Sodom

• Lot went to

93:5.9Abra­ham had kingly am­bi­tions, and on the way back from Egypt he laid be­fore Lot his plan to sub­due all Ca­naan and bring its peo­ple un­der the rule of Salem. Lot was more bent on busi­ness; so, af­ter a later dis­agree­ment, he went to Sodom to en­gage in trade and an­i­mal hus­bandry. Lot liked nei­ther a mil­i­tary nor a herder’s life.

• Lot went to

93:5.12Abra­ham, be­cause of his close con­nec­tion with the il­lus­tri­ous Mel­chiz­e­dek, pos­sessed great ad­van­tage over the sur­round­ing petty kings; they all revered Mel­chiz­e­dek and un­duly feared Abra­ham. Abra­ham knew of this fear and only awaited an op­por­tune oc­ca­sion to at­tack his neigh­bors, and this ex­cuse came when some of these rulers pre­sumed to raid the prop­erty of his nephew Lot, who dwelt in Sodom. Upon hear­ing of this, Abra­ham, at the head of his seven con­fed­er­ated tribes, moved on the en­emy. His own body­guard of 318 of­fi­cered the army, num­ber­ing more than 4,000, which struck at this time.

• king of S. joined Abraham’s military confederation

93:5.14Af­ter this bat­tle of Sid­dim, Abra­ham be­came leader of a sec­ond con­fed­er­a­tion of eleven tribes and not only paid tithes to Mel­chiz­e­dek but saw to it that all oth­ers in that vicin­ity did the same. His diplo­matic deal­ings with the king of Sodom, to­gether with the fear in which he was so gen­er­ally held, re­sulted in the king of Sodom and oth­ers join­ing the He­bron mil­i­tary con­fed­er­a­tion; Abra­ham was re­ally well on the way to es­tab­lish­ing a pow­er­ful state in Pales­tine.

• fabricated narratives relating to destruction of

93:6.7It was fol­low­ing this real and pub­lic sur­ren­der of his per­sonal am­bi­tions in be­half of the larger plans of Mel­chiz­e­dek that the three ce­les­tial be­ings ap­peared to him on the plains of Mamre. This was an ap­pear­ance of fact, not­with­stand­ing its as­so­ci­a­tion with the sub­se­quently fab­ri­cated nar­ra­tives re­lat­ing to the nat­u­ral de­struc­tion of Sodom and Go­mor­rah. And these leg­ends of the hap­pen­ings of those days in­di­cate how re­tarded were the morals and ethics of even so re­cent a time.

• fabricated narratives relating to destruction of

93:8.1It was shortly af­ter the de­struc­tion of Sodom and Go­mor­rah that Ma­chi­venta de­cided to end his emer­gency be­stowal on Uran­tia. Mel­chiz­e­dek’s de­ci­sion to ter­mi­nate his so­journ in the flesh was in­flu­enced by nu­mer­ous con­di­tions, chief of which was the grow­ing ten­dency of the sur­round­ing tribes, and even of his im­me­di­ate as­so­ciates, to re­gard him as a demigod, to look upon him as a super­nat­u­ral be­ing, which in­deed he was; but they were be­gin­ning to rev­er­ence him un­duly and with a highly su­per­sti­tious fear. In ad­di­tion to these rea­sons, Mel­chiz­e­dek wanted to leave the scene of his earthly ac­tiv­i­ties a suf­fi­cient length of time be­fore Abra­ham’s death to in­sure that the truth of the one and only God would be­come strongly es­tab­lished in the minds of his fol­low­ers. Ac­cord­ingly Ma­chi­venta re­tired one night to his tent at Salem, hav­ing said good night to his hu­man com­pan­ions, and when they went to call him in the morn­ing, he was not there, for his fel­lows had taken him.