“Your children who follow you in later generations and foreigners who come from distant lands will see the calamities that have fallen on the land and the diseases with which the Lord has afflicted it. The whole land will be a burning waste of salt and sulfur—nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it. It will be like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim, which the Lord overthrew in fierce anger. All the nations will ask: “Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?”-Deuteronomy 29:22-24
I wanna show you something interesting that goes all the way back to the book of Genesis.
Notice in verses 22-24 of Deuteronomy 29 how the Lord uses the annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah as well as the cities of Adamah and Zeboiim as perfect examples of the destruction those who rebel against God can expect.
Notice also it says these cities were rendered completely useless to the point where they would never be able to raise crops or animals there ever again.
The land would be completely uninhabitable and abandoned by God and Man forever.
Now recall when Lot and his family were rescued by an angel and instructed to flee Sodom they were told not to look back.
But do you remember who disobeyed this instruction and did look back?
It was Lot’s wife who couldn’t resist getting one last glance at the city that had been her family’s home for many years.
Big mistake.
Because we’re told she was instantly turned into a pillar of salt.
Here’s the thing.
In Scripture, salt can be both good and evil.
It is good because it can be used to preserve and season.
Yet salt can also be very destructive and Lot’s wife is a perfect example of this.
She had been given the opportunity to escape destruction.
Wait, let me rephrase that.
She had actually escaped destruction.
Yet because she didn’t completely trust the Lord and she looked back, she ended up suffering the same fate as the evil inhabitants of Sodom.
She was transformed into the same agent that served as the soil destroying poison which rendered Sodom and Gomorrah uninhabitable and unusable for all time.
Understand back in those days it was normal for a king who had treaties with their smaller vassal city holdings to utterly destroy any town that would dare rebel against him.
This destruction would serve as a sign and warning to the other vassal cities to not even think about rebelling.
As part of the process of laying waste to the rebellious vassal cities, the king’s henchmen would carry sulfur and salt to the conquered cities and spread it all over the arable parts of the land.
Why did they do this?
They did this because the powerful combination of sulfur and salt rendered the land unsuitable for growing crops, raising animals or for anything really.
The sulfur gave off a really bad-smelling odor and the salt poisoned the soil so that nothing could no longer grow in it.
“He will be like a tamarisk in the ‘Aravah- when relief comes, it is unaffected; for it lives in the sun-baked desert, in salty, uninhabited land.”-Jeremiah 17:6
One other point.
Although a lot of English Bibles say Lot’s wife was turned into a “pillar” of salt, a more accurate translation would be to say she was turned into a “monument” of salt.
Why?
Again, so her destruction would serve as a sign and warning to all those who might even consider falling away from the Lord.
CONNECTING THIS TEACHING TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
“You are salt for the Land.
But if salt becomes tasteless,
how can it be made salty again?
It is no longer good for anything
except being thrown out for people
to trample on.”
-Matthew 5:13
As per your explanation,i havent seen the mistaken translation of the passage.not unless the word it self is a mistaken word.For the word of GOD is true and amen.
The Hebrew word in Genesis 19:26 is “n’tzib” and is commonly translated as “pillar.”
Another word translated as “pillar” is “matzabah” — an outpost, garrison of soldiers on the perimeter of a guarded area.
Yet another is “amud”
It meant she turned and went into shock … euphemistically known as ‘turning into a pillar of salt.
Huge mistranslation.
One of many in the KJV bible
The true dichotomy is not good and evil but existence and non-existence. All things that exist have a counterpart that cancels them out and renders them non-existent. All is one, yet when all is reunited as one, it becomes nothing. This is the deeper message of the bible. God does not make mistakes, this is something that all good Christians will agree to. Sodom became the way it did as it was designed. Lot’s wife “disobeyed” God as she was designed to do. It is impossible to “disobey” God as even free will is given by God with full knowledge of how it will be used. All things fit together into perfection and reflect one another as a perfect cosmic puzzle. There is no mistake by God and all things have been, currently are and will be as God designed them to be.