Lot's wife

For disobeying God by watching Sodom's destruction, Lot’s wife is turned into a "pillar of salt" while Lot and their daughters escape (Monreale Cathedral mosaic).

In the Bible, Lot's wife is a figure first mentioned in Genesis 19. The Book of Genesis describes how she became a pillar of salt after she looked back at Sodom. She is not named in the Bible, but is called Ado or Edith in some Jewish traditions. She is also referred to in the deuterocanonical books at the Book of Wisdom (Wisdom 10:7) and the New Testament at Luke 17:32.

Quotes about

Bible

  • When the morning dawned, the angels urged Lot to hurry, saying, “Arise, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be consumed in the punishment of the city.” And while he lingered, the men took hold of his hand, his wife’s hand, and the hands of his two daughters, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city. So it came to pass, when they had brought them outside, that he said, “Escape for your life! Do not look behind you nor stay anywhere in the plain. Escape to the mountains, lest you be destroyed.” [...] The sun had risen upon the earth when Lot entered Zoar. Then the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the Lord out of the heavens. So He overthrew those cities, all the plain, all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.
But his wife looked back behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.
  • Likewise as it was also in the days of Lot: They ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built; but on the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.
“In that day, he who is on the housetop, and his goods are in the house, let him not come down to take them away. And likewise the one who is in the field, let him not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife.
    • Luke' 17,28-32 (NKJV).

K

  • Orpheus' mistake wasn't that he turned and looked back towards Eurydice and Hell, but that he ever thought he could escape. Same with Lot's wife. Averting our eyes does not change the fact that we are marked.

P

  • The next major figure in the Bible is Abraham, the spiritual ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Abraham has a nephew, Lot, who settles in Sodom. Because the residents engage in anal sex and comparable sins, God immolates every man, woman, and child in a divine napalm attack. Lot’s wife, for the crime of turning around to look at the inferno, is put to death as well. Abraham undergoes a test of his moral values when God orders him to take his son Isaac to a mountaintop, tie him up, cut his throat, and burn his body as a gift to the Lord. Isaac is spared only because at the last moment an angel stays his father’s hand. For millennia readers have puzzled over why God insisted on this horrifying trial. One interpretation is that God intervened not because Abraham had passed the test but because he had failed it, but that is anachronistic: obedience to divine authority, not reverence for human life, was the cardinal virtue.

V

W

  • Yet even among theologians we note here and there a skeptical spirit in natural science. Early in the same seventeenth century [Par F.] Eugène Roger published his Travels in Palestine. As regards the utterances of Scripture he is soundly orthodox: he prefaces his work with a map showing... the place where Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, the cavern which Adam and Eve inhabited after their expulsion from paradise, the spot where Balaam's ass spoke, the place where Jacob wrestled with the angel, the steep place down which the swine possessed of devils plunged into the sea, the position of the salt statue which was once Lot's wife, the place at sea where Jonah was swallowed by the whale, and "the exact spot where St. Peter caught one hundred and fifty three fishes." As to natural history he describes and discusses with great theological acuteness the basilisk. ...about a foot and a half long, is shaped like a crocodile, and kills people with a single glance. The one which he saw was dead fortunately for him, since in the time of Pope Leo IV—as he tells us—one appeared in Rome and killed many people by merely looking at them; but the Pope destroyed it with his prayers and the sign of the cross. ...Providence has wisely and mercifully protected man by requiring the monster to cry aloud two or three times whenever it leaves its den. ...the same divine mercy has provided that the crowing of a cock will kill the basilisk. Yet even in this good and credulous missionary we see the influence of Bacon and the dawn of experimental science; for, having been told many stories regarding the salamander, he secured one, placed it alive upon the burning coals, and reports to us that the legends concerning its power to live in the fire are untrue. He also tried experiments with the chameleon...

Z

  • Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far. They are generations, they are grandfathers, fathers, and grandsons. And grandsons invariably love and hate the fathers; the fathers invariably hate and love the grandfathers.
    Today is doomed to die — because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis, and tomorrow, the synthesis.
    • Yevgeny Zamyatin, "Tomorrow" (1919), as translated in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) edited and translated by Mirra Ginsberg

Films

  • Irene: Hello, Archie!
    Archie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
    Irene: I bet that means, "Who needs her around on my day off?"
    Edith: Archie didn't mean that... did you, Archie?
    Archie: Don't ever argue with a guest, Edith.
(regarding women Olympic gold medalists)
Archie: Even the judges couldn't figure them out, they had to give them one of them her-mone tests... Found out that most of them had more his-mones than her-mones.
Mike: How long have you been believing in curses?
Archie: How long have you been living here?
Mike: Of course there is magic all the time. You even find magic in the Bible.
Archie: Oh, shut up! You atheist you! The Bible is filled miracles, no magic. God didn't fool around with no magic.
Mike: What about Sodom and Gomorrah? When Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt?
Archie: That's because when she was running away from them two dirty cities, she stopped to take a look at her behind.
A stunned Mike slams his head against the table.
Merrick: Lot, before God, could make no case for that food.
Mary: Lot's wife may have been in that food.
  • Roy Tillman: Well, you don't get it, do you? This is the path I'm on. Starts at birth and it ends here. This isn't a trip to Starbucks on the way to the office. This isn't an idea. God cuts our names into bone and that's who we become. He blows His holy trumpet and the walls fall down. You all came here to find Lot's wife, but she's already a pillar of salt and she ain't turning back. So, go and live, or stay and die. It's up to you.
Dr. Soberin: There is something sad and melancholy about trips. I always hate to go away. But one has to find some new place or it would be impossible to be sad and melancholy again. [Lily tries to break open the box] Curiosity killed a cat and it certainly would have you if you'd followed your impulse to open it. You did very well to call me when you did.
Lily: Yes, I know. But what's in it?
Dr. Soberin: You have been misnamed, Gabrielle. You should have been called Pandora. She had a curiosity about a box and opened it and let loose all the evil in the world.
Lily: Never mind about the evil. What's in it?
Dr. Soberin: Did you ever hear of Lot's wife?
Lily: No.
Dr. Soberin: No. Well, she was told not to look back. But she disobeyed and she was changed into a pillar of salt.
Lily: Well, I just want to know what it is.
Dr. Soberin: Would you believe me if I told you? Would you be satisfied?
Lily: Maybe.
Dr. Soberin: The head of the Medusa. That's what's in the box. And whoever looks on her will be changed, not into stone, but into brimstone and ashes. Well, of course, you wouldn't believe me. You'd have to see for yourself, wouldn't you?
Lily: Where are we going?
Dr. Soberin: Where I am going, it is not possible for you to go. I had no illusion about deceiving you. You have the feline perceptions that all women have...
Lily: Whatever is in that box - it must be very precious. So many people have died for it.
Dr. Soberin: Yes, it is very precious.
Lily: I want half.
Dr. Soberin: I agree with you. You should have at least half. You deserve it, for all the creature comforts you've given me. But unfortunately, the object in this box cannot be divided.
Lily: [She points a gun at him[;; Then I'll take it all...if you don't mind.
Dr. Soberin: Listen to me, as if I were Cerberus barking with all his heads at the gates of Hell, I will tell you where to take it. But don't, don't open the box.
Castiel You’re suffering from smiting sickness.
Dean: That... that’s a thing?
Castiel: Yeah. The angels ― what they did ― it released a tremendous amount of energy and there’s fallout, so this whole area is poisoned.
Dean: You can heal me, right?
Castiel: No, I can’t and the closer you get to the blast site the worse your sickness will become.
Dean: How worse?
Castiel: The last time there was a smiting of this magnitude, Lot’s wife turned to salt.

See also

Media related to Lot's wife on Wikimedia Commons

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