1. Of Lot's wife the end is recorded in a curt and summary fashion. “His wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” The angel, knowing how closely on the heels of the fugitives the storm would press, had urgently enjoined haste, saying, “Look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain.” Rapid in its pursuit as a prairie fire, it was only the swift who could escape it. To pause was to be lost. The command, “Look not behind thee,” was not given because the scene was too awful to behold; for what men can endure, men may behold, and Abraham looked upon it from the hill above. It was given simply from the necessity of the case and from no less practical and more arbitrary reason. Accordingly, when the command was neglected, the consequence was felt.
2. Why the infatuated woman looked back one can only conjecture. The woeful sounds behind her, the roar of the flame and of Jordan driven back, the crash of falling houses and the last forlorn cry of the doomed cities, all the confused and terrific din that filled her ear, may well have paralysed her and almost compelled her to turn. But the use our Lord makes of her example shows us that He ascribed her turning to a different motive. He uses her as a warning to those who seek to save out of the destruction more than they have time to save, and so lose all. “He which shall be upon the housetop, and his stuff in the house, let him not come down to take it away: and he that is in the field, let him likewise not return back. Remember Lot's wife.” It would seem, then, as if our Lord ascribed her tragic fate to her reluctance to abandon her household stuff. She was a wife after Lot's own heart.
At the S.W. end of the Dead Sea is the singular formation called the Jebel Usdum, the “mountain of Sodom,” a range of cliffs 5 m. long, and 600 ft. high, consisting of crystallized rock-salt,-once part of the bed of the ancient Salt Sea,-“covered with a capping of chalky limestone and gypsum. It has a strangely dislocated, shattered appearance; and from the face of it great fragments are occasionally detached by the action of the rains, and appear as ‘pillars of salt' advanced in front of the general mass” (Smith, DB. iii. 1180). Such pillars, or pinnacles, have often been noticed by travellers; and it is probable that one, conspicuous in antiquity, gave rise to the belief expressed in the present verse. Writers of a later age often felt satisfied that they could identify the pillar referred to; but during the rainy season such pillars are constantly in process of formation and destruction, so that it is doubtful how far any particular one would be permanent.1 [Note: S. R. Driver.]
