Lot

Lot is introduced in Genesis as the son of Abraham's brother Haran, who dies young, leaving Lot to travel onward with his uncle from Ur and eventually settle in Canaan. When their combined herds grow too large for the land to support both households peacefully, Abraham offers Lot first choice of territory, and Lot chooses the well watered plain of the Jordan, settling near the city of Sodom despite the text's own warning that the city's inhabitants were wicked and sinful before the Lord. Years earlier, when a coalition of four kings raided the region and carried Lot off along with his goods after his own city was sacked, Abraham gathered his household retainers, pursued the raiders, and rescued his nephew by force, an episode that establishes the bond between the two men well before the destruction of Sodom becomes the center of Lot's own story. The central episode comes when two angels, sent to investigate Sodom's wickedness, arrive at the city and Lot insists on hosting them in his home rather than letting them sleep in the open square, honoring the same duty of hospitality to strangers Abraham had shown earlier in Genesis to three visitors of his own. That night the men of Sodom surround Lot's house demanding to abuse the visitors; the angels strike the crowd blind and warn Lot to flee the city before its destruction, which comes the next morning as fire and brimstone raining down on Sodom and Gomorrah.

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.