(3) Avenging Angels. At length the guilt of 'the cities of the plain' brought down the signal judgments of Heaven. The avenging angels, after having been entertained by Abraham, re paired to Sodom, where they were received and entertained by Lot, who was sitting in the gate of the town when they arrived. While they were at supper the house was beset by a number of men, who demanded that the strangers should be given up to them, for the unnatural purposes which have given a name of infamy to Sodom in all generations. Lot resisted this demand, and was loaded with abuse by the vile fellows outside on that account. They had nearly forced the door, when the angels, thus awfully by their own ex perience convinced of the righteousness of the doom they came to execute, smote them with instant blindness, by which their attempts were rendered abortive, and they were constrained to disperse. Towards morning the angels apprised Lot of the doom which hung over the place, and urged him to hasten thence with his family.
(4) Escape from Sodom. He was allowed to extend the benefit of this deliverance to the fami lies of his daughters who had married in Sodom; but the warning was received by those families with incredulity and insult, and he therefore left Sodom accompanied only. by his wife and two daughters.
(5) Lot's Wife. As they went, being hastened by the angels, the wife, anxious for those who had been left behind, or reluctant to remove from the place which had long been her home, and where much valuable property was necessarily left behind, lingered behind the rest, and was suddenly involved in the destruction, by which —smothered and stiffened as she stood by saline incrustations—she became 'a pillar of salt.' The turning of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt has often been regarded as one of the difficulties of the Bible, but is not so necessarily. "We are not to suppose that she was actually turned into one, but having been killed by the fiery and sulphurous vapor with which the air was filled, and afterward incrusted with salt, she resembled an actual statue of salt" (K. and D., Com. in /oco).
(6) Departure to Zoar. Lot and his daughters then hastened on to Zoar, the smallest of the five cities of the plain, which had been spared on purpose to afford him a refuge: but, being fear ful, after what had passed, to remain among a people so corrupted, he soon retired to a cavern in the neighboring mountains, and there abode.
(7) Daughters' Sin. After some stay in this place, the daughters of Lot became apprehensive lest the family of their father should be lost for want of descendants, than which no greater ca lamity was known or apprehended in those times; and in the belief that, after what had passed in Sodom, there was no hope of their obtaining suit able husbands, they, by a contrivance which has in it the taint of Sodom, in which they were brought up, made their father drunk with wine, and in that state seduced him into an act which, as they well knew, would in soberness have been most abhorrent to him. They thus became the
mothers, and he the father, of two sons, named Moab and Ammon, from whom sprang the Moab hes and Ammonites, so often mentioned in the Hebrew history (Gen. xix). This circumstance is the last which the Scripture records of the his tory of Lot ; and the time and place of his death are unknown.
(8) Palliation of Daughters' Offense. With respect to Lot's daughters Whiston and others are unable to see any wicked intention in them. He admits that the incest was a horrid crime, except under the unavoidable necessity which apparently rendered it the only means of preserv ing the human race: and this justifying necessity he holds to have existed in their minds, as they appear to have believed that all the inhabitants of the land had been destroyed except their father and themselves. But it is incredible that they could have entertained any such belief. The city of Zoar had been spared, and they had been there. The wine also with which they made their father drunk must have been procured from men. as we cannot suppose they had brought it with them from Sodom. The fact would therefore seem to be that, after the fate of their sisters, who had married men of Sodom and perished with them, they became alive to the danger and im propriety of marrying with the natives of the land, and of the importance of preserving the family connection. The force of this considera tion was afterwards seen in Abraham's sending to the seat of his family in Mesopotamia for a wife for Isaac. But Lot's daughters could not go there to seek husbands; and the only branch of their own family within many hundred miles was that of Abraham, whose only son, Ishmael, was then a child. This, therefore, must have appeared to them the only practicable mode in which the house of their father could be pre served. Their making their father drunk, and their solicitous concealment of what they did from him, show that they despaired of persuading him to. an act which. under any circumstances, and with every possible extenuation, must have been very distressing to so good a man.