Sodom Revisited Part II

This story of Lot continues on a for a few more verses than what we’ve concentrated on so far. The Sodomites reject Lot’s offer of his daughters, demanding the men. As the Sodomites move to attack Lot & break into his house, Lot’s two guests ‘reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them, and shut the door.’ They then strike the Sodomites blind.

Interestingly the Sodomites’ response to Lot’s daughters is ‘You, Lot, came here as a foreigner, and now he would play judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.’ – the Sodomites, the strangers, accuse Lot of setting them in his ethical system (to their detriment). The Sodomites (as strangeness) are so offended by Lot’s imposition of his worldview on them (as Lot did to the two men) that their hostility is increased dramatically. The Sodomites move to assault Lot (thereby destroying the totalizing worldview) – they reject Lot’s hierarchy in which he is willing to give them his daughters, & they will accept nothing less than the highest, the two men (& in the two men, Lot’s entire hierarchical system of hospitality).

At this point of Lot’s destruction, however, his two guests take a new role in the story. They take Lot into the house; a reversal of the first part of the story in which Lot takes them into the house. Now, finally, the two men have the opportunity to approach Lot. They can finally interact with Lot while retaining their strangeness, but only because Lot’s hierarchy has been undermined. Not only have the Sodomites pushed Lot to the edge of his system by rejecting anything less than everything, but Lot is no longer master of his house; it is not for Lot to shut the door & ward off the attackers, but he must allow the two men to save him, to host him.

Similarly to Mary, maybe Lot could have rejected the divine strangers, could have sent them away; but by allowing the divine to work, salvation comes. So the stranger can be preserved, but only when the stranger chooses to come; the stranger cannot be forced to be hosted & still remain a stranger. By taking Lot’s place as masters of the house, the two men undermine Lot’s hierarchical ethic just as much as the Sodomite could have by their force; but with the two men the loss of ethics leads to Lot’s salvation not destruction.

This leaves open the original question of whether there can be an ethical system for the stranger. I tend to think that it is impossible, but ethics really is not my forte. Lot’s story continues with the devastation of Sodom & the infamous episode of incest, which may be signs of the horrour that comes with the complete loss of an ethic of strangeness. But I’ll leave this to be worked out by someone with more intelligence than myself.

-Gabriel