Genesis Vol 3.pdf - College Press

LOT’S LAST DAYS 19:l-38
was all that could be seen. All life was extinguished. The
author is much too fine an artist to spell out the viewer’s
thoughts, and the close of the narrative is all the more
eloquent for this omission.’’ This is a characteristic of the
Bible throughout: in so many instances it tends to speak
more forcefully by what it omits than by what it tells us,
The most impressive example of this is in the Lord’s
narrative of the Forgiving Father (Luke 15 : 11 -32).
It is charged by the critics that the Genesis story of
Lot’s wife’s inglorious end is just another version of an
ancient folk tale. Alleged similarity of the Greek legend
of Orpheus and Eurydice is cited as a corresponding
example. According to this legend, after his return from
the Argonautic expedition, Orpheus lived in Thrace, where
he married Eurydice. His wife having died as a result of
the bite of a serpent, Orpheus followed her into Hades,
where his sweet music alleviated temporarily the torments
of the damned, and enabled him to win her back. His
prayer was granted, however, on one condition, namely,
that he should not look back at his wife until they had
arrived in the upper world. At the very last monient “the
anxiety of love” overcame the poet and he looked around to
make sure that his wife was following him, only to see
her snatched back into the infernal regions. The mytho-
logical tale of Niobe is another example of the case in
point, As the alleged wife of the king of Thebes, Niobe,
filled with pride over the number of her children, deemed
herself superior to Leto, who had given birth to only two
(Apollo and Artemis, by Zeus). Apollo and Artemis,
indignant as such presumption, slew all her children with
their arrows, and Niobe herself was metamorphosed by
Zeus into a stone which during the summer always shed
tears. We can only affirm here that to find any parallels,
in nzotivatioiz especially, between these fantastic tales and
the fate of Lot’s wife, must require the activity of a pro-
fane mentality, The awesome manifestation of Divine
3 63