“The sun had gone up on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of the ground. But his wife behind him looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.” (Genesis 19:24-26)
Over the past few months I’ve been studying the word “but” in Genesis, not to preach a sermon series (though I’ve heard of such a thing being done), but to prepare a paper discussing strategies for translating contrast. Of the seventy or so instances of “but” that I looked at, one in particular stood out, the one quoted above in Genesis 19:26. As I considered this narrative and thought about the conjunction, I became convinced that “and his wife” would be the better translation choice, though not a single major English translation from the KJV down to the ESV or NIV uses “and” here (Tyndale alone has “and,” but look what happened to him!).
It may well be that I’m wrong, and the translations are right; more likely, as is usually the case in translation, there is no single right choice. But giving close attention to the wording of this verse and the structure of the narrative it appears in will pay dividends no matter what.
Before I make my case for “and,” I have to lay some groundwork: first a thematic comparison of the Sodom story with the Flood narrative, then a short walk through the deep weeds of grammar.
Lot and Noah, Fire and Flood
The points of contact between the Sodom story and the Flood story demand that the two be read side-by-side. Before the flood, God sees the how great the evil of man is (6:5), and before the destruction of Sodom, God sets out to see whether the report of Sodom’s sin is true (18:20). Both stories involve sexual transgression—or attempted transgression—across God-ordained boundaries (Gen. 6:1-5; 19:4-9; cf. Jude 6, 7). In both stories, God discloses his plans of judgment to a righteous man: Noah before the flood (Gen. 6:13), and then Lot’s uncle Abraham before the destruction of Sodom (18:17-21). In both stories, judgment comes by rain from heaven: literal rain the first time (17:12), a rain of fire and brimstone the second (19:24). And in both stories, the devastation is total: observe the accounting of human and animal life blotted out by the flood in 7:21-23; and then in 19:25, the somewhat more succinct “those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of the ground.” Both stories end with the righteous father getting drunk and being ashamed by his offspring: Noah’s son Ham looks at then publicizes his father’s nakedness (9:21-24), while both of Lot’s daughters in turn uncover their father’s nakedness (19:30-38).
And there are differences, of course, too. Noah is in no way implicated with the sinfulness of the world, but Lot by his own choice associates with the wicked cities of the valley (13:11; 14:12; 19:1). By the same token, while Noah’s obedience is prompt and complete (6:22; 7:5), Lot is reluctant to leave the city and then unwilling to flee all the way to the mountains to which the angel directs him (19:16, 17-22). And although Noah’s son Ham dishonors his father, he still has two sons who act honorably. Lot, on the other hand, loses both of his children, along with their offspring, to the world.
Perhaps the most important point of connection between the stories, a junction of both similarity and difference, is how Noah’s and Lot’s families are saved only along with the family patriarch. This family solidarity—extending even to animal life—is a thematic linchpin in the Noah story, as I’ve argued on this blog in another essay. There I highlighted the repeated use of the prepositional phrases “with him” (that is, Noah) and “to him.”
That unifying use of prepositional phrases is almost entirely absent from the Sodom story. Nevertheless much as God tells Noah to “get into the ark with [his] family” (7:1), so the angels ask Lot, “who do you have here?” then tell him: “(whether) a son-in-law, or your sons, or your daughters, or anyone who belongs to you in the city—bring them out of the place” (19:12). When the time comes to leave, Lot is commanded: “Take your wife and your two daughters who are here” (19:15). Only if Lot brings them along will they be saved.
His Wife Behind Him
I said just above that the unifying use of prepositional phrases is almost entirely absent from the Sodom story. I might have said “is entirely absent,” since the only prepositional phrase that connects Lot’s family with him is in 19:26, and that preposition, unlike all the “with him’s” and “to him’s” in the Noah story, is one that puts distance between Lot and his wife: “his wife looked back from behind him.”
This prepositional phrase is quite odd, so odd in fact that a veritable Who’s Who of translations appears to omit it entirely: the NIV (old and new), NET, REB, NJPS (Tanakh), GNB, NAB, HCSB, CSB, and most significantly, the Septuagint. (In fact, these translations take the prepositional phrase to mean simply “back.”) Nevertheless, translations in the Great English Tradition (KJV, NKJV, RSV, NRSV, ESV), as well as the NLT and NEB, join the Vulgate in taking the prepositional phrase to indicate Lot’s wife’s location, behind him, when she looked back.
The truth is, the meaning of the prepositional phrase (literally “from behind him”) and its relation to the subject (“his wife”) and the verb (“looked”) are very difficult grammatical problems, well beyond my pay-grade. I suspect, based on a handful of other uses of the verb nbṭ “look” followed by the preposition “from” (like Isa. 63:15, “look from the heavens”), that in Gen. 19:26 the expression specifies the location of Lot’s wife: not with him as he runs to escape, but falling behind, perhaps even willfully. If that’s the case, then Lot has failed to take along his wife as the angels instructed him, and his wife has failed to stay with her husband, with whom, and with whom only, salvation is assured. But perhaps the prepositional phrase means simply that she looked back. The expression is suggestive, but not definitive.
“And” or “But”
What interests me even more than the preposition “from” is the conjunction at the beginning of Gen. 19:26: every single mainstream English translation, whether formal or dynamic, begins the verse with “but” (the CEV, NJPS, and Everett Fox are the only exceptions, and none of them is mainstream for Christian readers).
Now, “but” makes sense at the beginning of the verse. It’s a good sturdy conjunction, and one that shows up a lot in English translations. In the ESV, it occurs about 4,200 times in the Old and New Testaments, about once every 7 verses. So it’s no outlier. But does “but” belong at the beginning of this verse? I’m not sure it does, but to make my argument, I need to digress a bit.
Two English “But’s”
The English conjunction “but” has not one but two meanings.1 Or to put it more precisely, English “but” can signal two different kinds of relations between conjoined clauses. The first is correction: “no longer will you be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name” (Gen. 35:10). Correction “but” introduces the correct alternative after a negation. If you know Spanish or German—I hasten to note that I don’t—you’ve encountered this function in sino (versus pero) or sondern (versus aber). Hebrew has no direct, single-word equivalent for correction “but,” though it has a handful of equivalent constructions. The “but” in Genesis 19:26 is clearly not an instance of correction, so this type of “but” won’t concern us any further.
In its second use, “but” contrasts either two things (often people) or two situations with each other. In Gen. 29:17, two people are contrasted, Leah and Rachel: “And Leah was weak-eyed, but Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance.” When two things or people are contrasted, Hebrew quite frequently uses a special fronted-noun construction with a prefix meaning “and.”2 By fronting I mean that the noun occurs before the verb, which in a normal Hebrew sentence comes first. That fronted noun is the thing contrasted with something or someone in the previous clause—if you check your Hebrew Bible, you’ll find that in Gen. 29:17 Rachel is at the front of the clause with an and-prefix: a classic fronted noun construction.
Sometimes English has a contrastive “but” where the Hebrew has no special construction at all. In Gen. 31:34, rather than two things or people, two situations are contrasted, namely, Laban’s search, and its frustration: “Laban felt all over the tent, but he did not find them [the idols]” (Gen. 31:34). In cases like this, there’s no special fronting, no special anything: just a verb preceded by negation ‘not’ with a prefixed ‘and’.3 In cases like this, the translator has sensed some sort of contrast in the two clauses and decided to flag that contrast with “but”; crucially, though, this contrast is not flagged with a special conjunction in the Hebrew.
But (or And) His Wife
That brings us back to Gen. 19:26. I said at the beginning that I think “and his wife” would be a better way to start the verse than “but his wife,” but to make that argument, we first have to ask, what’s so attractive about “but” such that every major English translation uses it?
Clearly the English translations want to contrast Lot’s wife with someone or something else in the narrative. But who or what, exactly? Certainly nothing in the immediately preceding verse, which is a list of everything destroyed. Perhaps Lot, then, but the last time he was mentioned was in verse 23. This distance between verses 23 and 26 should give us pause. Moreover, if Moses wants to contrast Lot’s wife with Lot, he could use the fronted-noun construction. But he doesn’t; he just has a normal clause beginning with a verb, prefixed with ‘and’: like nearly every other narrative clause in Genesis.
To get at what’s going on here, we should think about that distance we just noted between verses 23 (which talks about Lot) and 26 (which talks about Lot’s wife). That is, we should read verse 26 first in its most immediate context. What is it that’s happening in verses 24-25 before we hear the fate of Lot’s wife? “And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of the ground.” Only then comes Lot’s wife: “And his wife behind him looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.” If you’re reading Hebrew, with its simple “and … looked back,” it would be quite natural to read here a simple continuation of the previous two verses, the kind of relation expressed not by “but,” but by “and.”
In other words, the narrative places Lot’s wife, not back in verse 23 with Lot, but here, after 24-25, to link her with the cities and the plain and all that was destroyed in them. Certainly she stands (and what else can she do now but stand?) in contrast to her family, but she does so because in her longing for the forbidden cities, she’s joined herself, heart and body, with those destined for destruction.
“And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of the ground. And his wife behind him looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.”
Here we have the inversion of Noah’s family and all those animals “with him” in the ark: in the very narrative form, Lot’s wife is separated from the one person who has found grace and mercy from God (19:19), united instead with the land and people of Sodom. Tyndale’s simple “and” (over against nearly every other English translation’s “but”) captures that just right.
Translation and Careful Reading
If you still think it’s a close call between “but” and “and,” I agree. (It’s fun to criticize published translations, but try translating the whole Bible yourself!)
In fact, either conjunction will serve: Lot’s wife is both joined to what she loved (“and”), and contrasted with the one with whom she could have been saved (“but”). More important than the conjunction in verse 26 is the position of verse 26: not with Lot in verse 23 but with the cities in their destruction in verses 24-25.
And more important still is the contrast between how Lot’s story ends and how Noah’s does: all of Noah’s family boarded the ark with him, and with him they all safely disembarked.
And You, And Me
If Jim Hamilton is right that the story of the Bible is the story of salvation through judgment, then it’s also true that the theme of that story, permeating every plot line, is union.
There’s a kind of longing and looking that unites us with the City of Destruction. And there’s a kind of holy effort that runs to keep up, not with the Joneses but with Jesus; that keeps looking, not toward the urban splendor but toward the Founder and Finisher; that keeps abiding, not in comfort but in Christ.
In C.S. Lewis’s Great Divorce, everyone gets, in the end, what he really wants. If what he wants is the City of Man, then like Lot’s wife, there he stays.
Joshua Jensen translates and teaches the Bible in northeast Cambodia, where he lives with his wife, their six kids, and a whole lot of geckos.
- By reducing the types of “but” to two I’m simplifying for expository purposes. It’s common to divide what I’ve labeled contrastive into contrastive (“semantic opposition”) and adversative (“denial of expectation”). See Robin Lakoff’s 1977 “If’s, And’s, and But’s About Conjunction” in Studies in Linguistic Semantics. Additionally, there is the prepositional “but” meaning “except” (all but one) and the adverb “but” meaning “only” (I sing but for thee). ↩︎
- This, too, is a simplification. The construction here is the waw-disjunctive, where a noun phrase, prepositional phrase, or even adverb phrase is fronted before the verb and prefixed with waw ‘and’. When a noun (or whatever else) is fronted without a prefixed waw ‘and’, then we have a different sort of construction that is not typically used for contrasting things. ↩︎
- This “nothing special” construction is called the waw-consecutive, and it’s the normal way to express consecutive events in Hebrew narrative. Pick up your King James and look for “and” at the beginning of clauses in Genesis, and nearly all of them are translating the waw consecutive: “and he said,” “and they went,” “and she bore to him,” and so on. This construction occurs about 2,300 times in Genesis alone! ↩︎