Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 19-20.

I want to comment on what I think are a couple of interesting points, although I am not sure any of them give us any guidance for living our lives.  First, it seems to me from this passage, and several other Old Testament passages that it was common for travelers to spend the night in the town square of walled cities they were passing through.  Directly related to that, Lot was sitting at the city gates and invited these men to stay with him.  When they initially demurred, he insisted.  This suggests that Lot was well aware that the men of the city would mistreat these visitors.  Thinking about that takes me back to Abraham’s “negotiations” for saving Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction.  It seems likely that if there had been as many as ten men in the city who would have acted as Lot did, the rest of the men of the city would not have confronted Lot about his guests.  There are a couple of different ways I can go here, but I think I will go with the lesson for us:  Lot offered up his hospitality in an attempt to protect these men from the violence he knew would otherwise be visited on them.  There is one other interesting thing I want to highlight.  The passage says that the morning after the destruction, Abraham looked down on the plain and saw smoke rising from the cities.  It seems likely that Abraham believed that Lot had been killed along with the rest of the inhabitants, a conclusion which is supported by the fact that Lot lived out his life in a cave in the mountains overlooking the plain.  How might things have turned out differently for Lot and his daughters if he had reached out to his uncle after the destruction of the cities on the plain?  Even if only for so much as to let his uncle know that he had survived.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.