Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Escape for your life, and do not look behind
Genesis 19:15-29
15 When the morning came, then the angels hurried Lot, saying, “Get up! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be consumed in the iniquity of the city.” · WEB
The man being rescued has to be dragged out by the hand, and the reason he survives is named in the last verse and is not himself.
Morning comes and the angels hurried Lot. The word suggests urgency on their side and reluctance on his, and the next verse states it outright: But he lingered.
A city is hours from destruction, he has been told so by messengers who blinded a mob in front of him, and he lingers. What follows is one of the most tender and least flattering sentences in Genesis: the men grabbed his hand, his wife's hand, and his two daughters' hands, Yahweh being merciful to him; and they took him out, and set him outside of the city.
Four people are pulled out by force. The clause in the middle — Yahweh being merciful to him — is the narrator's explanation for why the rescue proceeds against the rescued man's own dithering, and it is the honest account of the whole episode.
The instruction is absolute: Escape for your life! Don't look behind you, and don't stay anywhere in the plain. Escape to the mountains.
And Lot argues. Told to run for his life, he opens a negotiation about the destination — the mountain is too far, he might die on the way, and there is a small city nearby. He asks twice how little it is. It is granted, and the place is named Zoar, which means small, so that the town keeps the name of his bargaining forever.
The destruction is described in one verse without elaboration: Yahweh rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from Yahweh out of the sky, overthrowing the cities, the plain, the inhabitants, and what grew on the ground. The plain Lot had chosen because it was well watered like the garden of Yahweh is now what Abraham sees from the hills: the smoke of the land went up as the smoke of a furnace.
Then the sentence about Lot's wife, and it is nine words: But Lot's wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt. Nothing is explained. The one command given to people running for their lives was not to look behind, and she looked. Whether the looking was longing, disbelief, or a moment's hesitation, the text does not say — and the only comment Scripture ever makes on it is three words spoken as a warning about the day of judgment: Remember Lot's wife Luke 17:32.
The chapter's theological conclusion is placed at the end, after everything, and it credits the rescue to somebody who was not there. When God destroyed the cities of the plain, God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the middle of the overthrow.
Abraham had asked for fifty righteous, and come down to ten, and there were not ten. His intercession did not save the city. But God remembered him — the verb used of Noah in the ark — and the man he had crossed the country to rescue once was pulled out of the fire by the hand, on account of an argument he had made at the top of a hill and never learned the outcome of.
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