An Eye-Opening Experience

In the midst of Avram’s story, the Torah recounts an epic battle between two great alliances of kings in the Valley of Siddim, near the Dead Sea. In a final confrontation, the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah rebelled against the more powerful forces of Chedorlaomer and his allies, only to be forced into retreat:

And the Valley of Siddim was riddled with clay pits, and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled there and fell there, while the rest fled into the high country. (Genesis 14:10)

Since these pits were filled with wet clay used as mortar, some rabbinic interpreters assumed that the two kings likely met their deaths by fleeing into them. Yet when Avram later pursued and defeated Chedorlaomer’s coalition to rescue his nephew Lot, he was greeted upon his return by none other than the king of Sodom, who, according to one rabbinic tradition, had miraculously survived the pits.

This seeming anomaly inspired the following midrash:

“The Valley of Siddim was full of clay pits”— pits, pits overflowing with clay.

“The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled and fell there, and they who remained fled to the mountain.” …
Rabbi Neḥemiah said: “‘They fell there’ – this refers to the kings; ‘and they who remained fled to the mountain’ – this refers to the multitudes.” …
According to the opinion of Rabbi Nehemiah, Rabbi Azariah and Rabbi Yonatan ben Ḥagai in the name of Rabbi Yitzḥak: When our forefather Avraham descended into the fiery furnace and was saved, some among the nations believed [the story of his miraculous rescue], while others did not believe. [But] when the king of Sodom descended into the clay [pits] and was rescued, people began believing in Avraham’s miracle retroactively. (Bereishit Rabbah 42:7, Theodore-Albeck ed. pp. 412-413, abridged)

The premise of this midrash is that one who experiences or witnesses a miracle becomes open to believing in the reality of another. The story recalls the well-known rabbinic legend of Avram being cast into a fiery furnace by King Nimrod for rejecting idolatry, and miraculously surviving. A similar motif of deliverance from fire appears in the biblical account of Ḥananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, the companions of Daniel, who were thrown into a fiery furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar for refusing to bow to his idol and were likewise saved (See Daniel chapter 3). Both stories celebrate steadfast faith in God and the triumph of divine providence over human power.

It is the expectation of the midrash that the miraculous rescue of the king of Sodom would render Avram’s own miracle at least plausible in the eyes of skeptics.

Without attempting to define the nature of the miraculous, this midrash is an invitation for us to lose a little of our cynicism and keep our eyes open to the wonder and majesty of existence and to resist taking the lives we live for granted. In doing so, we, too, might become aware of the miraculous that is there for us to see every single day.