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For lack of even ten virtuous people, the town of Sodom is destroyed by two angels of God, depicted in this 1872 painting by the French artist Gustave Moreau.

In Genesis 18, news of the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah prompts God to send his angels to destroy the cities. In response to Abraham’s plea for compassion, God agrees to spare the towns if his angels find 50 righteous people there. Abraham bargains God down even further—to 40, 30, 20 and finally just ten. But the angels, unable to find even that many, carry out God’s plan: “And the Lord rained down fire and brimstone from the skies on Sodom and Gomorrah. He overthrew those cities and destroyed all the plain, with everyone living there and everything growing in the ground” (Genesis 19:24–25).

In Moreau’s painting, a stream of lava (“fire and brimstone”) descends from the mountain toward the domes and houses of the town, dimly visible in the gloom. A thick column of black smoke rises in front of the steep cliffs sheltering the valley, and embers smolder in the foreground. Above it all, swords held aloft, the calm agents of divine vengeance face the viewer like unearthly sentinels.

Absent from the dead landscape are Lot and his family. The angels themselves spirited away the only virtuous family in town, just before the destruction. But unable to resist temptation, Lot’s wife looked back. Could Moreau’s dark vision of Sodom be the fatal backward glance of Lot’s wife—the last thing she saw before she “turned into a pillar of salt” (Genesis 19:26)?

Moreau painted this dark vision in the gloomy years following the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and the revolutionary fervor of the Paris Commune that followed it in 1871. The Commune was crushed in May of that year, when the French government massacred 30,000 unarmed workers in the streets of Paris. It was a traumatic period for Parisians, including Moreau. The smoldering Sodom may be his Paris; the “look back,” his own pessimistic view of the catastrophe.