Wisdom 10:6–9

Drawing on the story of Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the author of Wisdom shows how divine Wisdom rescues the righteous even as she abandons the wicked to the consequences of their own folly. The ruins of the five cities and the pillar of salt stand as permanent witnesses to the catastrophic cost of rejecting Wisdom. Conversely, those who wait upon Wisdom are delivered, not by their own merit, but by her faithful intervention.

Verse 6 — Wisdom Delivers Lot from the Fire The unnamed "righteous man" is Lot, nephew of Abraham, whose rescue from Sodom is narrated in Genesis 19. The author of Wisdom, writing in the Alexandrian Jewish tradition (c. 50 B.C.–50 A.D.), reframes the Genesis account through a sapiential lens: it is not merely angelic intervention that saves Lot, but personified Wisdom acting as God's agent of deliverance. The phrase "fire that descended out of heaven on the five cities" alludes to Genesis 19:24 ("the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven"), and also to the tradition, known from ancient sources including Deuteronomy 29:23, that five cities of the plain — Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, and Bela (Zoar) — were consumed. Lot's escape to Zoar is thus a flight engineered by Wisdom herself. The contrast established here is stark: while the "ungodly" (Greek: asebon) were perishing in collective ruin, the one just man was extracted. This is not arbitrary favoritism; it is the logic of Wisdom, who orders creation toward justice.

Verse 7 — The Smoking Waste and the Pillar of Salt The author now points to two lasting physical memorials of Sodom's destruction. First, "a smoking waste" — the desolate landscape around the Dead Sea, still visible in the author's own era, served as a kind of ongoing indictment. Ancient writers, including the Roman historian Tacitus (Histories V.7), describe the region's barren, sulfurous terrain. Second, plants "bearing fair fruit that doesn't ripen" likely refers to the so-called "apples of Sodom" (Calotropis procera), beautiful in appearance but hollow and bitter within — a natural symbol of the seductive but empty promises of wickedness. Third, and most memorably, the "standing pillar of salt" recalls Genesis 19:26, the fate of Lot's wife, who looked back and was transformed. The author calls her "a disbelieving soul" (apistousēs psychēs) — her sin is identified not merely as disobedience but as a failure of faith, a refusal to trust in Wisdom's direction forward. The pillar thus becomes a monument to the danger of the backward glance toward sin.

Verse 8 — Folly Memorialized This verse offers a profound insight into the inner logic of sin. Those who "passed Wisdom by" (Greek: parelthan, suggesting a deliberate bypassing, a choice) suffered a double consequence: first, a darkening of moral perception — they could no longer "recognise the things which are good"; second, they left behind a monument of their folly for all to see. This anticipates what St. Paul will later articulate in Romans 1:28 — the reprobate mind () that results from persistently refusing God. The Sodomites are thus not simply punished from outside; they are undone by the internal logic of their own rejection of Wisdom. The phrase "where they stumbled, they might fail even to be unseen" is striking: their ruin is public and irremovable. Sin, the author implies, has an archaeological quality — it leaves ruins.

Catholic tradition reads this passage at several interlocking levels. At the literal-historical level, the Church has consistently affirmed the moral gravity of the sin of Sodom, not reducing it to a single vice but understanding it as the fullest expression of a culture that had systematically rejected the natural moral law. The Catechism (§2357) references the "grave depravity" of acts contrary to natural law, and this passage from Wisdom grounds that teaching in the broader sapiential tradition: wickedness is not merely the breaking of rules but the rejection of the very principle of order — Wisdom — that structures creation toward the good.

At the typological level, the Church Fathers read Lot's rescue as a figure of baptismal deliverance. St. Ambrose (De Abraham I.6) and St. Augustine (City of God XVI.30) both interpret Lot as a type of the soul rescued from the "city of destruction" — the world ordered by pride and lust — and led by grace to safety. The pillar of salt attracted rich patristic commentary: Origen (Homilies on Genesis V.2) reads Lot's wife as a warning against apostasy, the soul that, having been called forward by grace, turns back toward the sins of the past. St. Irenaeus (Against Heresies IV.31) sees in the two memorials — ruin and pillar — the double function of divine judgment: it destroys the wicked and serves as permanent instruction for the living.

The Catechism's teaching on the "senses of Scripture" (§115–119) invites precisely this layered reading: the literal rescue of Lot opens into an allegory of the soul's journey from sin, a moral warning about the backward glance of apostasy, and an anagogical anticipation of final judgment. Wisdom 10 as a whole was cited by the Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum (§16) as a model of how the Old Testament illuminates the economy of salvation, foreshadowing the fullness of Christ.

The image of Lot's wife — frozen mid-turn, unable to let go of what she was called to leave behind — is one of Scripture's most psychologically acute portraits of the spiritual life. Contemporary Catholics know this paralysis well: the old sin that still draws the gaze, the attachment that undermines commitment to a new way of life, the nostalgia for a disordered past that prevents full conversion. Christ himself invokes Lot's wife as a warning in Luke 17:32 — "Remember Lot's wife" — precisely because the danger of the backward glance never becomes obsolete.

This passage also challenges the modern tendency to sentimentalize the spiritual life by removing consequences. The ruins and the pillar are not divine cruelty; they are the natural residue of choices that bypassed Wisdom. Every Catholic is invited to ask: What "monuments to folly" — habits of mind, relational patterns, media consumption, comfortable compromises — am I building in my own life? And inversely, am I actively attending to Wisdom — through Scripture, prayer, the sacraments, the counsel of the Church — or merely avoiding her path without quite pursuing her? The passage promises rescue, but to those who wait on Wisdom, not merely those who admire her from a distance.