The Promise, and the Fall of Sodom

At the same time God spoke to Abraham and promised that his offspring would be multiplied like the sand of the sea; that this promised offspring would live in a land not their own, and his descendants would endure slavery in a hostile country for four hundred years, but would afterward be set free. Then his name was changed, and his wife’s too, by adding one letter: instead of Abram he was called Abraham, and instead of Sara she was called Sarra. The mystery in this is by no means a small one, but it is not the business of this work to discuss it. At the same time the law of circumcision was laid on Abraham, and he had a son called Ishmael by a slave woman. Moreover, when he himself was a hundred years old and his wife ninety, God promised that they would have a son, Isaac, when the Lord came to him together with two angels. [a]

Then the angels were sent to Sodom, and found Lot sitting in the gate of the city. Taking them for human beings, he welcomed them as his guests and gave them a meal in his house. But the wicked young men of the town demanded the newcomers for their impure purposes. Lot offered them his daughters in place of his guests, but they would not accept the offer, since they desired rather what was forbidden; and then they laid hold of Lot himself with vile intent. The angels, however, quickly rescued him from danger by striking these lustful sinners with blindness.

Then Lot, told by his guests that the town was about to be destroyed, left it with his wife and daughters; but they were commanded not to look back at it. His wife, however, did not obey this command, in keeping with that evil bent of human nature that makes it hard to keep away from forbidden things. She turned her eyes back, and is said to have been changed at once into a monument. As for Sodom, it was burned to ashes by fire from heaven. And Lot’s daughters, imagining that the whole human race had perished, sought to lie with their father while he was drunk, and from this sprang the races of Moab and Ammon.