13

ANGELS IN SODOM

Sleep, my love, and peace attend thee

All through the night;

Guardian angels, God will lend thee,

All through the night.

Welsh folksong¹

After the three mysterious visitors have finished talking with Sarah and Abraham about Sarah’s impending pregnancy, they set off to visit Lot, who is still doing his best to preach the new gospel to the wicked inhabitants of Sodom. Abraham decides to accompany them part of the way.

As the men walk, they begin to discuss the fate of Sodom, and the Lord says to Abraham, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me.” He indicates that if the condition of the cities is as bad as it seems, destruction will ensue. Abraham is so disconcerted by this idea that He stops walking. The Lord stays with Him, but the other two men—who from now on will be described as angels in the Torah—keep walking.

To find out whether it is truly necessary to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham begins posing questions. “Will you destroy both innocent and guilty alike?” He asks. “Suppose you find fifty innocent people there within the city—will you still destroy it, and not spare it for their sakes? Surely you wouldn’t do such a thing, destroying the innocent and the guilty exactly the same! Surely you wouldn’t do that! Should not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?”

The Lord responds to Abraham by saying, “If I find fifty innocent people in Sodom, I will spare the entire city for their sake.”

Abraham chides Himself for being arrogant enough to argue with the Lord but then immediately escalates the argument: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes,” He says, “what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city because of five people?”

“If I find forty-five there,” the Lord replies, “I will not destroy it.”

Abraham is not content with forty-five. He asks what will happen if there are thirty innocents … and then twenty … and, finally, “What if only ten can be found there?”

“For the sake of ten I will not destroy it,” the Lord responds. With this, the conversation ends, and Abraham returns to his home.²

THE POWER OF INNOCENCE

By means of His argument with the Lord, Abraham introduces a new spiritual concept to mankind: the protective power that can be generated by the choices of a single individual or by a very small group of individuals.

The existence of moral choice had certainly been demonstrated by Adam and Eve and their interaction with the fruit tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and by the flood associated with Noah; yet as far as can be gleaned from scripture, the positive spiritual power generated by a single individual who chooses good over evil had not yet been delineated so clearly.

With His argument, Abraham demonstrated that the ethical actions of as few as ten people might be enough to save a whole town. Previous generations knew that if the gods weren’t placated through offerings and through the intercession of priests, then famine, pestilence, war, or earthquakes might ensue; but they weren’t familiar with the notion that their own moral actions could have a powerful influence. When the Lord said, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it,” the sacred burden of morality was placed squarely on the shoulders of each person. The most humble of individuals—a potter, a shepherd, a mother, a farmer—was assigned a spiritual value equal to that of a priest or king. Each of them now possessed a compelling reason to be obedient to laws of God and behave in an honorable manner: his or her actions mattered.

Sodom, as it turns out, does not contain the necessary ten innocent people, a sad fact that condemns it to destruction and transforms it into an enduring reminder of what happens when not enough people are willing to do the right thing.

TESTING A CITY

The test that proves Sodom’s communal guilt is provided by two of the three visitors who have been talking with Abraham. The two angels appear at the entrance to Sodom, where Lot welcomes them and invites them to his home so that they can wash their feet and be his guests for the night. When they accept, he prepares a feast and bakes unleavened bread.

As the meal is coming to an end and the guests are preparing to retire for the night, Lot realizes that all the men of Sodom have gathered outside his house, evidently infuriated by the hospitality he has shown to the two strangers. They shout at Lot and demand that he bring the visitors out so that “we may know them.” Lot refuses, offering his two virgin daughters instead, but his offer is rejected.

The mob surges forward and begins breaking down the door, but, just as all seems lost, the angels intervene by blinding the men of Sodom so that they cannot find the doorway. The angels warn Lot and his family to leave Sodom because it is going to be destroyed. Lot, his wife, and their two daughters obey, but the fiancés of Lot’s daughters laugh at the warning and are left behind.³

As the family flees, fire and burning sulfur (“brimstone and fire” in some translations) rain down on Sodom, on the nearby city of Gomorrah, and on the other cities in the area, “eliminating all life—people, plants, and animals alike.” Or, as the Qur’án says, “He destroyed the Overthrown Cities (of Sodom and Gomorrah), so that (ruins unknown) have covered them up.”⁴

THE MECHANICS OF DESTRUCTION

The precise locations of Sodom and Gomorrah are still a mystery. One possibility is that cities by that name never existed at all and, instead, the narrative given in the Book of Genesis was based on regional memories of a catastrophic event. Abraham, Moses, and / or one of the writers of the Torah took the memories, reshaped them into a cautionary tale contrasting the good behavior expected of Israelites (represented by the hospitality of Abraham) to the rude conduct of neighboring tribes who did not follow the same religion (i.e., those who were impolite to the visiting angels).

But, if Sodom and Gomorrah did exist during Abraham’s lifetime, the words of the Torah indicate that their buildings lay somewhere along the eastern side of the Dead Sea. Several places have been proposed, including Tell el-Hammam, which is currently under excavation, as well as a spot in the south basin of the Dead Sea that is presently covered by water. In either case, the cities were perched tenuously above an earthquake-prone area—the Dead Sea fault—that continues to be active today.⁵

Making the situation even more precarious were the slime pits dotting the land. Slime pits sound more gloppy than threatening, but a clearer translation of the original Hebrew word would be tar pits, puddles of asphalt, or pools of bitumen, any of which can be quite dangerous.*

Asphalt is a natural component of crude oil. It is thick, dark, sticky, and—mixed with sand and stone—makes a very resilient surface for a highway. Modern refineries generate asphalt as a byproduct when they distill crude oil into gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuel. But, long before any modern refineries were built, Mother Nature was giving mankind access to asphalt in naturally-occurring puddles and ponds. These were created by upwelling arteries of oil bubbling to the surface through layers of sand or cracked rock. After the more volatile gasses and oils had evaporated (a process that could have been speeded up by placing the glop in wicker baskets), the asphalt was ready to use as mortar for laying bricks, glue for mosaics, caulking for boats and roofs, or even to mummify an Egyptian body.⁶

Because crude oil deposits lie beneath so much of the Middle East, tar pits were—and still are—common throughout the region, but other countries have their share, too. Think, for example, of La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, California; La Brea Del Sur in Venezuela; and the enormous Asphalt Lake of Trinidad.

Four thousand years ago, asphalt was a valuable commodity. Valuable enough to support the growth of several towns—perhaps including Sodom and Gomorrah—whose residents specialized in collecting and trading it. The trade would have generated enough profit to account for the gold and other valuables that had enticed a group of Syrian kings to make war on Sodom soon after Lot moved there (see Chapter 9).

Asphalt is not especially flammable after it has dried into a semisolid mass. But when it is still fairly liquid, before the lighter oils associated with it have evaporated, it can catch fire. So can the methane gas that sometimes bubbles up through liquid asphalt from hidden pockets in the rock below. Combine an earthquake with the explosion of a pocket or two of methane, then add drops of oil flying up into the air and catching fire before gravity brings them down, and it all adds up quite logically to the Torah’s descriptions of fire, brimstone, and mass destruction.

Abraham, camped on the higher and safer ground of Mamre, would have been no more than fifty miles away. He rose early in the morning (wakened by a tremor?) and “looked out across the plain to Sodom and Gomorrah and saw columns of smoke and fumes, as from a furnace, rising from the cities there.”⁷

THE MANY MEANINGS OF SODOM

A search of the Google Books Web site on March 15, 2011, turned up 23,100 references to books with something to say about the symbolism of Sodom. It is variously seen as a clear-cut mandate to extend hospitality to strangers, a model of the lowest forms of sensory desire, a cautionary tale about the wages of sin, a physical description of the spiritual punishment in store for the wicked, an injunction against homosexuality, a comparison between the way in which the followers of God are expected to act and the way in which unbelievers behave, and a warning about what can happen to believers like Lot who make their home among the unrighteous. It has also been taken as a sign that only those who were physical descendants of Abraham would inherit the blessings of His Covenants with God: In spite of being a faithful believer, Lot was not a direct descendant of Abraham and thus not destined to be the founder of a tribe that would continue to pledge allegiance to the new Revelation.

Another angle from which to view the incident of Sodom and Gomorrah is to understand it as an account of what can happen when a group of people accepts a religion in word but does not adhere to it in deed. From this perspective, the story looks back at history and also forward in prophecy because the same kind of religious hypocrisy has occurred again and again during the last several thousand years. The angelic Messengers represent the religions sent by God—such as the religion of Noah, the religion of Moses, and the religion of Jesus—while Sodom represents those who profess to be followers of these religions. When the angels examine the behavior of the Sodomites, it becomes obvious that although they pretend to be religious, they have been perverting the true intent of their faith. The perversion is indicated by their unnatural lust for the angels—they want to use the angels for their own purposes rather than treat them with honor. When Lot tries to turn the Sodomites away from their perversions (i.e., he offers them the teachings of a new and pure Word of God, symbolized by his two virginal daughters), the men adamantly refuse to change their behavior. They are content with the way they are—disobedient to the old and heedless of the new. Their spiritual blindness means that they cannot see any reason to flee from the wickedness of disobedience, and so their annihilation (physical, spiritual, or both) is inevitable.

A PILLAR OF SALT

Warned by the angels, Lot gathers the members of his family together, and they leave Sodom just before its destruction. Lot’s wife, described by Muḥammad as being false to her husband, bitterly resents having to leave the city where she has been happy. She turns and looks back in longing at the wickedness behind her, an act of disloyalty that freezes her into a pillar of salt. The mystical implications of this crystalline image can be explored by examining the ways in which both the helpful and the harmful properties of salt are delineated in scripture.

One of the first passages about salt that springs to mind is Jesus’ question: “Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” According to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Jesus is speaking about the dangers of the “dissensions and lack of unity among His followers,” pointing out that if the apostles—the “salt”—are not united, the delicious flavor of the work they do will be lost. There are several other biblical verses that use salt as a metaphor for a quality that is desirable or of value, including this one from Matthew: “Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person.”⁸

Muḥammad uses images of salt in several ways, but one of the most intriguing is the manner in which He speaks of the spiritual realm and the material realm as twin oceans. One ocean contains fresh (spiritual) water, while the other is salty. Both oceans yield food and treasure, yet only the fresh water is sweet and pleasant to drink: “He hath let loose the two seas which meet each other … From each he bringeth up pearls both great and small … Nor are the two seas alike: the one fresh, sweet, pleasant for drink, and the other salt, bitter; yet from both ye eat fresh fish, and take forth for you ornaments to wear …”⁹

Bahá’u’lláh employs the same contrast between fresh and salty to demonstrate the foolishness of rejecting the sweetness of spirituality in favor of the bitterness of materialism: “Yea, inasmuch as the peoples of the world have failed to seek from the luminous and crystal Springs of divine knowledge the inner meaning of God’s holy words, they therefore have languished, stricken and sore athirst, in the vale of idle fancy and waywardness. They have strayed far from the fresh and thirst-subduing waters, and gathered round the salt that burneth bitterly.”¹⁰

Applying all these examples from scripture to Lot’s wife, she becomes the salt that has lost its savor. She is in disunity with religious truth because she is more attached to the treasures of the salty sea, epitomized by Sodom, than she is to the fresh truths brought by Abraham and preached by her husband. She refuses to drink from the “crystal Springs of divine knowledge” and wishes only to immerse herself in the bitter ocean of physical existence, a wish that causes her to become so encrusted with its sediment that she is spiritually immobilized.

* The problem with using tar in translation is that from a chemical point of view, tar and asphalt are different substances. They are both hydrocarbons and have many shared characteristics, but tar is created by the destructive distillation of wood, coal, or peat and softens at a lower temperature than asphalt, which is oil-based.