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Chapter 18
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Genesis, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
God, Humanity, and Creation
Mistrust, Disobedience, and Death
Covenants and Faith in God’s Promises
The Role of Women
Summary
Analysis
In the evening, two angels arrive in Sodom, where Lot is sitting at the gate. Lot greets the angels and urges them to spend the night at his house. That night, as the guests prepare to sleep, all the men of Sodom gather around Lot’s house and demand that Lot bring the guests outside, so that they can have sex with them. Lot goes outside and implores the men of Sodom not to do this to his visitors—he will even offer them his virgin daughters instead. But the men scorn Lot and try to break down the door of his house. Lot’s guests pull him inside and shut the door; the men outside are struck with blindness.
Here, the wicked men of Sodom want to sexually assault Lot’s divine guests, which suggests that what God heard about Sodom is right—its people are deeply sinful. While homosexual rape is perhaps part of the outrage, the primary offense that Genesis underscores here is that the men are violating the sacred obligations of hospitality, which was so important in the biblical world. That’s why Lot risks his own life to try to placate the mob, even offering his daughters instead—a shocking act, even if he intends it as a bluff.
Themes
Then the guests tell Lot to gather his family, because they are going to destroy Sodom. The next morning, the guests take Lot, his wife, and his two daughters outside the city and instruct them to flee without looking back, or else they will be consumed, too. Lot and his family flee toward the nearby city of Zoar while God rains sulfur and fire onto Sodom and Gomorrah. However, Lot’s wife glances back, and she is turned into a pillar of salt.
In an echo of the flood story, God destroys Sodom for the wickedness displayed earlier in the chapter. Demonstrating his mercy, though, he allows Lot and his family to escape because of Lot’s righteousness. Lot’s wife’s disobedience to the angel’s command (looking back at the city when she was explicitly warned not to) causes her to be swept up in the destruction, becoming a salty pillar like the surrounding Dead Sea landscape.
Themes
Afraid of staying in Zoar, Lot takes his two daughters and settles in the nearby hills, where they live in a cave. The elder daughter proposes to her younger sister that because there are no marriageable men here, they must get their father drunk and have sex with him in order to ensure that they have offspring. So both sisters take turns having sex with Lot while he is drunk and oblivious. Both daughters become pregnant, the elder bearing Moab, the ancestor of the Moabites, and the younger bearing Ben-ammi, the ancestor of the Ammonites.
After what’s happened in Sodom, Lot decides to live in isolation. However, Lot’s daughters seem to think that their family is all that’s left in the world, or at least that they’ll be cut off from society forever. The Moabites and Ammonites are said to be the results of these incestuous encounters. The episode is reminiscent of drunken Noah and his sons in the cave after the flood, which resulted in a curse against Ham.
Themes
