“Thus both the daughters of Lot became
pregnant by their father”.
Anyone under the impression that
the Bible is a boringly respectable book clearly hasn’t read it. Today’s story
is a shocking tale of incest and disgrace. Lot, who was Abraham’s nephew, had
travelled with him to Canaan. Warned by God, he had fled from Sodom and
Gomorrah just before they were destroyed by a rain of sulphurous fire. His
wife, however, had been turned to a pillar of salt when she looked back at the
burning cities. Now Lot and his two daughters were alone in a foreign land. The
daughters realised they had no hope of finding husbands. Unless they took
drastic action they were doomed to remain unmarried and childless. Their
father’s name would die out, which seemed to them a terrible thing – Lot’s
views are not recorded. So they got Lot drunk and, one after another, while he
was unconscious, had sex with him. Each conceived and bore a child. The child
of the oldest daughter was called Moab, the child of the second Ben-ammi. The
end of the story explains that these were the ancestors of the Moabites and the
Ammonites, tribes which later became bitter enemies of Israel.
The story is told, in part, to
heap scorn on tribes with which Israel had long running feuds. In a society
which regarded incest with horror, this was the worst insult that the Biblical
writers could throw at them (though later a Moabite would become the
grandmother of their greatest king – see Dec 18 )
·
What do you think of Lot’s daughters’
actions? What alternatives would they have had?
·
What might Lot have felt when he realised
what had happened?
·
Logically, no one is to blame for the
circumstances in which they are conceived, yet children have often suffered
because they were illegitimate, or because their families weren’t considered
respectable in some way. What might it feel like to grow up in the shadow of
some sort of family disgrace?
·
Pray for those whose childhoods are blighted
through no fault of their own.
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