Genesis 19's unnamed casualty: one command, one look, one pillar of salt. Jesus reduces her to a three-word warning; geologists study her neighborhood; rabbis argued about her crime for two thousand years.
Documented
The verb and the witnesses
Genesis 19:17 gives the command, do not look behind you; 19:26 records the violation. The Hebrew verb is nabat, to look intently, to gaze, the same verb used when God tells Abraham to gaze at the stars, and deliberately not shaqaf, the word for Abraham's own look toward Sodom one chapter earlier. Wisdom of Solomon 10:7 already calls the pillar a monument to an unbelieving soul. Josephus writes that the pillar still stood in his day: I have seen it, for it remains even now. Clement of Rome and Irenaeus repeat the attestation. Luke 17:32: Remember Lot's wife.
Assessment: Fully documented: the verb distinction is standard commentary, the Wisdom and Josephus attestations are primary texts. Josephus claiming eyewitness is a first-century tourism claim, filed as such.
Stories
She sinned with salt
The Midrash gives her what Genesis withheld: names, Ado or Edith, and a crime measured to the punishment. When the angel guests arrived, she went door to door asking the neighbors for salt for the meal, deliberately alerting the mob that strangers were inside. She sinned with salt, so salt took her. And the landscape cooperates with the story: Mount Sodom is a real seven-kilometer salt diapir studded with eroded pillars, one of which still carries her name on the tourist maps.
Assessment: Stories: the salt errand is midrash, not text. The geology is real and dated; Frumkin's GSA Bulletin study dates the pillar formation. The identification of any pillar with the woman is tradition doing what tradition does.
Interesting claims
She was not punished; she was overrun
The rabbinic counterreadings unsettle the moral. Radak: no transformation occurred; she slowed to look and the destruction rolling over the plain simply caught her, the fate of anyone who stops inside a blast radius. Hizkuni goes further, re-reading the grammar so that it is the land, not the woman, that becomes the pillar of salt, matching Deuteronomy's brimstone and salted soil. On these readings the verse reports consequence and geology, and two millennia of preaching turned a casualty into a criminal.
Assessment: Interesting: both readings are documented in the classical commentators and both solve real problems, the disproportion, the unique punishment-by-transformation. What remains: whether she was executed or engulfed, the text chose to spend its one death on the person who cared enough to look.
Sources and further reading
Genesis 19:17 and 19:26; the nabat (gaze intently) versus shaqaf distinction per standard commentary (Hamilton, Genesis 18-50)
Wisdom of Solomon 10:7, the monument to an unbelieving soul
Josephus, Antiquities 1.11.4, the pillar remains to this day
Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer for the names Ado and Edith; the salt-errand midrash
Radak and Hizkuni on Genesis 19:26, the overrun-by-the-storm and salted-land readings
Frumkin, Formation and dating of a salt pillar in Mount Sodom diapir, GSA Bulletin 121 (2009)
Worth asking
What was her crime: disobedience, attachment, or simply being slow?