Chapter 18
God appears again as a corporeal being, or rather, three beings. Or is he one of the three beings? It’s quite possible that these are three gods since we’re still in the polytheistic tradition at this point. Anyway, Abraham greets them (or him) and recognizes God immediately. Abraham offers to wash their feet, give them water, a little bread, curds and milk, and a calf, and hell, why not just have an all-out feast? Naturally, Abraham ran into the tent to Sarah to make the bread because her place is in the kitchen (that was sarcasm). Then he served the three men (gods) and they ate. They informed Abraham that Sarah will have a son of her own and Sarah overheard and laughed because they’re old, but then said that she didn’t laugh because she was afraid.
The men (gods) left with Abraham tagging along and after virtually no deliberation God decides to tell Abraham that he is planning on destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. So Abraham, knowing full well that his nephew lives there, decides to bargain with God. Abraham asks God if he would spare the city if he could find fifty righteous men and God agrees. Oh wait, sorry, make that forty-five, no, forty. Wait! Thirty. My mistake, twenty. Oh, for the love of…ten. Sold for ten righteous men.
Chapter 19
Forgive my language, but the God of Genesis is a prick. He can, according to the religious folk today, do anything, but he can’t simply pluck the bad guys from the world. No, he seems to enjoy the idea of laying waste to everything. On top of that, he is a horrible judge of character. Take for instance Lot, who welcomed the angels into his home and washed their feet and probably brought snacks and stuff, but when the lustful mob came to his door wanting to “know” the angels, he instead offered up his two virgin daughters. What. The. Frack.
8 Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.”
Bibles, Harper . NRSV Bible with the Apocrypha (Gen 19: 8, p. 57). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
So these men are under the shelter of Lot’s roof, but his daughters are not? I suppose if Lot was the most righteous man in Sodom and Gomorrah then the cities should have been destroyed, preferably with Lot still in his house. Yet, for some reason God decides that he and his family are the only ones who deserve to be saved?
Also, remember that whole flood thing because the world became corrupted? How did that work out again? Apparently, God can wipe evil (and everything else) off the face of the earth, but he is impotent when it comes to preventing it from coming back.
So anyway, Lot and his wife and daughters (who have no names because…women) are allowed to leave town because, as a superb judge of character, God had found favor with him. And God, wanting to show off, rained fire and brimstone down on the cities, turning them to cinders. Lot’s unnamed wife, out of a completely natural human reaction, looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt, because that’s a reasonable punishment.
Back when we were still recording the In Search Of… Series over on the Illuminati Social Club, we did the episode on Sodom and Gomorrah and one observation that I had made there was that the area by the Dead Sea was near a volcano, which would explain the story of fire and brimstone and sulfur and burning. Also, there are pillar-like salt formations all over the area since the Dead Sea is the saltiest body of water on earth. Most likely, the story was invented by somebody trying to explain the geography.
Then we get to the aftermath. Apparently, the sons-in-law of Lot didn’t come along and they were now charcoal, so the daughters didn’t have men to “preserve offspring” so they decided to “keep it in the family” by getting dear ol’ dad drunk and lying with him. The older daughter the first night, the younger the second night. Maybe they all should have stayed in Sodom. Anyway, the older daughter had a son named Moab, the ancestor of the Moabites, and the younger a son named Benammi, the ancestor of the Ammonites.
AlienCG's Bible Study 
We have a mess on our hands here because those darn rainbows meant that God won’t flood the land again and all the sin came back so fast! What to do? BURN IT ALL DOWN. We learn that there are less than 10 good people in the doomed cities so I guess that means the rest of the cities may have been spared with as few as 10 good people so sin was still all around. What’s really troubling here is that all of these people have a direct lineage back to God through Adam and Eve and so many of them are terrible people. How does that happen? Like most of the Old Testament, all of this leaves me scratching my head. Maybe the point of this was to keep people in line through fear of being turned, as you said, to charcoal!
LikeLiked by 1 person