What Does Genesis 19:17 Mean?

As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, "Flee for your lives! Don't look back, and don't stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!" The three instructions, "Flee for your lives, don't look back, don't stop in the plain," are the covenant boundary conditions of the rescue. The flight is required, not optional; the looking back is forbidden; the stopping in the plain is forbidden. The rescue is offered in full, but it has conditions: those being rescued must accept the conditions of the rescue rather than their own terms. Life in flight from judgment is not life on one's own preferred timetable and route.

The prohibition on looking back is the chapter's most ominous restriction, given that Lot's wife will violate it in verse 26. The instruction not to look back is simultaneously practical (looking back slows the flight and disorients the fleeing person) and symbolic (looking back at the judged city with longing is the lingering attachment to what has been left behind that compromises the flight). The issue is not the physical action of turning one's head but the attachment to Sodom that would produce it. Standing between the present mercy and the past investment with regret for what has been left is the form of the forbidden looking back.

Jesus's teaching on the same subject in Luke 17:32 is explicit: "Remember Lot's wife." The warning in Luke's apocalyptic discourse, about fleeing judgment and not looking back, references exactly this moment and exactly this instruction. The one who has received the covenant rescue is told to flee forward and not look back at what is being left behind. The disciple who said "Let me first go back and bury my father" and the one who said "Let me first go back and say goodbye to my family" received the same response from Jesus: "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62).