Lot’s Wife Was Human—And So Are You

The story of Lot’s wife is usually trotted out as a biblical “gotcha”—a cautionary tale about disobedience, attachment, and the fatal cost of looking back. But really, it’s much darker, much richer. It’s about the soul-crushing gravity of nostalgia, the seductive pull of the past, and how the refusal to fully commit to forward motion—spiritually, morally, existentially—can leave us frozen, calcified, halfway between escape and surrender.

Lot’s wife is never named in the Genesis account. She’s just “Lot’s wife,” a narrative afterthought, a supporting character reduced to a cautionary statue. And yet her fate is more memorable than her husband’s, etched into the landscape as a monument to hesitation.

Fortunately, Midrashic literature gives her a name—Ado, or more memorably to my ear, Edith. Maybe it’s the residue of All in the Family, but Edith conjures a kind of moral warmth: a woman who feels deeply, who wants to do right, but is also tragically susceptible to emotion and memory. I prefer Edith to “Lot’s wife” not for historical accuracy, but for dignity. Edith feels human, conflicted, real.

I don’t think Edith turned around because she was vain or shallow. I think she turned because she was haunted. She turned because the past was more than rubble—it was love, memories, people. Her heart was a complex web of longing, and it snagged her. The salt wasn’t a punishment. It was a crystallization of what happens when our nostalgia outweighs our conviction.

And let’s be honest: Who among us doesn’t have some briny lump of regret weighing us down? Some internal salt pillar we’ve built in the shape of a younger self we can’t stop worshiping?

Our culture is Edith’s playground. Social media, advertising, and even the algorithms know exactly how to pander to the Edith within. I can’t scroll without being invited into some “Golden Age of Bodybuilding” time warp: vintage photos of Arnold, Zane, Platz, Mentzer; protein powder reboots; playlists that reek of adolescent testosterone and gym chalk. Jefferson Starship and Sergio Oliva, side by side. It’s like being invited to embalm my past and celebrate its eternal youth. I can join message boards and talk shop with other proud monuments to vanished glory, all of us reenacting the same ritual: remembering what life used to feel like. Not what it is.

This, I suspect, is what it means to turn to salt. Not just to long for the past, but to despise the present. To dig our heels into a world that no longer fits and spit at progress as if it betrayed us. To canonize a version of ourselves that no longer exists, then try to live in its shadow.

But maybe Edith’s not just a warning. Maybe she’s a mirror. A deeply flawed, deeply human figure who reminds us that the instinct to look back isn’t evil—it’s inevitable. And maybe we don’t conquer that instinct so much as we recognize it, name it, and learn when to say: Enough. That life was real, and it was mine. But I’m walking forward now.

Or at least trying to.