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

There are several interesting bits to the story about Lot’s rescue before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  First, the men of Sodom reacted with out of proportion hostility to Lot’s verbal offer to leave his guests alone.  Also, was their reaction his calling their intentions evil, or to the offer of his virgin daughters?  Second, while the NIV translates the passage about Lot’s sons-in-law pledged to marry his daughters, the translators’ notes, and other translations, say that it may mean they were married to them.   Then, the angels told Lot to take his wife and two daughters “who are here” and flee.  Finally, the passage tells us that Lot’s wife was turned to a pillar of salt for looking back at Sodom as it was destroyed.  Other translations say that she was behind Lot when she did so, and some commentators have suggested that the words translated as “looked back” imply that she did so longingly for more than just a moment.   Combining those two things, with the description that the vegetation of the land was destroyed suggests to me that she paused to look back before reaching safety and was caught in the destruction. Jesus mentions Lot’s wife when He warns of the destruction which will come when He returns.  I think the warning here, as many others have said, is that we should not look back on the life of sin we left behind to follow Christ with regrets for sinful pleasures we did not embrace.

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

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.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 19-20. I have decided to switch from suing the New Living Translation to using the New International Version because, all in all, I prefer the NIV.

I struggled with what to write about this passage until I was skimming it for the umpteenth time and I read this in isolation, “This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge!”  I knew right where that was in the story, so I understood the context.  Lot was trying to convince the men of Sodom not to rape his visitors and their response was essentially, “Who are you to judge us?”  He was an outsider among them, even though it was because of Lot that they, or their parents, had not been enslaved when Sodom had been plundered some years back (Abram had gone after those who had plundered Sodom and taken many of its people as slaves because Lot was one of them).  In many ways, this was THE sin of Sodom.  Sodom was not destroyed because of what these men wanted to do to strangers.  It was destroyed because the men of Sodom were going to turn on their neighbor for standing up for those strangers.

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

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

When God’s angels arrived in Sodom, Lot immediately invited them to stay at his house.  When they demurred by saying that they would just stay in the town square for the night and be on their way in the morning, Lot refused to take “No” for an answer.  That exchange suggests to me that Lot know that the men of Sodom would abuse strangers who spent the night in the town square.  Then when the men of Sodom came to Lot’s door demanding that Lot turn his guests over to them so that they could rape them, Lot tried to convince them to leave the angels alone because they were his guests.  The response of the men of Sodom was to threaten Lot and to complain that he was judging them.  I find that interesting because Lot did not tell them not to abuse the strangers because it was wrong, but because they were under his protection.  That suggests to me that Lot had previously spoken out against abusing visitors who spent the night in the town square and been told they were fair game.  The fact that he extended his protection to strangers who would have otherwise been vulnerable meant that he was judging those who wished to take advantage of those strangers.