Ulysses Essay 38 (54:12)

Chapter 4 (Calypso) No. 9

“Age crusting him with a salt cloak”

The sky is now overcast and Bloom feels suddenly chilly: “Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak.” Coming after the description of the Dead Sea and the destruction of the cities of the plain, the immediate association is with Lot’s wife who ignored the instruction not to look back on the burning city as she escaped with her family from her home in Sodom (Genesis 19:17). Apparently she could not overcome the temptation to enjoy with vengeance the comeuppance of her neighbors who had so viciously attacked her family and their two guests  (Genesis 19:4-11) and she therefore made a point of disobediently witnessing the catastrophic disaster  –somewhat emulating her foremother Eve in disobeying a divine commandment - and consequently was turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for her derelict behavior (Genesis 19:26). Bloom has similarly “looked back” in time to the destruction of the cities of the plain, and hence he imagines that like Lot’s wife, he too is being similarly encrusted in “a salt cloak”.

Lot is a fascinating character: he is presented in the Tanach as petulant, vacillating, avaricious and morally depraved. He is all the time contrasted with his illustrious and god-fearing uncle, Abraham, with whom he made the long trek from Mesopotamia to Canaan, and to whom he was a constant source of trouble. For instance, when infighting breaks out between Abraham and Lot’s shepherds because of conflicting claims on water sources Abraham proposes that they part company while generously offering Lot first choice of where he wished to make his home. Lot chooses the green and fertile Jordan River plain, and settles in the city of Sodom on the shores of the Dead Sea, renowned at the time for intractable violence and sexual abandon.

The next Abraham hears of his nephew is that after tribal warfare between Sodom and some neighboring chieftains, the city had been conquered and Lot had been taken prisoner along with a number of his fellow citizens. Ever loyal to his troublesome nephew, Abraham raises an army with the help of some local tribes, and together they defeat the conquerors of Sodom and release Lot from his captivity.

Shortly after this event Abraham, sitting at the door of his tent in the heat of the day, encounters three passing travelers to whom he extends classic desert hospitality, offering them water to wash their feet and bread to assuage their hunger, while simultaneously ordering his wife, the aged and childless Sarah, to hurry and bake cakes out of fine meal for their unexpected guests. In retrospect it turns out that the three men are actually ”angels” (Hebrew “mal’achim” – literally “messengers”) sent by God to inform Abraham that Sarah – long postmenopausal as she herself points out – will become pregnant and give birth to a son. At this unbelievable news Sarah bursts into laughter, thereby predicting the name of her son Isaac (Hebrew: Yitzhak – “he will laugh”).

But the travelers have another message: they inform Abraham that God has had enough of the sinful cities of the plain and that he intends to destroy them. At this point Abraham, probably worried about Lot and his family, but also obviously dismayed by the injustice of mass senseless destruction, begins a typically Jewish argument with God: “Perhaps there are fifty righteous people in the city: will you utterly destroy and not forgive the place for the fifty righteous people? It is far from fitting for you to do such a thing – to kill the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous shall be as the wicked; this is not fitting for you: shall not the judge of all the earth do justice? (Genesis 18:24-25). The final audacious, agonizing and unanswered question with which Abraham sums up his (opening) argument has resounded down the ages, perhaps most pertinently after the Holocaust and the other mass slaughters of history. God is a bit taken aback by this man who is lecturing him on justice and ethics, and concedes that if indeed fifty righteous people can be identified, he will spare the cities. Still not satisfied, Abraham then asks if there only forty-five righteous people, maybe God can still back down. God agrees, and then the to and fro argument repeats itself over and over, each time with Abraham apologizing obsequiously for his presumption. In typically lawyerly fashion, Abraham repeatedly begs forgiveness for his audacity (e.g., “…Although I am but dust and ashes”; “I know I am being foolhardy to speak to the Lord”; “O let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak just one more time”– Genesis 18:27,31,32)  but still continues to plead for the cities to be spared by specifying a decreasing number of righteous people who can avert the destruction: forty–thirty–twenty–ten. Finally God agrees that even if only ten righteous people can be found in the cities, the slaughter will not take place. He then anthropomorphically “goes on his way”(Genesis 18:33) like a tired judge at the end of a hard day, indicating in no uncertain manner that the case is closed. Here Abraham, feeling he has done all possible to avert the disaster, begs off as well, although it is clear to him  that not even ten righteous people will be found in in Sodom and Gomorrah, and that the catastrophe is at hand.

Without further ado, two of the angels, now identified as such in the text, leave on a rescue mission to save Lot and his family from the coming destruction of Sodom. They reach Sodom at nightfall and find Lot, who is apparently a man of some local importance, sitting at the city gates. The hospitality theme initiated so appealingly by Abraham on encountering the three angels in the heat of the day (putting aside for the moment the anti-feminist manner in which he orders his wife to bake the cakes)  is now reprised twice at night: once by Lot in a depravedly exaggerated fashion, and once by his neighbors in an act of violent anti-hospitality.

Lot suggest to the two travelers that they should come to his house to wash up and to spend the night. At first they are reluctant and say that they prefer to sleep in the open in the city square, but after more urging by Lot, they agree and follow him to his house, where they join him for a feast, including newly baked matzot. The household is just about to retire when a disturbance breaks out. The men of Sodom surround Lot’s house and demand that he bring out his two guests so that they can indulge in homosexual rapine sex with them. Lot goes out to them and explains that he cannot comply with their demand as custom demands that he protect the guests who are under his roof. However, he has a counter offer to make. He tells the increasingly violent mob that he has two virginal daughters whom he would be prepared to give to them in lieu of his guests and that they could then do his daughters as they wished. This is too much even for the Sodomites, although it is not clear whether their rejection of Lot’s depraved proposal stems from the fact that they are dismissive of heterosexual sex, lusting only for violent homosexual sex, or whether even they cannot stomach the thought of a man giving up his daughters to be gang-raped. The mob begins to close in on Lot threatening him with a worse fate than that which awaited his guests (apparently violent homosexual rape), all the while jeeringly mocking at him for presuming that he, a relative newcomer, can presume to play the judge and to dictate a change in the established customs of the town. The mob is now at the door of the house, pressing on Lot, and threatening to break down the door. Salvation ensues: the angels pull Lot back into the house, shut the door, and strike the closest attackers with blindness so they cannot find the door.

The angels now proceed with the business of getting Lot and his family out of Sodom. They first ask him if he has as any other  family in the city, particularly future sons-in-law who might wish to accompany them on their escape. It turns out that there are indeed two betrothed sons-in-law in the city,  and apparently noting that the blinded mob has evanesced, Lot goes out to tell the sons-in-law-to-be of the anticipated destruction of the city. However, the two are sure he is joking (a reprise of Sarah’s laughter at the promise of pregnancy) and do not join the family. At daybreak, the angels, who rather humanly are beginning to lose patience with their host, tell him that the family must leave immediately. But Lot is vacillating, apparently also not sure whether the prophesy of catastrophe is true, and begins to show signs of ignoring the violent events of the previous night, reminiscent of the German Jews who even after Kristallnacht felt that the Hitlerian nightmare would disappear and eventually all would be well. “But he lingered” says the biblical text (Genesis 19:16): the Masoretic grammarians who punctuated the text of the Torah and added musical notation for public reading, instruct that the onomatopoeic Hebrew word “va’yitmahama” (“but he lingered”) is to be notated with the rare  “shalshelet” mark, indicating that the word is to be read in a lengthy and drawn-out manner.

At this point the angels abandon polite behavior. They take by hand Lot, his wife, and their two daughters,  and somehow get them out of the city, maybe even miraculously flying them over the city rooftops. They instruct the family to escape from the plain as quickly as possible so as to save their lives, and suggest they make for the mountains to avoid being caught up in the coming catastrophe, while no account to turn around to witness the destruction of the city. Unbelievably Lot still has demands to make. Reprising Abraham in his argument with God, Lot apologetically thanks the angels for being so forbearing with him and for saving his life, but explains (without giving a reason) that he does not want to go into the mountains, as this will mean certain death for him. He therefore requests that one small town of the plain – Zoar (Hebrew for “little) – be spared as this is his preferred place of escape and that he is sure that he will be able to go on living there undisturbed. The extremely forbearing  angels give in to this strange request and promise to spare Zoar, but they plead with him to get there as soon as possible so that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah can begin.

At noontime Lot and his family reach Zoar, and as they enter the town “brimstone and fire” (lava from a volcano?) are rained down on the other cities of the plain. Lot’s wife disobediently turns around to see the destruction and is turned into a pillar of salt.

With the seismic catastrophe over, the ever-dithering Lot suddenly decides that actually Zoar is not for him and that indeed the mountains are a safer haven. So taking his two  daughters with him, he makes for the mountains where towards evening the threesome find a place of refuge. That night the elder daughter persuades her sister that since they and their father are the last people on earth – a somewhat surprising conclusion seeing they were aware that Zoar was not destroyed – it is their manifest duty to procreate the human race by having sex with their father. This they will accomplish by making him drunk with wine so that he will not be aware of the nature of the sexual liaison. The elder sister accomplishes this easily “…and he did not know when she lay down nor when she got up” (Genesis 19:33). The following night she tells her younger sister of the success of her incestuous act, and cajoles her into doing the same. They again make Lot drunk and the younger sister also has sex with her father: once more “…and he did not know when she lay down nor when she got up” (Genesis 19:35). As a result, both sisters become pregnant and give birth to sons: the elder one to Moab – the forefather of the Moabites; the younger one to Ben-Ami, the forefather of the Ammonites. As a last reprise to the Abrahamic story, the incestuous coupling of Lot and his daughters contrasts with the implied parallel sexual union of the elderly Abraham and Sarah, which will result in the birth of Isaac – the second forefather of the Jewish people.

One doesn’t need to be polemically feminist to wonder if the author of the story of Lot and his daughters didn’t purposely mix things up a little so as to satisfy the masculine political correctness of the time. We know from the events of the previous night that the sisters were both virgins,  and that therefore each of the incestuous sexual acts between Lot and his daughters would have required defloration, not an easy task for a male under the influence of alcohol, which – as Shakespeare so succinctly puts it – “provokes the desire but takes away the performance” (Macbeth  II.iii). It makes more sense that the new widower Lot, who was so lacking in basic morality that he had been prepared to hand over his virginal daughters to be gang-raped by his Sodomite neighbors, would not stop at getting his daughters inebriated and then raping them himself – a story straight out of today’s newspaper. 

And finally: although the Torah commands later that “an Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the assembly of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 23:4), one of Moab’s descendants was Ruth, the sublimely idealistic proselyte to Judaism who married the Bethlehem landowner Boaz, and was the great-grandmother of King David (Ruth 4:21-22) and also, according to New Testament  genealogy (Matthew 1:5-6; Luke 3:31-32), the foremother of none other than Jesus Christ himself.