This sheet on Genesis 19 was written by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein for 929 and can also be found here
Rabbi David Kimchi (a thirteenth-century exegete known by the acronym Radak) points out that in Genesis it is sulfur and fire that are said to have rained down on Sodom. But in Deuteronomy, when Moses, before dying, warns the children of Israel not to repeat the sins of the past, he speaks of sulfur and salt as having been poured onto the doomed city. In the course of explaining the discrepancy, Radak says that in fact all the people of Sodom became pillars of salt. The outcome of the physical devastation wrought upon Sodom was that the place itself became sulfur, while the people became salt.
Hence—at least if one follows Radak—it seems that Lot’s wife was not the spectacular aberration I had always thought. Her fate was continuous with those who had been left behind. Suddenly I felt the whole story of Lot’s wife shifting.
She was told not to look and she looked, says the Bible. And her punishment came swift and horrible, added my teacher, following the traditional interpretation I, too, had thought inevitable. But I read the story differently now:
Irit looked back to see if her two firstborn daughters were following, and she saw that they weren’t and what had become of them.
In such a moment of grief one knows only one desire: to follow after one’s child, to experience what she’s experienced, to be one with her in every aspect of suffering. Only to be one with her.
And it was for this desire that Irit was turned into a pillar of salt. She was turned into salt either because God couldn’t forgive her this desire . . . or because he could.
(Excerpted and reprinted with permission from the essay “Looking Back at Lot’s Wife,” in: Reading Genesis Beginnings, Beth Kissileff, editor, Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 113).
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and a novelist.
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