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After this promise Lot was delivered out of Sodom, and a fiery rain
from heaven turned into ashes that whole region of the impious city,
where custom had made sodomy as prevalent as laws have elsewhere made
other kinds of wickedness. But this punishment of theirs was a
specimen of the divine judgment to come. For what is meant by the
angels for-bidding those who were delivered to look back, but that we
are not to look back in heart to the old life which, being regenerated
through grace, we have put off, if we think to escape the last
judgment? Lot's wife, indeed, when she looked back, remained,
and, being turned into salt, furnished to believing men a condiment by
which to savor somewhat the warning to be drawn from that example.
Then Abraham did again at Gerar, with Abimelech the king of that
city, what he had done in Egypt about his wife, and received her back
untouched in the same way. On this occasion, when the king rebuked
Abraham for not saying she was his wife, and calling her his sister,
he explained what he had been afraid of, and added this further,
"And yet indeed she is my sister by the father's site, but not by
the mother's; for she was Abraham's sister by his own father, and
so near of kin. But her beauty was so great, that even at that
advanced age she could be fallen in love with.
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