Lot's Daughters

The incident, related in Gen.19.30-38, whereby the two daughters of Lot became the mothers of children by their own father has been used by many a commentator and in many a homily to illustrate the depravity and corruption of that far-off day but the strictures all too often do not take into account vital differences between that day and ours. The standards and conventions of four thousand years ago were not as those of today and some of the reasons that similar conduct is now rightly regarded as reprehensible did not then apply.

The story is set in the shadow of the catastrophic overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah.The patriarch Lot, with his two young daughters, had been saved from the holocaust and taken refuge in a cave on the high mountain which stands at the south-east corner of the Dead Sea. From their refuge, five thousand feet above the plain, they could see the devastated area below them and realised that all life had been obliterated. They had at first found shelter in the little town of Zoar some sixteen miles from Sodom but, the record tells us, they "feared to dwell in Zoar", perhaps because the Canaanite inhabitants were not too friendly or perhaps they feared that Zoar in its turn would be involved and destroyed; the conflagration probably went on for weeks and spread over a wide area. So they were eking out a sparse and primitive existence on this un-inhabited mountain-top. It was here that the two girls, despairing of finding husbands, resorted to this desperate expedient in order to ensure posterity to their father. "Our father is old " said one to the other "and there is not a man in the earth to come in to us after the manner of all the earth", This need not necessarily mean that they thought all human life had been destroyed from the earth; the word for "earth" here can be limited in its meaning to the land around them and from their elevated position they could see some seventy miles to the horizon which would take in much of the land of Canaan where Abraham dwelt; they would perceive that the highlands of Judah were still green and fertile. More likely they saw no avenue of escape from their mountain fastness across the desolated plain below and felt that they were permanently cut off from the rest of the world.

The daughters justified their action by necessity, but the entire episode is better understood when it is remembered that at that early stage in the history of the race, marriage was customary within much closer relationships than is considered either ethically or biologically sound now. The progressive physical degeneration which has continued from the beginning had not sapped human vitality to the extent it has now. Men and women lived longer and were more virile. In Old Testament history we find that Abraham and Nahor his brother both married their nieces; nearly a thousand years later a possible marriage between David's son Amnon and his half-sister Tamar was considered quite proper (2 Sam.13.13) although this was in fact forbidden by the Mosaic Law. Another and earlier Tamar saw nothing improper in bearing a child to her father-in-law Judah in order to maintain the family line (Gen.38). Outside Old Testament records, it was a frequent occurrence for kings of nations to marry their own sisters with the object of keeping the line of descent in one family. Every one of the eleven Pharaohs of the famous Egyptian 18th dynasty, under some of whom the Oppression and Exodus of Israel took place, took their own sisters, daughters or half-sisters to wife, one even marrying two of his own daughters. Abhorrent as the idea might be to modern minds, therefore, it has to be admitted that Lot's daughters were not so far removed from the general thought of their times and the solution they found to their problem should be viewed accordingly.

The two children became ancestors of nations which multiplied to inhabit the territory east of the Dead Sea, the Moabites and the Ammonites. Both nations were thorns in the side of Israel in after days. One noteworthy fact is that Ruth, an ancestress of Christ, was a Moabitess. Had it not been for the action taken by the two daughters in that cave on the Canaanitish mountain above the ruined cities, one of the most appealing characters in the whole of Bible history would not have lived, and the Book of Ruth would never have been written.

AOH