Lot's Wife and the Story's Long Afterlife

Lot's flight from Sodom carries two details that outlived the city itself in later religious memory. His wife, warned by the angels not to look back at the destruction behind them, does exactly that and is turned into a pillar of salt, a fate the Hebrew Bible states without further comment but that later tradition, including a direct reference in the New Testament's Gospel of Luke urging listeners to remember her, turned into a standing warning against longing for a life one has been commanded to leave behind. Afterward, believing themselves the last people left alive, Lot's two daughters get their father drunk and conceive children by him, an episode Genesis records as the origin of the Moabite and Ammonite peoples, two nations Israel's later history treats as neighbors and frequent rivals. The Quran tells substantially the same core narrative under the figure of Lut, counted among the prophets sent by God to warn a wicked people, and Islamic commentary reads the story, as Jewish and Christian commentary generally does as well, as centered on the inhospitality and predatory conduct of Sodom's inhabitants toward strangers, the three traditions differing chiefly in emphasis rather than in the shape of the events themselves.