As the Cities of the Plain are being incinerated, Lot’s wife looks back, וַתְּהִי נְצִיב מֶֽלַח | vatəhi nətziv mélaḥ | “and she became a pillar of salt” (Bəreishit 19:26).

This is often framed as a punishment, or at least a cautionary tale. The most benign readings frame it as almost an industrial accident: Idit, Lot’s wife [a], just didn’t quite get out of the way fast enough, and was caught up in the general hail of fire and brimstone, or was smitten by glancing on an angel without the proper intermediary, or some such thing. Perhaps she looked back because she was worried about her extended family, or because she needed to see the end of those terrible cities with her own eyes to believe she was really free of them. It’s understandable, and it’s poignant, even tragic. Idit’s tale becomes a cautionary parable about the difficulty of letting go, even when the thing you’re letting go of isn’t all that great.

[a] Bəreishit never bothers to give her a name, but the sages of our tradition weren’t content with that. There’s a little bit of fuzziness here, with some sources calling her Ado and some Idit (or, on occasion, Irit, due to the similarity of the Hebrew letters pronounced D (ד) and R (ר)). Idit, (עִידִית in Hebrew) is close to the word for “witness”, עֵיד | eid, and since witnessing is so woven thru here, that’s the name I’m going with today. (You’ll also find this name brought into English as “Edith”, which makes fine sense according to the traditions of Hebrew to Latin to English transliteration, but is somewhat confusing because there’s already an English name “Edith” that comes from an entirely unrelated Old English root.)

At the other extreme, you have people making up sins to explain why Idit deserved to die. Frequently there’s a kind of Dantean contrapasso to these: Idit refused to salt her guests’ food, or spread news of the strangers’ arrival under the pretense of asking to borrow salt, and so she was turned into salt as a pointedly fitting punishment. I find many of these sources deeply cruel: The Biblical text has nothing to say against Idit’s character, and I think there’s something ghoulish about the project of smearing her posthumously just so we don’t have to feel bad about what happened to her.

(And, indeed, this tendency to make up stories about people to justify delighting in their suffering is still very much with us today, wreaking havoc all the political spectrum from “they’re just lazy, so we shouldn’t help them afford food” to “they’re all climate change deniers, so it’s fine if they die in a hurricane”. The world is full of suffering, and the idea that much of it is profoundly undeserved feels ghastly, so I understand the protective appeal of finding reasons to release yourself from the anguish of caring, but I think durable progress towards a better world requires sitting with this truth in all its horror.)

I would like to discuss a different possibility here.

The word I translated as “and she became” above is וַתְּהִי | vatəhi. This is a slightly obnoxious word to parse, but I want to take the time to step thru it. This is bug analysis, after all; let’s get insectal.

In the big picture, vatəhi comprises two parts: a conjunction, and a verb in what looks like the future tense but isn’t. The conjunction, strictly speaking, is just the first consonant, the vav (ו). I’ve translated it “and” here, and that’s usually what it means, but its usage is less restricted in Hebrew than and’s is in English. I prefer to think of vav as a hook, linking two things together [b]. Sometimes, that linkage is additive (“good and evil”), sometimes contrastative (“forgive and not punish” = “forgive but not punish”), and sometimes even temporal (“and you will come to this place and do X” = “when you come to this place, do X”). But here it really is fine to leave it as “and”.

[b] And, indeed, the word vav in Hebrew means “hook”, tho this is more to do with the shape of the letter than its grammatical function.

The verb is gnarlier. At first blush, תְּהִי | təhi looks like a perfectly respectable third-person singular, grammatically feminine future-tense verb, which would be translated “she will become” [c]. And, indeed, if you’re out and about in the wild and stumble upon a random təhi with nothing else going on, that is the correct form and translation [d]. But: When you take a future-tense verb and stick that vav plus that little a vowel on the front, a weird thing happens: It goes from being a future-tense verb to a past-tense one [e]. So a standalone “she will become” turns into “and she became”.

[c] “Become” and not “be” is, as I understand it, closer to the essential meaning of this verb. It’s frequently translated as the latter into English (so, in the beginning of Genesis, you get the famous “‘Let there be light!’ and there was light”), but even here you can get the sense that it has the force of “come/came into existence”. These are often fine distinctions, and it’s not worth putting too much weight on them, but it’s something worth keeping in mind as a difference between Hebrew and English.
[d] Well, unless it’s second person. In Hebrew, the second-person masculine singular is identical with the third-person feminine singular in the future tense. I leave it to a bolder midrashist than I to spin out a reading built around translating this clause as “and you became a pillar of salt”.
[e] We are already very deep in the weeds here, so I’ll forgo the full explanation for why this is, but essentially what happened is that the earlier language Hebrew evolved from had a pretty different tense system, and in the evolution into Hebrew, two originally different forms converged and got confused for one another at the same time as some tenses were being lost and others were swapping places. From the outside, it looks like a messy and chaotic process, and the end result (“verbs flip their tense when you stick an ‘and’ in front of them”) is a little bewildering, but it does seem to be a real thing that happened and produced that very real phenomenon in Biblical Hebrew, so here we are.

All of which is a protracted way of drawing attention to the fact that Idit is the subject of this verb.

Which means that the text doesn’t actually say, specifically and explicitly, that G-d turned her into a pillar of salt. She’s the one, grammatically, doing the becoming.

Sometimes becoming is a passive process. I became a US citizen when I was born, not because of anything I did, but just because of the laws of this country and the legal status of my parents. I became an emergency room patient because I slipped and fell down a flight of stairs. These are things that essentially happened to me.

But sometimes becoming is much more active. I became a bassoonist by begging for lessons and practicing my tail off. I became a Jew by actively choosing to rearrange the direction of my entire life. No one did these things to me; I pursued them actively and deliberately myself.

And so Idit becomes a pillar of salt. What if this isn’t a becoming that is done to her, but a becoming she makes happen herself?

I have sometimes stood by the sea, letting the water lap at my feet, burying my toes with the in-and-out rushing of sand. I have let my mind empty and time go blank under an overcast sky, expanding until it felt like ages of the earth could pass with me still stood there. And eventually, of course, I get hungry, or cold, or I have to leave to go to an event or whatever, but always I’m like, what if this time I didn’t? What if this time I stayed at the shore, becoming just another part of the environment?

When I am home alone on shabbes afternoon, I’ll usually read for as long as I can see the page, and then just settle on the couch in the dying light, letting the last however many minutes tick by until it’s time for havdalah, sitting there quiet and patient in the dark. In these moments, I feel a great communion with the objects around me, the chairs and books and tables that clutter my life. Here we all are, persisting in space amidst the gathering night. I feel the boundary between myself and the world dissolve — just one more temporary accumulation of atoms formed in the heart of dying stars.

Torah tells us nothing about Idit’s experience of Sədom. Perhaps she loved that place; perhaps she hated it. Perhaps she resented every day her husband kept her there; perhaps she held close to the possibility it still might change.

Perhaps she was tired of enduring evil times. An apocalyptic, omnicidal rain usually isn’t the harbinger of good things to come; perhaps she wanted to know whether anything would ever grow in the place of Sədom ever again, whether with enough time healing would come. Perhaps she knew that change is different than escape, that it’s not so simple to disaffiliate yourself from a place of evil where you lived for many years — it is so easy to be complicit in structural harm and so difficult to atone for it. How can any of us say our hands are clean of the annihilatory logic of doing what we have to to get by in a system built on misery? Surely there were children in Sədom, infants too young to do moral harm.

Perhaps Idit chose to share a part of Sədom’s fate. Perhaps she changed herself, made herself become a pillar of salt, so she could stay rooted there, connected physically to this place that had defined the last years, at least, of her life. Perhaps she wanted the patience of stone, the quietude of sand, to wait out the ticking-by years without haste, without worry, sharing space and time with the death-blasted valley. There is a great peace that can come with accepting sorrow, with abiding with grief, sharing space quietly with it, acknowledging it, not as a problem to be fixed or a challenge to be overcome, but just as a presence in your life to be dwelt with like any other. The grief of Sədom was very great — the sorrow of it reached up to heaven! — perhaps Idit wanted to sit quietly with it, to share space with it until, if ever, it was ready to depart. Perhaps she hoped that with enough time, the passing showers and morning dews would leech the salt of her away from the rocks, leaving nothing but the memory of eroded geology, and she would finally be free.