Lot

LOT. - Son of Haran of the Tharchite lineage and nephew of Abraham (v.), together with whom he emigrated from Haran in Mesopotamia to the land of Canaan, bringing with him his family and a good number of servants and herds (Gen. 12:4 ff.). After having accompanied his uncle Abraham to Egypt, he returned to Canaan, near the locality of Bethel (ibid. 13:1 ff.). But, a quarrel having arisen between the shepherds of L. and those of Abraham, the latter, to remove every cause of dissension, decided on the separation of the two groups, leaving to his nephew the choice of territory. L. chose the more fertile region, the area of the Jordan near the Dead Sea, and settled with his family in Sodom (v.; ibid. 13:5-13). In the clash that took place in the valley of Siddim between the four eastern kings and the five kings or chiefs of the Palestinian Pentapolis, L. too was taken prisoner and deported with his household; Abraham, with a handful of valiant men, set out to pursue the invaders as far as Dan on the northern borders of Palestine, and after a successful night attack drove them back beyond Damascus, thus freeing L. and recovering his possessions (ibid. 14:1-16). L., though living among sinful people, kept himself righteous and merited, also through Abraham's prayers, to escape from the slaughter of Sodom (cf. Wis. 10:6; 2 Pet. 2:6-8).

Warned by two angels in the guise of pilgrims, whom he hosted in his house and defended from the attacks of the Sodomites, he saved himself with his family by fleeing from Sodom, before the city and the other towns of the Pentapolis were overwhelmed by the cataclysm described in Gen. 19. He took refuge in the small town of Zoar (Sä'ar) or Bala (probably on the southeastern edge of the Dead Sea, near present-day es-Sä'ijjeh), which was spared thanks to his prayers. But his wife, having lingered on the way (less accurately the Vulgate: «respiciensque uxor eius post se») against the express warning of the angels, was «turned into a statue of salt» (Gen. 19:26), that is, as modern exegetes commonly explain, she was suffocated and covered by the saline exhalations released by the action of the fire that burned the Pentapolis. Subsequently, not feeling safe in Zoar, L. took refuge with his two daughters on a mountain, and there dwelt in a cave (ibid. 19:30); from the twofold incest the Moabites and Ammonites (v.) took their origin, who are therefore also called in Sacred Scripture «children of L.» (Deut. 2:19; Ps. 83:9); the ignominious act cannot, strictly speaking, be imputed to L., who at that moment was under the effects of wine; the truly guilty ones were the daughters (Gen. 19:31-38). Nevertheless, for this deed L. is left ingloriously in the shadows, and the Bible makes no mention of his death. According to a tradition, the tomb of L. would be near the present village of Beni Na'im, east of Hebron. In the Talmudic books too the figure of L. is for the most part placed in an unfavorable light.

Many rationalist critics, denying all truth to the biblical account, maintain that L. is nothing other than an imaginary eponym indicating the supposed common ancestor of the two peoples of Moab and Ammon; indeed some (such as H. Ewald and A. Dillmann) arbitrarily identify him with Lotan, son of Seir, one of the chiefs of the Horite tribe, subdued by the descendants of Esau (Gen. 36:20).

The name of L. is linked to the tragic fate of Sodom and Gomorrah («the days of L.», Luke 17:28-31). Even the name that the Arabs give to the Dead Sea (bahr Löf, «lake of L.») serves to perpetuate his memory. In the surroundings to the southwest of the Dead Sea one can still see today numerous salt columns, quite characteristic, and popular imagination has recognized the unfortunate wife of L. in a salt prominence in the shape of a column of Gebel Usdum (mountain of Sodom), 15 meters high. Already Flavius Josephus mentions a statue or column of salt, existing in his time, which was believed to be the petrified body of the woman (there are references also in Clement, 1 Cor. 11:11; Irenaeus, Haer., IV, 31; in the Peregrinatio Etheriae; numerous fabulous details in the «carmen de Sodoma» falsely attributed to Tertullian: PL 2, 1104). Wis. 10:7 too alludes to the statue of salt, into which the unfortunate woman was turned, as a permanent document of the destruction of the Pentapolis: but from this one cannot deduce that the «statue» was standing at the time of the hagiographer.

Jesus adduces the example of the wife of L. to exhort to constancy and vigilance (Luke 17:32).

Gaetano Stano