sanwerin, a dazzled, bewildered blindness that leaves the eyes open and useless. The Sodomites could still see. They simply could no longer see the one thing in all the world they wanted. The door was gone from them. From the youngest to the oldest, the same crowd, the same span of ages that had come to violate one threshold, now groped along the wall with their hands, patting the stone, wearying themselves to find the gate that stood in front of their faces. They had come to break a doorway. Heaven took the doorway away from their eyes and left them clawing at a blank wall in the dark.

Long ago this same dazzling would fall on an Aramean army outside Dothan, when Elisha would pray the word sanwerin down on his enemies and walk them blind and harmless into Samaria. The enemies of the righteous are seldom struck dead by force. More often they are simply made unable to find what they are reaching for.

The Last Door in Sodom

They scratched at the wall until they tired, the boys and the elders alike, a whole city's worth of men hunting a door that had stood open to them their entire lives. None of them found it. Behind the stone they could not see, the strangers were already telling Lot to gather whatever family he had, because the outcry against the place had grown loud, and they had been sent to destroy it.

The men who built a law to torture every traveler who passed their gate spent their last night alive locked out of a single house, blind in their own street, feeling for a handle that was no longer there.