Lot and His Daughters

by David Epstein

February 8, 2001

 

 

The men of Sodom were busy doing their thing. They were experiencing the hedonistic pleasures of the flesh with their fellow men. In the Biblical sense, they were getting to “know” each other.

 

The issue of homosexuality is explored in various places in the Bible, but most poignantly through the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Whatever one may think about the morality of engaging in such sexual practices, the story illustrates how God brought swift judgement against those people he deemed to be sinners.

 

In the midst of this story is a short scene where Lot speaks with some of the men who are doing their thing. From Genesis, Chapter 19, verse 5, the men asked Lot to bring them some more men (the 2 angels) for their orgies. In verse 6, Lot responds: “I pray you, my brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters that have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes; only unto these men do nothing; forasmuch as they are come under the shadow of my roof.”

 

Two ideas come to mind from this last verse. First, Lot wishes to protect the “men” who are staying with him. This shows his concern for watching out for the strangers in his midst, the visitors. That’s something which has been valued by Jews throughout their history. Second, Lot doesn’t want the men to engage in homosexual practice. Inherent in both of these ideas is the selfless sacrifice of personal action for the sake of the greater good. This greater good is the moral righteousness expected by God to be upheld by the people. Specifically, related to the story at hand, thou shalt take care of the stranger, and thou shalt refrain from homosexual behavior.

 

As part of this sacrifice, Lot is willing to let the men have direct sexual experience with his own daughters. He would sacrifice their innocence, and forego his parental duty to protect them from such abominations, in order to uphold the greater collective good. He has made a value judgement that it would be better for his own daughters to lose their virginity rather than for these men, who he doesn’t even know, to fornicate with each other. In addition to this, he is making the decision on behalf of his daughters; they have absolutely no say in this decision.

 

Suffice it to say that offering the daughters unto them is a payoff, a bribe if you will. Lot is set to sacrifice them, for God’s sake in a way, like Abraham was close to sacrificing Isaac. The daughters have no freedom, no choice in the matter. They are merely chattle to secure some leverage for the top-down designed ‘greater common good’. The fact that the men turn down this offer is beside the point. The damage was done once the offer was made.

 

The saving grace to this argument could be that Lot evidently was trying to save people from the impending doom the city was about to face. It’s possible he was attempting to prevent the spread of God-defined sinful behavior. Coupled with this could have been Lot being a messenger of Abraham and God, to find 5 righteous people to spare the wrath of God upon the Sodomites.

 

Evidently, he did not, for God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah and all of their residents. No mercy for those lot, so to speak. Not for them, nor for Lot’s wife who unfortunately was turned into sodium chloride simply because she took a peek. Oh what becomes of those who have little faith and don’t follow instructions.

 

Lot, however, survived the ordeal. He was loyal to his God all along. Even before the destruction of the cities, Lot thanked him for being saved. In verse 19, he acknowledges that God ‘hast magnified thy mercy, which thou hast shown unto me in saving my life.’ In verse 20, he pleads with God to “let me escape thether ... and my soul shall live”. It’s not clear whether God saved him, or that Lot fortuitously survived the ordeal.

 

Starting with verse 30, the daughters reemerge in quite a remarkable scene. After the fire and brimstone holocaust, Lot takes his daughters into a cave because he “feared to dwell in Zoar”. There are virtually no survivors, hence, no men for the daughters to take as husbands, but more importantly from the standpoint of ancient Hebrew virtues, no possibility for procreation. In verse 33, the eldest daughter says “Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.” In verse 34, the eldest daughter acknowledges that she slept with her father and encourages the younger daughter to do likewise.

 

Now, this is not the first example of incest in the Bible. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that far from being something taboo during that period, it was a customary practice. One interpretation of this passage is that the daughters took it upon themselves to carry on the descendency. To the crux of the matter, they themselves didn’t matter because they were women. Only a son could legitimately pass the torch of descendency and hence preserve the lineage.

 

Another interpretation involves the concept of perpetuating the species. According to evolutionary theory, there are deep-rooted forces which drive a species to pass on their genes. These forces most likely are the product of biological inheritance, but the main thrust of the movement is the long-term survival of the species. The fact that the ‘forces’ are inherited provides us with some useful information, but that in itself doesn’t give us the whole picture, for the biological inheritance could equally have passed on a tendency for impotence, asexuality, astheticism, or other characteristics or values which would dampen the ability to procreate. No, it’s quite clear that through some combination of sexual desire, yearning for sons and daughters, religious and cultural values of the long-term survival and worthiness of a people, and power are at work instantiating this phenomena. In this vein, Lot’s daughters were expressing their biological urges to procreate, with the added by-product they would hopefully generate male progeny.

 

This interpretation, however accurate it may be in its description, nevertheless still doesn’t paint the entire picture for us. It’s not complete. The reason is that Lot’s eldest daughter makes a conscious decision to sleep with her father. She’s not blindly driven by biological impulse. Biological urge may be one factor, but there are many others to consider. The daughter is aware of the post Sodom & Gomorrah realities of the world and she has keenly sized them up. The need to produce a son is a custom she consciously values not just for herself, but for the Jewish people in its entirety.

 

Here again, we see the element of personal sacrifice for the ‘greater good’. Or do we? Is this really a sacrifice? After all, the concepts of “innocence” and “personal freedom” are modern social constructs we are retroactively applying to this ancient people. From the standpoints of sociology and anthropology, it doesn’t make sense to do this. We must try to see things from the point of view of the prevailing customs, practices, taboos, virtues, and values of that period. So what I said about Lot willing to “sacrifice” his daughters in an above paragraph might not apply either, for it might have been a normalized practice in their time.

 

Nevertheless, if we are to accept the idea that the Bible can provide our modern society with insights, examples, virtues, and the like, about how we can live upright lives in our own society, then it is equally noteworthy to judge the ancients by our own standards. First, it reveals something about ourselves, particularly what we value and how that’s applied. Second, it tells us something about how we’ve evolved to what we are today.

 

So to be consistent with what I said earlier, Lot’s daughters are sacrificing their own virtues, their own “innocence”, for the common good! And they did it with their own father, who’s seed produced them, and who’s seed they were now taking to perpetuate the species! Those are some seeds indeed. And if we fast-forward the story a bit, both daughters bore a son. The lineage is thus extended an additional generation.

 

A third interpretation involves a bit of a stretch, but has some plausibility if we consider the possibility that the daughters somehow found out about Lot’s earlier “offer” to the men of Sodom. This could have made them very angry, for they might have felt that Lot had no right to make such a high-impact personal decision for them. Sleeping with their father would be revenge for his betrayal. But Lot’s daughter doesn’t show any sign of being angry, or for that matter, being a vengeful person. In the verses I’ve cited, she doesn’t speak about anything he did, only about the lofty custom she consciously desires to perpetuate. Therefore, I don’t think this third interpretation has significant merit, though it’s a natural idea for the external 3^rd person reader to consider.

 

Finally, we must say something about why she had to “make him drink wine”. First, it’s not clear whether this was to loosen his inhibitions or to put him in a state of mind where we wouldn’t know what he was doing. Making him less inhibited could improve his ability to perform, but as we see in verse 33, “he knew not when he lied down”. From this, we can infer that Lot would not have slept with his daughters out of choice. It could have been anathema to him, or he was concerned with his virility, or was concerned about the impact it would have on family dynamics, etc. But the flip side of this is that once the inebriation wore off, or when he awoke, he would find out about it and say “I did what?! It was lots of what, you said?!” Hmm. Perhaps it was some type of payback or revenge! Who knows.