The introduction sets up the book’s conceptual and methodological parameters by laying out two intersecting avenues of inquiry. First, it establishes the link between the biblical account of the flight from Sodom and the ethical conundrums the Sodom legacy bequeaths to hospitality theory. Second, it argues for a fresh understanding of Lot’s wife – traditionally the exemplar of moral obduracy and female unruliness -- as an ethically provocative figural mediator between Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the “flesh” and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of dispossession before the “face” of the Other. Through this critical lens, chapter overviews show the far-ranging impact – across millennia and a wide variety of art forms – of Lot’s wife’s legacy as a mutable figure of reparative witnessing and ethical resilience.

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