Illustration Credit: Elad Lifshitz, Dov Abramson Studio
What's going on here? מַה זֶה?
Why a pillar of salt?
Before Lot and his family run away from the destruction of Sedom, they are warned by the angels not to look back. But Lot’s wife did turn back to look—so she turned into a pillar of salt (Bereishit 19:26)! Why, of all things, was she turned into salt?
Without other details in the Torah to understand this, two midrashim assume that she must have done something wrong to have deserved such a terrible end. Also, we know that the people of Sedom were not welcoming to the angels who came to Lot as guests. So, these midrashim offer the following explanations:
- She did not want to allow her guests to have salt in their food, even though it would have made it taste much better and it wouldn’t have cost very much (Bereishit Rabbah 50:4).
- She went around to her neighbors asking for salt for her guests, knowing that guests were not allowed in Sedom and she was endangering them by asking (Bereishit Rabbah 51:5).
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