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Special thanks to Benjy Koren for suggesting this Midrash.
“His [Lot’s] wife looked behind her” – Rabbi Isaac said, for she sinned with salt. That night when the angels came to Lot, what was she doing? Going to all her neighbors and saying to them, ‘give me salt, because we have guests.’ And her intention was that the men of the city would come to know of them. Therefore “she became a pillar of salt.” (Beresheet Rabba 51:5)
The Torah famously recounts that, in the wake of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the wife of Lot violated the instructions of the angels, looked back, and was transformed into a pillar of salt. The Midrash explains that she was punished with salt because of a sin she committed that involved salt. Lot’s wife knew that the people of Sodom opposed welcoming guests. Therefore, ostensibly in a show of hospitality her visitors, she went around from house to house requesting salt on their behalf. However, this effectively served to alert the citizens of Sodom to the presence of strangers in their midst and naturally incited them to react with violence.
On the surface, it is difficult to see what the Midrash intends to accomplish with its “embellishment” of the story of the wife of Lot. According to the simple reading of the text, when fire, brimstone and sulfur were raining down from heaven, Lot’s wife disobeyed the divine command, and this brief delay caused her to get caught up in the storm and struck by falling salt that then enveloped her. It seems unnecessary to introduce a fanciful backstory in which the wife of Lot ran around Sodom collecting salt for her unexpected guests, grimly foreshadowing her own ultimate fate. What insight did the Rabbis of the Midrash mean to convey to us with this tale?
In order to unlock the hidden message embedded in the words of our Sages, we must first examine the words of the Torah and attempt to identify what exactly troubled them about the text. Two angels arrive in Sodom; Lot, in accordance with the Abrahamic tradition in which he was raised, welcomes them into his home, and they proceed to warn him about the impending destruction of the city. Lot attempts to share this frightening message with his married daughters and their sons, encouraging them to flee with him, but they mock his naive belief in what they consider to be a false prophecy. Lot, too, hesitates at first; but he, his wife and his two unmarried daughters are finally rushed out of the town, physically pulled by their heavenly visitors to safety.
The breakdown in the narrative seems fairly simple. There are members of Lot’s family who are firmly entrenched in the sadistic, unjust and coarse culture of Sodom, who have no intention of ever leaving, and who ridicule the suggestion that Divine punishment could possibly be visited upon their community. Then there are individuals like Lot and his two daughters who, although hesitant to leave their comfortable home and belongings behind, nevertheless view themselves as outsiders in Sodom, ideological opponents of its vicious, selfish ethic who can appreciate why God might finally see fit take the city to task for its wickedness.
The view of the wife of Lot in all this, however, is a mystery. If she was a card-carrying member of Sodom, why didn’t she insist upon remaining in the town with her married daughters and sons-in-law? If, on the other hand, she identified more strongly with the path of Lot and the traditions of kindness and justice he inherited (albeit in an imperfect form) from Abraham, why was she punished for merely looking over her shoulder on her way out of Sodom?
In the form of a brilliant and vivid Midrash, our Sages resolve this question beautifully. Lot’s wife was, in reality, torn between the selfish, self-indulgent and cruelly indifferent culture of Sodom on one hand, and the more gentle, compassionate conduct of Abraham’s family on the other. On the surface, she cultivated the image of a sincere and devoted partner in Lot’s efforts at hospitality. Deep down inside, however, she harbored bitter resentment toward the imposition of guests and railed against the expectation that she must share her food and her space to accommodate the needs of strangers.
In order to capture this conflict in the form of memorable imagery, the Sages depict Lot’s wife in a typically passive-aggressive manner, outwardly collecting salt for the benefit of the visitors while indirectly and insidiously facilitating their discovery and entrapment. Her behavior allowed her to maintain the outward appearance of a dedicated spouse to Lot while simultaneously gratifying her darker egotistical and selfish impulses as a citizen of Sodom.
With this insight into the personality of Mrs. Lot, we can now understand the Torah’s account of her ultimate fate much more clearly. For Lot himself, the decision to flee Sodom, while logistically complicated, was not difficult in principle – he was abandoning a place that enshrined values and ideas that were antithetical to everything he believed in. There was no reason for him to look back with love or longing in the direction of a place that was so thoroughly corrupt and morally repugnant.
Lot’s wife, however, while willing to “go along with the program” and run from Sodom in a manner consistent with her role as a genuine partner to her husband, could not resist the temptation to take one last affectionate look at her cherished Sodom before it collapsed into ruins. Glancing back was not a “sin” because it violated the command of the angels – it was a revelation of her true colors, an expression of where her most deeply held convictions and personal identifications really lay.
At the end of the day, despite being married to the nephew of Abraham, Lot’s wife was a Sodomite through and through, and she deserved and suffered the same fate as those whom she actually considered her brothers and sisters. The lesson for us, perhaps, is simple: in the eyes of the Almighty, we are judged for who we truly are, and not who we pretend to be.
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