So yes, this post is a day late, and the next one will be too, most likely. I'll catch up eventually, though.
By way of explanation, the Interwebs are broken at my house right now, or were until this morning, apparently, and this weekend is a swamper at work, so time and brain power are at a premium.
Also, the Internet breaking makes me irritated, and irritated is not the frame of mind to try and reflect in any sort of coherent way on some of the most nauseating passages of the entirety of scripture.
Which brings us to Genesis 19 and 20.
Simply put, these two chapters of the Bible make Jerry Springer's "too-hot-for-TV" DVD specials look like Christmas morning with the Brady Bunch. It's a cavalcade of human baseness and deplorability - maybe that's what it's there for, I don't know.
First, you've got the relatively well-known (but disgustingly misused, particularly in American politics and social policy issues) story of the angels visiting Lot in Sodom. Two "guys" show up in town, and Lot recognizes them at once as people worthy of both worship (or at least reverence) and protection, and he insists that they stay with him, in his house. Word gets around town that two foreigners are in town and that they're staying with that other foreigner, and every single male in town shows up to gang rape them.
Can we take a moment and agree that, no matter what your opinion/belief is on gay rights, same-sex unions, homosexuality in general, that any mention of Sodom and Gommorrah in the modern debate's context should instantly land the person making the reference in the same pool as the people (coincidentally, often also Fox News contributors and "analysts") who blindly throw around references to Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia with absolutely not regard for the mind-bogglingly severe, over-the-top and tragic history that they're invoking? Thanks.
There's no other way to put it, really. This is a hideously violent, dangerous and offensive story. And it only gets worse. So the two men are in the house, only after Lot begs and pleads with them to stay with him, and this mob of angry men are literally trying to claw their way past Lot into his home, after turning down his... offer?... of just sacrificing his two daughters to the mob, literally telling them that they can do to them whatever they want.
Not good enough, says the mob, we want the new guys, until finally, the angels drag Lot inside, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they could, indeed, have stayed in the town square all night and been perfectly safe, and let Lot in on the news that he'd better get out of town, along with his whole family. Future sons-in-law refuse, not really believing him that anything's going to happen, and even Lot and his family need to literally be dragged out the door and sent on their way, not to the mountains where he was told to go, but to Zoar, a small town where Lot for some reason wanted to go more.
Lot's wife "looks back" and is turned to a pillar of salt.
Much has been made of this "looking back" and I agree that the typically portrayed glance over the shoulder doesn't really seem to merit instantaneous death, but that doesn't really seem to be what the Hebrew says.
In the text, both words are verbs, not a verb and a preposition (adjective? adverb? whatever) as in English, so it seems that a better translation would be that she "looked to go back," "looked to return," or even "considered returning". Now even this may seem like a bit of a minor offense, but when you consider that this wasn't their lifelong home together (she may have been a local that Lot married, but it would have been fairly customary for women to go wherever their husbands wanted once they were married anyway), and she had just witnessed dozens if not hundreds of men threaten to break down their door to gang-rape their guests. Not exactly Mayberry, is it? She also was fleeing from its then-still-ongoing destruction at the hands and brimstone-y wishes of the creator of the universe. Whether you still think the sentence of pillar of salt was a bit harsh is one thing, but it's hard to pass off Lot's wife's desire to return as a simple sentimental moment.
Not to mention the fact that if there's a distinctly volcanic disaster from which you're fleeing desperately, it's not hard to see how dallying and dithering may well end up with you turning into a pile of very salt-like base material as a simple natural consequence of not getting the hell out of Dodge while the gettin's good.
Then we get to the mountains eventually anyway, and we find out more about just how strenuously wrong Lot's whole family situation must have been. There they are, in the mountains, having narrowly escaped death and disaster, their lives, apparently, in tatters and only still alive because of these already-identified-as-angelic messengers who had the power to strike a town blind and call down instant scorching for all, and Lot's daughters' best idea for going forward is to get their dad blind drunk and sleep with him so that they can conceive children.
I'm pretty sure Jerry Springer is gagging somewhere right now. Or wishing that network television, and he, had been around thousands of years ago.
Nice little dig at the Moabites and "Sons of Ammon" there by the author of the narrative, too, don't you think. I think we may have found out that the Bible also invented "Yo Momma" disses.
And all of that's just in chapter 19...
Then we get back to Abraham, breathing a sigh of relief that we can get away from the daytime talk show host fantasy that is Lot's family and return to the sanity and heroism of God's chosen patriarch, only to find him going to yet another kingdom and trying to save his own skin by pawning his wife off to the local king as his sister so that she'll end up in the king's boudoir.
Sigh.
Here, as an interesting tid-bit and something that I either never knew or forgot I learned, we discover that both of these times Abraham's only been telling half-lies, since Sarah really is (according to him) his half-sister. Wife from another mother type of thing, I suppose. A sort of brother-from-another-mother type of situation.
Except with a woman.
That he married.
Anyway, then we get the birth of Isaac, which causes more problems for the understandably strained Sarah-Hagar "relationship."
For some reason, I had always pictured the "Hagar and Ishmael being cast out into the wilderness" story as being a mom-and-baby near-death adventure, but now that I think about it, Ishmael must have been in at least his mid-, maybe late-, teens by this time.
Still, Helen Mirren and circa-2001 Haley Joel Osment could have done wonders with this story and surely would have reduced any audience in the world to a blubbering, tearful mess. It's good literature, this one.
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