In Search of a Lost Name: Lot’s Wife and the Poetics of Ravaged Cities

The project revolves around the biblical figure of Lot’s wife, remembered for her fatal glance back at the burning city of Sodom and materialized in the mark she left behind—a mute pillar of salt.

The inquiry begins with Lot’s wife’s enduring status as a silenced icon associated with that pillar of salt. Whatever she may have sought to grasp or express through that gaze vanished in that instant, along with her and her city. From that moment onward, the hermeneutic effort to know Sodom and Lot’s wife is necessarily performed after their erasure, in their absence. Yet, paradoxically, through her fatal metamorphosis Lot’s wife becomes her own signature, a material sign etched into the landscape. Thus, the salt mark condemns the narrative to preserve what it seeks to obliterate—the very possibility of representing annihilation.

My book will take the self-negating symbolic function of the salt mark as a conceptual key for comparative, figural, and semiotic analyses of narratives of ravaged cities. Both Sodom, as the locus of atrocity, and Lot’s wife, as its witness, have counterparts in narratives of other destroyed cities and silenced witnesses across the literary tradition. The Sodom myth reveals striking parallels, or sedimented traces, within the narratives of our history’s ravaged cities—from ancient Ur, Jerusalem, and Carthage, through modern Magdeburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and up to the present reemergence of a “Sodomscape” in Gaza.