The story of Iris, Lot's wife, is taken from the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. In the Bible she has no name, but the midrashic literature named her Edit, or Edis, or Iris (pronounced Eeris), from the Hebrew word for 'witness'.
In the biblical narrative Iris is most notable by her absence. She seems to take little part in the lives of her husband, her children, her home. She has no name, she has no voice, she has little presence. And, eventually, she has no life. But the text gives us one action of hers: she looks back towards Sodom.
This absence can be construed in a variety of ways. We can believe that she was physically absent, literally not there when the events of the narrative took place. Or we can see that she was indeed present, but has been rendered invisible and silenced by the text.
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