Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [38]
The part of Lot’s story that was left out in Sunday school is that Lot’s motherless daughters have another worry: with all the available men in Sodom gone up in smoke and ashes, what will they do for husbands? They get their father drunk and each of them “lies with” him. Both become pregnant and each bears a son.
Why did Lot’s wife turn into a pillar of salt?
The Sodom and Gomorrah story has always been useful as a simple moral tale of God destroying evil. But there is a subtext to the story that has been even more influential. It is all about the sin to which the name Sodom is attached, and this story has always been cited as one of the basic biblical justifications against homosexuality.
When God’s messenger angels go to Lot’s house, they are threatened with mass homosexual rape by the men of Sodom, who are all destroyed. This episode was long viewed as a fairly direct condemnation of homosexuality—sexual behavior condemned elsewhere in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Although many contemporary biblical scholars have argued that the specific act of homosexuality is not the real issue in Sodom, it is difficult not to accept that ancient Israelites viewed homosexuality as an “abomination,” even though it was acceptable in other nearby cultures. One explanation is the sacredness of having children in the ancient Israelite view. Sex that did not produce offspring was therefore considered sinful.
As for Lot’s incestuous daughters; each bears a son. The first is named Moab and becomes the ancestor of the Moabites, a neighboring tribe of Israel. The other is Ben-Ammi, ancestor of the Ammonites, another neighboring tribe. For the Israelites, this story, adapted from an old Canaanite folktale, mockingly explains the origin of two neighboring tribes. It also establishes that these tribes were not descended from Abraham and had no divine claim to the Promised Land.
The remains of the Twin Cities of Sin have never been found. Myth has it that they lie buried beneath the Dead (Salt) Sea. Apart from its moral implications, the story provides an explanation of two local phenomena. The Dead Sea area is rich in bitumen, or tar, supposedly left in the wake of the destructive “fire and brimstone” raining down from heaven. Bitumen was used in the Egyptian mummification process, and the Egyptian word for “bitumen” is momiya, from which “mummy” is derived. Bitumen was also used for “tarring” houses and was one of the key trade items in this area.
But Dr. Charles Pellegrino offers an unorthodox but fascinating speculation in Return to Sodom and Gomorrah. Pellegrino, a sort of “bad boy” of science, who has designed rockets, probed the wreckage of the Titanic with Dr. Robert Ballard, and once wrote an article about cloning dinosaurs that helped inspire Jurassic Park, likes to tweak conventional scientific wisdom. In his book, Pellegrino suggests that the Sodom story, like so many other early Israelite tales in Genesis, was adapted from Babylonian sources. He points to the fact that original names translated in Greek as “Sodom” and “Gomorrah” were Siddim (or Sedom) and “Amora”—Mesopotamian names—and that the warring kings who attacked Sodom and were defeated by Abraham were from Shinar, in the Tigris-Euphrates area. Pellegrino concludes, “Sodom, if it existed at all, existed in or near Iraq.” (p. 180)
The account of Lot’s wife is another version of a common mythic theme: someone is punished for looking back against divine or heavenly instructions. In the Greek myths, for instance, Orpheus goes to the underworld to recover his beloved wife, Eurydice. As they leave the underworld, he ignores the instruction not to look