The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

Frightened by the sight of the smoking rubble in the valley where Sodom and Gomorrah used to be, Lot gathers his daughters and goes up into the mountains, as the angels originally told him to do. There he finds a cave and sets up house in it.

Then his first born has an idea. With no men around, and no chance of any stopping by, she worries about Lot never having any children to carry on the family name. “Come,” she says to her sister, “let us make our father drink wine, and let us lie with him that we may preserve our family through our father.”

The thought may be abhorrent to us, but remember all the people who exist in the world at that time are committing numerous forms of what we would call incest today, because there is no one else available; everyone stems from Noah and his no-name wife, who obviously were the progeny of Adam and Eve.

The younger daughter agrees, and that night they made their father drink wine, “and the firstborn went in and lay with her father; and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose.” But he evidently knew what to do while she was there.

The next night is a repeat of the first, with the younger daughter going “in to lie with him, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose.”

But you have to hand it to Lot. So drunk he didn’t even know he had a bed partner, he was still able to get both of his daughters pregnant. The man had really powerful swimmers.

The first born gave birth to Moab, who became the father of the Moabites; the younger daughter gave birth to Ben-ammi, who became the father of the Ammonites.

It’s already quite clear I’m not a biblical scholar, and I freely admit it, so I am somewhat puzzled by this passage. But since the Jews are so concerned with provenance and the order of generations, I assume this is important because it details the origins of two large geographical areas in the bible: Moab and Ammon, homes, of course, of the Moabites and Ammonites. Because they were founded more than thirty-two hundred years ago, their entire history is unclear.