According to the clock here in Israel, it's past Christmas by a few minutes, a week to New Years, several days past Yule--the real end of the year if you're going to be accurate. Shortest day, longest night, that sort of end of the year...
Who gets to decide which is true?
What is truth? You can lie to your characters, you can have your characters lie to themselves and to each other factually, provocatively, or without meaning too, just like in life.
What makes the truth? Is it perception or is it something more emotional, more visceral?
There was an actual geographical event causing the collapse of Sodom aka (Bab edh-Dhra) and Gomorrah. Then someone says a deity did the destruction, and that's backed up by some writing for this event that occurred 4000 years ago to an establishment with maybe 1000 people, a city by those times' standards.
The tectonic plates don't lie, well, they do, on top of each other like dinnerware and if the shelf support drops on one side you'll need to buy a new set and eat off of paper plates till then. The Dead Sea area, within a donkey's ride of Sodom, had a 160+ feet change in elevation on that day.
To primitive peoples that's a major catastrophe, they may have had minor temblors, then the big one hit. Lot and company left before that but Mrs Lot looked back and was turned to a pillar of salt.
Aside from the fact that people have salt in them but don't become pillars is that line, 'literary license'? Third parties point to Mrs Lot's assumed guilty pleasures and regrets in leaving them. Isn't that blaming the victim?
Happens all the time. No one blames Lot for being a whoremonger and incipient child-abuser for offering his two virgin daughters to two men visiting him whom he knew were angels.
That poses the questions, A: Why would angels have need of sex? B: Would they have sex with children? If so, they're no angels. C: If Lot offered the children--is it a custom of the place he was following? D: If it was custom then he is as guilty as the rest of the Sodomites for their licentiousness. E: If it wasn't a custom then he is more guilty of the sacrifice of his precious daughters to rape by strangers. F: It's a lie, falsehood, fiction, and artistic license to explain away the 'difference' between 'good' Lot and 'evil' Sodom dwellers who wanted to see these men and speak to them. New guys in town can be trouble, they can be scouts for an invading army, have signs of illness that could infect everyone else, be provocateurs sowing dissent and causing trouble among people. It's not an unlikely scenario.
Does this make sense? No, no one said it had to, BUT, it does make for interesting reading doesn't it? And discussions on theology, ethics, boundaries 'good' parents should follow, etc.
What if Lot was making money off his girls? Whores get better pay than shepherds. What if the girls were promiscuous teenagers and, asked "Hey Dad, let's f--k the new guys to welcome them into the town?" Or it was something Lot did all the time and they were used to being abused? What if they were in love with local boys and had to 'service' Dad's old buddies for a welcome? What if Mrs Lot had to do the same?
Why did she look back? She'd found a way out, she was going to leave with her daughters and start a new life away from Daddy Dearest when he said 'pack it in we're out of here'--and her chance is gone. She's doomed to watch the endless parade of male visitors in another location say 'hello' up close and personal with her underage daughters and there is no escape but death.
The old term for salt is also used for vapor. Lot's wife wasn't turned to sodium chloride, she went pouf by the actions of an angry planet. Lot and his daughters took refuge in a cave and, we're told, the girls, 'thinking it was the end of the world lay with their father to regenerate the world'. Or per usual with child abuse cases in which Dad gives his daughters' bodies to his buddies, the daughters have sexual relations with their dad, again, still.
What's true? What's real? What's fact? What makes good reading?
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