Chapter 19 was a page turner as well. You have a midnight run from destruction, and father-daughter incest. Amazing stuff.
Basically, it picks up with the two men from the previous chapter (Three, if you include God. I missed that part.).
Lot is already at the gate of the city, so he must have been warned, or was expecting them? Anyway, he invites them to his house, but they say they'd rather spend the night in the square. But Lot convinces them to come over to his house for some grub. When they get there, they eat some food, but then ALL the men from EVERY part of the city came over and wanted to have sex with the new guys. Not just a couple...I get the image it was a sausage-fest of Biblical proportions.
I wonder if this is why the two men wanted to stay in the square...because they wanted to spare Lot the embarrassment of having a ton of dudes hit on his guests. But Lot insisted. So, there must be a good time to argue with God, and a not so good time to argue with God, a time to leave well enough alone. "Be careful what you wish for..."
Oh, and another thing! Sodom is home to King Bera, who Abraham snubbed after restoring Lot, so maybe these guys had it in for Lot, because of his connection to Abraham. Lot was the whole reason for the season, anyway.
Anyway, Lot is losing his mind, because now these men are banging on the door, trying to get in. Lot offers his daughters to them, as a sort of token diversion, but it doesn't work. These men are not bi. Finally, one of the angel visitors blinds the wave of attacking rapists so they can't find the door. Clearly it is time to leave. The angels tell Lot to go get the people he knows, because God has enough evidence here to destroy the city. And Gomorrah. So Lot tells his future sons-in-law, but they think he's just joking around.
Crazy ol' Lot...you just never know what he's going to say at any given time. It could be that he invented the wheel, or that the LORD is going to annihilate the city. Stay tuned!
Dawn was fast approaching, and time was running out. So Lot grabs his wife and his two daughters and they hit the bricks.
The original instruction was to head for the hills, but Lot whines about it because he's scared of what might happen to him in the mountains, and, acknowledging the favor he has been done by his salvation, Lot instead wants to flee to the nearby tiny settlement of Zoar. I don't know what history, if any, Lot has with the mountains...maybe it goes back to chapter 13, where he and Abram split up, and maybe there was some bad blood with someone's herdsmen...I don't know. I am reading too much into it perhaps. The point is, Lot argued again, and got his way again.
They ran all morning to get to Zoar, and then God rained fire and brimstone on Sodom? What's brimstone? Sulfur. Nasty, nasty stuff. God pours it all over the cities and the plain, just a continuous torrential burning rain of fire.
Lot's wife looks back, against warnings, and turns into a pillar of salt. I'm not sure if there is any meaning yet in my reading as to what a pillar of salt is, but its a big Bible. The point probably is that God takes disobedience to Him very seriously. If its enough to destroy two whole towns, and the vegetation of an entire plain, its enough to turn someone's wife into a pile of salt. Weird. That's about all I can say right now about turning someone into a pillar of salt. I'm guessing no one looked back after that.
So, I'm about 2/5 of the way through the first of 66 books, and God has already wiped out the near entirety of the earth's population once (quantity notwithstanding), and later two complete established cities. God's wrath is powerful. I forget that God does wrath well. A global flood, and fire from heaven. He simply will not abide disobedience.
And in neither display was there joy in God's wrath. What I mean by that is, some people are happy being mad. Not so with God. I believe it was with a heavy heart that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. The previous chapter mentions that there was an outcry by those who had been victimized by Sodomites. This was also about justice.
Verses 27 and 28 are kind of like that "catch your breath" part of an action movie. It describes Abraham surveying the damage of the towns, the plumes of smoke rising...the city probably still burning in some areas...just destruction. I imagine Abraham had feelings similar to how I felt watching Manhatten smolder in mid-September 2001. I imagine Abraham remembered his conversation and bargaining with God...not ten righteous people in the plain...Possibly wondering if Lot made it out alive. So, God spared Lot...who was precious to the man who held the other end of the covenant.
Lot, who was now scared to live in Zoar, moved to the mountains after all. He and his daughters moved into a cave. The daughters, who had just lost their fiances in the destruction, now figured they had no hope of ever conceiving. So, they conspired to get dad drunk, have sex with him, and carry on their line in that way. Now, of course this is detestable, and taboo today, and the fact that they needed to get Lot drunk in order to follow through with their plan suggests it wasn't exactly a good idea at that time in history either. Certainly not the design. Anyway...they got Lot drunk, which was probably easy enough, after all the upheaval, the moving, the destruction, the fear, and then losing his wife...probably figured that maybe the bottle was a good way to escape. 9 months later, the older daughter gives birth to Moab, father of the Moabites, and the youngest has Ben-Ammi, the father of the Ammonites. I wonder if and how Lot put it together just how his daughters became pregnant, and what his reactions were.
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