Lot is the hapless nephew of Abraham, the patriarch and “paradigm of the man of faith”1 on whom God bestows a rich and enduring blessing: “I will make of thee a great nation,” God tells Abraham (Gen. 12:2). Lot, by contrast, is something of a schlemiel who tags along after Abraham and relies on his kindly uncle to get him out of trouble-According to one of the oddest passages of the Bible, Abraham—a gentle old man “rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold” (Gen. 13:2)—is shown as a rough-and-ready campaigner who mounts up and rides out at the head of an army to rescue Lot from a powerful king who has taken Lot hostage (Gen. 14:14–16). The last and greatest of Abraham’s favors to Lot—an act of audacity that Abraham does not undertake even when God orders him to sacrifice his own son—is the patriarch’s plea to God to spare the righteous of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18:23), Lot and his family presumably among them.
The jury of biblical exegetes, so to speak, is hung when it comes to the question of whether Lot is righteous at all. One faction insists that Lot, like his Uncle Abe, is “perfect and pious,” as one of the sages put it.2 Christian tradition regards Lot as a “righteous man,” in the words of Peter, who likens him to Noah and argues that the rescue of Lot and his family from Sodom is a sign of God’s willingness to “deliver the godly out of temptations” (2 Pet. 2:7–9 Scofield KJV). The Koran characterizes Lot, like Mohammed himself, as a prophet sent by Allah to rebuke the wicked.3 The other faction holds that Lot is not much better than his fellow Sodomites: Lot is described elsewhere in rabbinical literature as “lascivious,”4 and it is suggested that he chose to settle in Sodom precisely because he was attracted by the ribald goings-on.
The Bible itself is undecided on the moral worthiness of Lot. But it appears that sleeping with his own daughters in a drunken stupor—not once but twice—is the least of his crimes.
GOOD AND EVIL IN THE STORY OF LOT
Lot’s righteousness—or lack of it—is the unspoken subtext of a remarkable debate between the patriarch Abraham and the Almighty over the fate of Sodom, where the question takes on life-and-death implications for Lot and his family. Abraham, who will later raise a knife to his son’s throat at God’s command without a single word of protest, summons up the courage to argue with God over good and evil, a gesture of defiance that may seem bizarre to any Bible reader who is under the impression that God prefers his believers to shut up and do what they are told.
One hot afternoon, as the story is told in Genesis, God* couple of his angelic sidekicks appear at Abraham’s tent “by the terebinths of Mamre” in the guise of desert travelers, and Abraham hastens to make them welcome by washing their feet and serving them a meal Since the dietary laws against mixing meat and milk will not go into effect until Moses comes along a few centuries later, the divine guests dig into a distinctly nonkosher meal that includes a veal roast and “curd and milk” (Gen. 18:1–8).
God’s traveling companions are on their way to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah “because their sin is exceedingly grievous” (Gen. 18:20). God, who lingers behind, feels obliged to confide their mission of mass destruction to Abraham, apparently out of loyalty to the human being with whom he has recently made “an everlasting covenant” (Gen. 17:8 Scofield KJV). The otherwise compliant and uncomplaining Abraham has the chutzpah to argue with the Almighty over his bloodthirsty intentions toward Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities of sin and wretched excess.
“Will Thou indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” says Abraham, acting as the self-appointed defender of the Sodomites, among whom his nephew Lot is numbered (Gen. 18:23).
After much carping and cajoling by Abraham, who haggles with the Almighty like a bazaar merchant, God finally concedes that if he finds as few as ten righteous souls in Sodom, then the whole city will be spared (Gen. 18:25–32). (For that reason, some sources suggest, the minyan or prayer quorum required for a Jewish religious service is ten.5) But we are forced to conclude that the Sodomites could not scrape together even a minyan, because the angelic messengers proceed to destroy not only Sodom and Gomorrah but several other “cities of the Plain” without mercy to man, woman, or child (Gen. 19:29).
As it turns out, however, Lot and his family are spared from the famous “hellfire and brimstone” that sweeps away the rest of the Sodomites, but not because they are declared to be righteous by God or anyone else. “[E]ven the righteous in these sin-laden cities, though better than the rest, were far from good,” a rabbinical sage would later say.6 So Lot’s good fortune is yet another favor from his uncle—or a favor that God is willing to do for the otherwise undeserving kinfolk of his chosen one, Abraham.7 “God remembered Abraham,” the Bible pauses to tell us, “and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow (Gen. 19:29).
A TRAGIC BUFFOON
If Lot is not a righteous and upright man, exactly what are his crimes and misdemeanors? Much attention is paid in religious literature to the fine points of the hospitality that Lot extends to the two strangers who show up in Sodom on the eve of destruction. We are asked to believe that, according to the ethical code—and, more important, the etiquette—of the time and place where Lot lived, he did the right thing. “The spectacle of a father offering his virgin daughters to the will and pleasure of a mob that was seeking to despoil his household,” offers one apologist, “would not have seemed as shocking to the ancient sense of proprieties as it may seem to us.”8
Astoundingly, scholars and sages over the centuries have tended to overlook the most obvious and abhorrent conduct of Lot, and they spend much breath and ink in debating whether, for example, Lot ought to be condemned because he procrastinates in leaving Sodom or because he haggles with the angels over the place of refuge. A favorite subject is the comparison of Abraham and Lot as good hosts: Lot is found wanting because Abraham ran to meeting the angelic visitors who appeared at his tent while Lot “display[ed] no effort to go in haste” when they showed up in Sodom!9
Even these supposed failings are excused by most sermonizers and exegetes. Lot’s dillydallying before actually leaving Sodom is characterized as the cautious conduct that we might expect “of any home owner,” and Lot’s slightly ludicrous plea that the little town of Zoar* be spared is motivated not by Lot’s desire for a more convenient refuge but by “an understandable concern for small and helpless things.”10 At worst, Lot is criticized as “passive, foppish, [and] foolish.”11
When it comes to the most grotesque and repulsive of Lot’s conduct—his willingness to cast his daughters to the mob—the apologists offer two thin excuses. First, we are told that the ancient laws of hospitality imposed on Lot a sacred obligation to protect his guests, even at the risk of his family and his own life. The fact that the guests turn out to be angels, which is not yet known to Lot at the moment when he offers his daughters to the mob, is entirely beside the point; a couple of nameless drifters, we are instructed, are no less worthy of Lot’s hospitality than a team of heavenly messengers. Second, we are asked to believe that children were regarded as something less precious in biblical times than they are today, more nearly chattel than loved ones, and so a father was at liberty to do with his children (and especially his daughters) exactly as he pleased.
Now, it is true that a strict and perhaps even sacred code of hospitality prevailed among the desert-dwelling nomads of the ancient Near East, as it does among the Bedouins of the contemporary Near East: “As soon as a stranger had touched the tent-rope,” explains one contemporary rabbinical scholar, “he could claim guest-right.”12 Survival in the wilderness may depend on the generosity and goodwill of travelers who encounter each other by chance, and it was held to be a solemn duty to shelter a stranger who appeared at one’s tent. The Bedouin code of hospitality traditionally requires that strangers be offered food, drink, and a place to sleep for no less than three days even if the host is so poor that he is reduced to starvation by his efforts.13
Some anthropologists suggest that the duty of a good host extended even to providing sexual companionship to his
guests, a practice that was supposedly observed among certain Bedouin tribes, “the modern-day heirs of Abraham,” as recently as the last century.14 If Lot regarded himself as obliged to extend a similar kind of “hospitality,” of course, then the offer of his daughters for the sexual pleasure of the mob may have been even less remarkable in his own eyes, even if it strikes us as still more grotesque than the scene presented in the Bible itself.
It is true, too, that biblical law bestowed upon an Israelite father a considerable degree of authority over his family and especially his children. A father was empowered to mete out punishment to his offspring, to exclude them from his household, or even to sell them into slavery or concubinage as a pledge for a debt.15 The Book of Deuteronomy authorizes a father to put a rebellious son to death, at least under certain narrow circumstances (Deut. 21:18–21). And, not unlike other times and places (including our own), a male child was valued more highly than a female child in the biblical world and the Bible itself. Only male children inherited property from their father, and a daughter was expected to marry into her husband’s family—“and so,” as one Bible scholar puts it, “the strength of a house was not measured by the number of its daughters.”16 For all of these reasons, some critics and commentators conclude that Lot simply does not value his daughters highly enough to place their safety above his duties to the strangers who sheltered under his roof.
So we are asked to exonerate and even to praise Lot for offering his daughters to the mob in order to protect his houseguests. Even if surrendering his daughters was “abhorrent to Hebrew morality,” as one commentator concedes, we are supposed to regard Lot not as a craven coward but as “a courageous champion of the obligations of hospitality in a situation of extreme embarrassment,”17 which we are encouraged to see as a higher calling than, say, the physical safety of one’s children. Above all, we are urged not to render a moral judgment on the conduct of Lot as reported in the Bible—an ironic argument to make in defense of a book that is supposed to be the definitive authority on good and evil.
“The surprising offer of his daughters must not be judged simply by our Western ideas,” urged Gerhard von Rad, a distinguished commentator on Genesis. “That Lot intends under no circumstances to violate his hospitality, that his guests were for him more untouchable than his own daughters, must have gripped the ancient reader.”18
What grips the modern reader, by contrast, is Lot’s readiness to allow “the claims of courtesy [to] transcend moral obligations of fatherhood,” as one Bible scholar rather delicately puts it.19 And it is simply not enough to shrug and say that we cannot understand how men and women who lived a few thousand years ago must have felt about their children. Even the first readers of these stories could not have failed to recoil at Lot’s readiness to consign his daughters to gang rape, if only because, “as any Israelite reader of this text would know,”20 the crime of rape is flatly condemned in biblical law and harshly punished in biblical legend. (See chapters four and fourteen.) Both the Bible itself and the weight of biblical scholarship confirm that children were regarded by the Israelites as nothing less than “a precious gift from God” and the fulfillment of God’s oft-repeated promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he would “multiply [their] seed.”21
The attitude of the biblical author toward Lot is not spoken out loud, but it is hard to miss in an open-eyed reading of the Bible. Lot is depicted as neither a coward nor a champion; rather, he is shown to be a clown: “A tragic buffoon,”22 in the words of one contemporary Bible scholar; “a laughing stock,” “a jester,” “a passive fool” according to another.23 The encounters between Lot and his neighbors, his family, and his angelic rescuers remind us of the pig’s bladder, the comic patter, and the blue humor of the vaudeville stage. As I have tried to suggest in my own retelling of the story, Lot’s banter with the destroying angels over the fate of the “little town” called Zoar is the stuff of an Abbott and Costello routine, not a morality play.
“[T]he story of Lot and his desperate daughters ought to be told in a Yiddish accent,” observes one dramatist who turned the story of Lot and his daughters into a stage play, “ending with: ‘So, after all that work what happened? Their kids were goyim!’”24
When it comes to the forbidden sexual union of father and daughters, however, the biblical storyteller is straight-faced and even solemn. Neither Lot nor his daughters are criticized in the Bible or the religious literature that tries to explain away their sexual misadventures in that mountain cave overlooking a blasted Sodom. For his part, Lot is regarded as wholly innocent of what happens after his daughters ply him with wine and send him into a drunken stupor: “Lot is the victim, rather than the instigator, of this disgraceful affair,” says one commentator.25 And even his daughters, as we shall see, are regarded as heroines rather than seductresses. Incest, the biblical author seems to suggest, is hardly the worst offense against the moral order, especially when survival of the species, the kingship of Israel, and the birth of the Messiah appear to be at stake.
INCEST IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Ever since Sigmund Freud replaced the Heavenly Father as a source of moral law, we have been taught to regard the taboo against incest as something deep and powerful, ancient and universal, and that is why the scenes of sexual intercourse between Lot and his own daughters are so shocking and unseemly when we encounter the story in the Holy Bible. But the fact is that the biblical world (and, as we shall see, the Bible authors) regarded incest with far less horror than we might suppose by reading the catalog of sexual prohibitions in the Book of Leviticus.
Sexual relations between blood relatives were not universally condemned in the faiths and cultures of the ancient Near East. For example, the civilizations of Mesopotamia, the place where Abraham and Lot were born, tolerated incest among gods if not among ordinary human beings. Although a prohibition against sexual intercourse between a father and his daughter is literally chiseled in stone in the Code of Hammurabi, the sacred myths of ancient Mesopotamia depicted the gods in sexual couplings with their own offspring and siblings.26
The laws and customs of ancient Egypt, the place to which Abraham and Lot traveled in search of sustenance during a famine, were more evenhanded: Gods and human beings alike were permitted to engage in incestuous marriages under certain circumstances. Since under Egyptian law property descended from a mother to her eldest daughter, rather than from father to son, a father might resort to marrying his own daughter (or a son might marry his sister) in order to prevent the family wealth from falling under the control of an outsider.27And a reigning pharaoh might wed his own sister in imitation of the myth of Isis and Osiris, the sibling-lovers with whom the rulers of Egypt identified themselves.28
The land of Canaan, located to the west of Mesopotamia and to the north of Egypt, fell within the contesting spheres of influence of both civilizations, and the Israelites who came to live in Canaan encountered a local tradition that imagined the Canaanite god called Baal in sexual union with his sister, Anat. Still, by the time the Israelites conquered and settled in Canaan after the Exodus from Egypt, the laws that are preserved in the Five Books of Moses—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—plainly and pointedly condemned all forms of incest as practiced by non-Israelites:
“After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do,” the Bible commands in the Book of Leviticus, “and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do” (Lev. 18:3).
Thus, the Bible specifically forbids sexual intercourse between an Israelite and any blood relative: mother or father, sister or brother, aunt or uncle, children or grandchildren, even in-laws and stepparents. “None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I am the Lord,” is how the King James Version introduces the whole notion of incest, using a common biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse. And then, lest anyone start looking for loopholes, a veritable catalog of forbidden sexual conduct begins: “The nakedn
ess of thy father, and the nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover…. The nakedness of thy sister…. The nakedness of thy father’s wife’s daughter …” and so on (Lev. 18:6–30).
Of course, according to the sequence of events described in the Bible itself, Lot and his daughters were not subject to any formal law against incest, since the legal codes found in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were not handed down until God revealed them to Moses several centuries later. But modern biblical scholarship generally assumes that much (if not all) of the Bible was compiled and reduced to writing in its present form sometime around 600 B.C.E.* by editors (or “redactors”) who drew on sources and traditions of great antiquity, added glosses and even whole new passages of their own, and tacked on new books of more recent authorship. For that reason, the authors and editors who compiled the stories that we find in Genesis were thoroughly familiar with the law codes that appear in Leviticus, and so it seems likely that they regarded incest as a forbidden act when they were retelling the story of Lot and his daughters. (See appendix: Who Really Wrote the Bible?)
Yet the very first act of incest reported in the Bible—Lot and his daughters—draws no punishment at all. Even when Reuben, the eldest son of the patriarch Jacob, slips into the bed of his father’s concubine, Bilhah, he faces no consequences of any kind until the final illness of his father, when he finds out for the first time that he will be denied the inheritance that is due to him as the firstborn son. “[T]hou shalt not excel,” says the dying patriarch to Reuben when the time comes to hand out the blessings and the curses, “because thou wentest up to thy father’s bed; then defiledst thou it” (Gen. 35:22, 49:4).
The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible Page 5