You aren’t going to like this story. It involves someone who was supposed to be a good person, and who had been shown great mercy by God, doing something terrible. And it was far worse than Noah’s escapade into drunkenness that ended with a curse on his grandson. This story is, to me, one of the saddest stories in the Bible. It’s the story of a man who was supposed to be a good man falling into a sin that even the worst of humanity does not often practice. This is not a story for children.
I’m going to skim over the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah because it is not an obscure story, though some parts of it probably count as obscure. I will say this about it, though: the city of Sodom, as evidenced by the last story and this one that I am skipping over, had a great friend in Abram. First Abram freed their captives. And then, when God revealed to him that He was going to destroy the city, Abram prayed very earnestly for the city, practically begging God not to do it.
Though Sodom couldn’t be saved, you remember from my last post (if you don’t know it from any other source) that the city had a very important resident: Abram’s nephew, Lot. And two angels sent Lot and his family out in the nick of time, telling him to run into the mountains. Lot didn’t want to go there and asked permission to flee to a small city instead. Permission granted, they went there, though Lot’s wife died on the way.
Lot had either two or four daughters, and no sons. If he had four daughters, his two older daughters were married and died in Sodom with their husbands. If he only had two, they were engaged to men from Sodom who died there. The story is not clear on this point, and there is some disagreement. But what is clear is this: Lot arrived in Zoar, the little city that was spared for his sake, but he arrived without his wife or any of his possessions, not even that huge flock of sheep that he once owned, but not quite alone. He had with him his two teenage daughters.
Something spooked Lot about Zoar. The commentaries suggested that he thought it was going to be destroyed, too, only later. Perhaps once he got there he realized that it was just as bad as Sodom. He finally did what the angel suggested and went to the mountains. My opinion is that he went there at the wrong time. He should have gone there right away and only temporarily. Now it was time to humble himself, take his girls, and go back to Abram for help. Abram obviously loved Lot, and would have given him shelter. But this did not happen. He headed for the hills instead. He brought with him his girls, and, somehow, a large amount of alcohol—wine, I guess. Maybe he was seeking to drown his sorrow at the loss of his wife, and to obliterate the memory of the sight of the destruction of his home. If he had lost two older daughters as well, of course his grief would have been almost unfathomable.
Somehow or other the two girls got the idea that the entire world had come to an end, except for the three of them. What they did next they did with the noblest of intentions. They thought they were preserving humanity. Some of the commentaries I looked at suggested they also were trying to bring forth the Messiah.
What they did was to make their father drunk. And then the older girl went to him and lay down with him just as their mother would have done, and made him, in his drunken stupor, think she was his wife. She got what she was after.
Then they did it again the next night for the younger daughter.
I don’t know how Lot allowed this to happen to him twice. Maybe he didn’t really sober up between times, and that was the girls’ hope in doing this on two consecutive nights. Maybe he was so broken as a human being after all he had been through already that he was becoming an alcoholic. If so, this definitely wouldn’t have helped him to feel better about himself. No one knows what happened to Lot after this. After his youngest daughter did her thing, he is never mentioned again in the narrative of Scripture. Some of the things already recorded about him are mentioned again, but we are not told anything of what happened to him after this. One Biblical-historical novel I read years ago suggested that Lot may have either committed suicide or abandoned his daughters. I don’t know that he would have done anything that drastic, but then again, what the girls did was drastic.
You’d have thought that these girls would have been ashamed of what they had done. But that’s not what happened. Nine months later each of them gave birth to sons. The elder girl named her son Moab, proudly proclaiming his parentage. His name meant, “from my father.” The younger girl’s son was named “Ben-ammi,” meaning “son of my people.” The descendants of both of these boys would show up in Scripture later, often as troublemakers for the Israelites—the Moabites and the Ammonites.
But that’s not the only way Moab’s descendants show up. I’ll explain in a little while.
First, I want to comment on something. I have heard of people who hate the Bible citing this story as a reason to hate it. Some people seem to think that because something is in the Bible that must mean it’s being proclaimed as a good thing, as though God were putting his stamp of approval on what these two girls did to their father, and on their father for allowing it, simply because it is there, in the holy Scriptures. Some people seem to think that we Christians think that the Bible only tells good things, and that we would be shocked out of our belief in the Bible if we knew some of the horrible stories that were there.
I’m not afraid of that happening. I’m not ashamed of this story, and I don’t want to hide this story as a way of protecting the Bible and making it more palatable. It isn’t even the worst story. I skipped one that was worse. There were some sordid things going on in Sodom just before it was destroyed—in Lot’s house, in the presence of the angels who were there to rescue him. Lot, because of the custom in his country of protection of guests, felt forced to offer to do something that to us seems downright criminal. Nor is even that the worst story in the Bible. The story I would say is the worst of all is found in the last few chapters of Judges. There are two stories there that no one ever hears about. One of them I will very much enjoy telling in my blog when I get to it. The other one is absolutely sick. I have been debating whether or not I’m going to tell that story, and I still haven’t decided.
These horrible stories are in the Bible because they happened. God is not absent when bad things are going on, when people are doing terrible things to one another. Why, in His wisdom, He allows them I don’t know, but I’m sure I will know, if I need to, when I get to heaven. He is fully present and active even in the worst of times, and the book of Job teaches us that He restrains evil, so that it can go no farther than He says it can go, and it stops when He says it stops.
Just after the wretched story that closes the book of Judges, there is a very short book in the Bible, telling one of the most beautiful love stories of all time. And it is about a descendant of Moab: Ruth. Ruth was a descendant of Lot through his elder daughter, but she married into the tribe of Judah, and was the great-grandmother of King David. She was an ancestress of Jesus, thus taking her from a shameful genealogical past and putting her into the most noble genealogy of all.
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