Lot and Lot’s Daughters (17)

Saw-Cross Facing East. The Wind Blows from the West.

© Eso A. B., 2012

When the men of the Ono tribe of Tierra del Fuego decided to kill their women, they petrified the minds of all women they were to take as wives in the future. At the same time, they also petrified their own minds.

To ‘petrify’ is a most unusual word, but it is not rare. In the Bible, for example, we meet it as an event that turns a human being into a pillar of salt. Genesis 19:26 tells how Lots wife, looked back (whence she had come) “and she became a pillar of salt.”
Some interpretations of the event suggest that Lots wife (incidentally a nameless woman), was caught up in some seismic event, such as a volcanic eruption. We know from excavations at Pompei where people were entrapped by the hot ashes of an eruption of Vesuviusm, and when the ashes solidified and human bodies decayed, the cavities filled with minerals. It is not difficult to imagine the minerals as being salts.

Another interpretation is that Lot’s wife was a “disobedient woman ”. This is an argument that we would likely hear today from the Ona tribesmen and contemporary mysogynists such as Rush Limbaugh in the U.S. While all the Ona tribesmen are dead now, we cannot question them. Rush Limbaugh is still alive, but his show is (by acts of a grateful public) dead as a consequence of most of the advertisers leaving the show.
 
Murder needs an explanation, no matter how flimsy or artificial it may be. This is why the reason for making war is often a created one. The instigator of war blames the other side for beginning it. It is also known as a “false flag” event.

Is it possible that Lot somehow got wind of such a “false flag” event—an attack on the city of Sodom—and had time to flee before he was entrapped by the events of his own making?

The story of  Genesis 19 tells that Lot was visited by two angels, whom Lot apparently recognizes and calls “Lord”. Who are these “angels”, and “lords”? It is possible that the name “angel” was once pronounced differently, that is, it was pronounced “Yangel” (the letter “A” pronounced with a Y preceeding it, re “YA”), a name that in our own time is a cognate of John, Ian, lvan, and Zhan, etc.?

In days past (when Earth was still covered by forests), John or Yang (Yanj) was a traveling preacher. In American folklore, he was known as JohnnyAppleseed (also John Chapman) . Interestingly, Johnny Appleseed was a preacher or angel for the “New” or Swedenborgian Church. While the meaning of the word “preacher” is better derived from the word “chap” as in Johnny Chapman, the legal name of Johnny. ‘Chapman’ and ‘preacher’ have near identical meanings, even if we are not accustomed to make that association. In other words, ‘chap’ = refers to the fleshy covering of a jaw; whence probably the name for “cheek”, “chops”, and also “jawboning”, preaching to someone until he-she is persuaded not to give “no” for an answer.


While some readers may think that equating of “Angel” with “John” is  far fetched, this was probably not the case in the Swedenborgian Church, at least not in its early days (17^th century), when the father of Swedenborg—Jasper Swedberg, was alive. Jasper “…held the unconventional belief that angels and spirits were present in everyday life”. In fact, these were days when the people of the countryside believed that a traveller walking the roads of Europe, could discover that the man or woman he-she met on the road could be God or one of the ancient Gods. These were also the days when travelling men or preachers, known as Johns, were still walking the roads of Europe.


To return to the story in the Bible, the Angels who came to visit Lot, were thought of as aliens by the people of Sodom, who came to attack Lot’s home were they had found lodgings. The Angels blinded the attackers, so they could not find the door to Lot’s house. It is at this point in the story that the Angels tell Lot to leave town, indeed, carry him out of town, then tell him to keep going and not to look back.


Lot’s wife does look back however, which act turns her into a pillar of salt. This suggests that she was petrified by what she saw. And whatever it was that she saw was, evidently, horrifying beyond words. In other words, the story of Lot tells us of a terrifying, possibly an unnatural event that also petrified the minds of the people in a manner that it lasted for generations thereafter. Moreover, the messengers of the terror were two Lords, Angels, or Johns who—for reasons unknown to us--had come to Sodom to rescue Lot and his family.


The story of Lot does not describe to us the event that so horrified his wife, but we may make a guess. Perhaps the terrific event was not connected to the violence of war orana ture cataclysm, but was all of that, plus psychological terror. After Lot leaves Sodom, the story goes on to tell us that….


Lot’s two daughters, who apparently do not look back as their mother did,  survived the event. These same daughters later decide to sleep with their father, so that he may have male descendants. This suggests that Lot’s wife’s fault was not to have born Lot sons. Whoever told and recorded the story, must have believed that in the event a woman fails to bring into the world sons, her husband is justified in engaging in incest with his daughters.


Because incest is a nigh universal taboo, perhaps Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt in hindsight, that is, because Lot forced his daughters to sleep with him. Here we have to ask why the taboo against incest? Come to think of it, incest is not against nature; rather it is rather natural and common in the animal kingdom.


There is an interpretation, however, that suggests that the reason incest is taboo is to prevent two males (two sons, or father and son, coming to fight over a daughter or sister). This interpretation brings us back to the story of Cain and Abel, which stops at the grave of Abel. When Cain, the first born, is discovered to be the murderer, God himself marks Cain in a manner that warns anyone against attacking him to revenge Abel’s death. Why did God do this? Did he think that it was the right of the first born son to sleep with his sisters, but which act is forbidden to the younger sons?


In other words, Cain is to be spared attacks from any of his future brothers, because if such attacks are to take place, then fratricidal violence becomes ‘natural’ to a community.


We are on confusing grounds here. Does not God’s mark on Cain also condone Cain’s act? Does this not perpetuate fear of Cain and, therefore, cause the human brain to lock up in fear at the sight of the man?


No doubt, it does do so. The only escape from a fear locked mind set, therefore, is a) the passing of a long period of time, or b) the replacement of Cain, a mere man, with a man born as a divinity? Christians will, of course, argue that the latter man is Jesus Christ. This is not an uncommon belief today. One theologian (John Milbank) says, for example, “…perfect human autonomy is attained only through a sharing in the most absolute degree of heteronomy imaginable—namely, the paradoxical circumstance that the only true human being who ever lived was not in fact a human person at all, but a divine one.”


If so, what is the kind of “heteronomy” that human beings will subject themselves to peacefully and without violent opposition? Milbank surely cannot be speaking of “heteronomy” as imposed by a secular government, which in case of the U.S. argues that it has a legal right to assassinate its own citizens or that Europeans must submit to NATO or that its present secretary general AndersRasmussen  is somehow a divinity?
The sight of NATO commander surely turns many a European into a pillar of salt. So what is Milbank talking about? Is this divinity perhaps an oligarch filled with liberal capitalist idealism? Or were the two angels who visited with Lot such divinities?

If we permit ourselves to think of these ‘lords’-angels as divine, then Lot’s wife must have seen something else. Perhaps she did see the angels as suitors come to ask for the hand of her daughters, but that her husband Lot grew jealous and killed them.
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