In the Bible book of Genesis, just prior to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham has an encounter with divinity that is interpreted variously as being with three men, three angels, or Yahweh and two angels.
Genesis 18:1 And the LORD appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day;
2 And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground,
3 And said, My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant:
4 Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree:
5 And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts….
It is not clear how Abraham knows which one of the three men is the Lord. It even sounds as if there might be the Lord plus three men? But a group of three angels seems to be the most common interpretation. Later Christian doctrine will cast this visit as an aspect of the Holy Trinity.
After Abraham helps the strangers refresh themselves, they tell him that his elderly wife Sarah will give birth to a son, which causes Sarah to scoff and then lie to the Lord about having done so. Then Abraham has a private conversation with the Lord, who tells him he is on his way to destroy [the cities of] Sodom and Gomorrah because they are so wicked.
Genesis 18:22 … the men turned their faces from thence, and went toward Sodom: but Abraham stood yet before the LORD.
23 And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?
24 Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?
Abraham eventually bargains the Lord (or the angel) into agreeing to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten good people can be found there. (But no such luck.)
Genesis Chapter 19 describes the visit of two angels to Sodom, where they find friendly lodging with Lot and his family. Lot is so awed by the angels that he offers his two virgin daughters to the Sodomites who are pounding on the door screaming to sodomize the visitors. But, while the angels may have appreciated Lot’s thoughtfulness, they don’t need his help. They blind the Sodomites. Then, because Lot has been nice to them, the angels give him and his family a head-start out of Sodom before the big kaboom.
Of course, mom looked back and turned to a pillar of salt. And it wasn’t long before the daughters were getting dad drunk and seducing him in order to continue his seed in the new barren world. But that’s another story.
Genesis 19:24 Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;
25 And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
26 But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.
27 And Abraham gat up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the LORD:
28 And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.
“Lot’s wife, fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, looked back and turned into a pillar of salt (or “a shadow-print… — just as were so many vaporized human beings at Hiroshima.” Extraterrestrials in Biblical Prophecy.
Matest M. Agrest, Russian-born ethnologist and mathematician, “startled his colleagues in 1959 with his assertion that the giant terrace at Baalbek in Lebanon had been used as a launch site for space vehicles and that the destruction of the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah (twin cities in ancient Palestine on the plain of Jordan) was caused by a nuclear blast.”
