Whatever happened to Mrs Lot?

Nearly everyone knows that in Old Testament times Sodom and Gomorrah were pretty naughty places to be and that the Lord, after negotiations with Abraham, was moved to spare any good people that could be found in them. In the event, it seems that only Lot, his wife and his two unmarried daughters fitted the bill. It is true that his two sons-in-law-to-be were invited to leave with Lot and his family, but they scoffed at the idea that two angels were going to destroy the city of Sodom with little obvious help.

Mr and Mrs Lot were told "Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed." Somewhat unfairly, to my way of thinking, there was no "or else" attached to the looking back, to make them suspect that something unpleasant might happen it they did. In the event, Mrs Lot did look back and "she became a pillar of salt."

I have come across two explanations for this paranormal misfortune that befell Mrs Lot (in the April 1989 Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine) and will add to them one of my own which seems a little more plausible.

One suggestion is that on looking back, she missed her footing and fell into a deep, highly saline pool which apparently abound in those parts. Lot, of course, was keeping his eyes to the fore so that his wife was left to struggle out unaided and moribund. Her saline-soaked garments quickly dried out in the heat as she expired, leaving an apparent pillar of salt crystals, albeit a horizontal one.

Another suggestion is that Mrs Lot was not perhaps as free from sin as her husband. (We learn later that her surviving daughters deliberately committed incest with their father

Page 16 as he lay in drunken sleep). It is possible that in the past she had contracted a sexually transmitted disease and, in pre-antibiotic days, urinary tract and kidney damage was one of the results. Maybe she had end-stage kidney failure and in the intense heat of the desert, the exertion of flight was the last straw for her ailing kidneys. When the kidneys cease to work, urea is excreted in quantity in the sweat and the skin may become coated with a urea frost. Again, one would expect a horizontal pillar of salt...

There are quite clear indications of volcanic and seismic activity in the account of the flight of the Lot family: "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities and all the plain..." It may well be that Mrs Lot was overtaken by a nuage ardent. This is not a lovesick cloud but a cloud of superheated steam and poisonous gases which can travel at hundreds of kilometres an hour during certain types of volcanic eruptions. It is difficult to see how not looking back might have saved her, but one can imagine her sinking to ber knees having suffered instant death from a lungful of the searing cloud and being covered rapidly by fine volcanic ashes to give the form of a somewhat truncated pillar of salt.

Not looking back may of course be allegorical, implying that she had not been averse to a bit of sin in the past. However, there are clear indications in the details of the story suggesting that, when it was written at least, it was seen as a factual account. There may of course be other explanations, including the supernatural actions of Jaweh. I will donate a prize of a telepathic therapeutic mind massage to the best suggestion received before Christmas.