Genesis 19:30-38

I’d…
You know there won’t be people here.
Welcome back, friends.
Glad you’re with us today.
We are nearly done with the difficult section we’ve been in,
in Genesis, which has primarily to do with Sodom and Gomorrah,
that part of the story.
Really is kind of behind us,
but there’s one lingering end yet to be tied up,
and that is Lot and his daughters.
You’ll remember that Lot escaped with his wife and daughters as Sodom and Gomorrah was being destroyed.
His wife looked back,
and for whatever reason,
whether it was regret or
disobedience or something else that maybe hasn’t translated very well in the text,
she was turned into a pillar of salt,
which leaves Lot and his daughters to some extent
to fend for themselves.
And this is one of those uncomfortable stories.
It’s one of those stories that on the surface we read and we think, “What?
That’s in the Bible?”
It’s also one of those stories, interestingly enough,
that God doesn’t make an
appearance in this story.
There’s no judgment.
Sodom and Gomorrah has just been
devastated,
and as people parse out why that is,
they point to the Old Testament laws of various types,
all of which sit right beside a law
which condemns today’s story as well,
but there’s really no mention.
And we’ll tell you ultimately why we think this story is in here and what it points to,
but let’s read it first and we’ll deal with it then.
So verse 30 here.
Lot went up out of Zor,
settled in the hills with his two daughters,
for he was afraid
to stay in Zor,
so he lived in a cave with his daughters.
And the firstborn said to the younger,
“Our father’s old.
There’s not a man on earth to come to us after the manner of all the world.
Come, let us make our father drink wine,
and we will lie with him that we may preserve
offspring through our father.”
So they made their father drink wine that night,
and the firstborn went in and lay with her father.
He did not know when she lay down or when she rose.
The next day, the firstborn said to the younger,
“I laid with our father last night.
Let us make him drink wine tonight also,
that you may lie with him and preserve our
offspring through our father.”
So they made their father drink wine again that night,
and the younger rose and lay with
him, and he did not know when she lay down or when she rose.
Thus, both daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father.
The firstborn,
let’s stop there, Michael.
We’ll hold on.
We’ll get to those last verses at the end.
So again,
a very strange story,
a very messy, ugly story.
The two daughters here who lost their fiancés,
essentially the husbands of a sort in that culture,
to this punishment in Sodom and Gomorrah,
now are desperate to continue the
line.
We’ve seen how important lineage is,
and feeling that they have no other options,
they here deceive their father,
they make their father drunk.
The text
really, I think, tries to defend him in saying that he didn’t know this was
happening, he wasn’t aware of this.
We could argue what that means and what it doesn’t mean and how possible that is.
But really, the story is,
I think, giving Lot a little bit of a pass here and probably
putting the impetus of this on the daughters.
But these are the measures that they’re willing to take in order to continue their
line and in order to become parents.
Yeah, and there’s a few different layers to this.
So let’s just start with the obvious,
that being that this story is uncomfortable,
it’s uncomfortable to read.
And part of that discomfort for us comes,
we don’t share the same cultural
understanding of the absolute importance of having a lineage and an air.
We very much have a much more egalitarian kind of understanding of what it means to
have your name sort of continue on.
And in fact,
in post-exilic Judaism or following that time and era of the Jews being
returned to Israel and Jesus and his day and beyond,
there’s that idea of eternal life and
the idea that in the end,
all will be made right.
But at this stage of the Jewish community,
the understanding of that eternal life lives in the
passing on of your family.
We’ve mentioned this before.
The reason I mention it now is it provides a kind of motivation that doesn’t make this
story less troubling to modern years.
But if you share that understanding that we are essentially going to watch our father’s
name end here in this cave, this dead end,
really,
and our own life has come to an end because of it,
there’s maybe a sense in which that begins to have its own kind of
meaning, a kind of taking agency in the situation where you’re going to see that connect to
the previous biblical story that we’ve already seen, this thread.
When people take God’s plan into their own hands,
it almost always leads down forks in
the road that are not desirable.
And so as you see this happening now between Lot and his daughters,
you can already anticipate that this is probably not going to be looked upon as a positive move or it’s
going to at least have some negative connotation.
And so once again,
we see humans taking God’s plan into their own hands and in doing so,
they really warped that plan from the start.
I want to be careful with this.
So push back, Michael, if this is overstated.
But in the book of Genesis,
I think
there are moments we see God’s stories and there
are moments we see people’s stories.
And what I mean by that,
we’ve said over and over again that the scripture is God’s story.
That is completely true.
But there are moments when Genesis puts forward human drama and when God is not
mentioned specifically, when God is not the front and center character,
sometimes those stories are trying to tell us human details.
They connect to earthy and earthly stories.
And it is very likely that that is the case here.
Let me read these last two verses.
“The firstborn bore a son and named him Moab,
and he’s the ancestor of the Moabites to this day.
The younger also bore a son and named him Ben Ami.
He is the ancestor of the Ammonites to this day.”
So what is fascinating about this story is that in the Holiness Code,
the laws of the Old Testament,
what happens here would be deserving of death.
We told you the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
There are those who would argue that it was the nature of the homosexuality that hangs
over that text, that that’s the nature of Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin.
And they would point to the Holiness Code and say that is punishable by death.
Well,
this act is also right next to that in the Holiness Code punishable by death and
there’s no mention of it.
God doesn’t show up.
There is no punishment.
There’s no anything.
So this isn’t a story which Genesis tells us with a God character front and center.
God is always in the background.
But this becomes a story then about the characters themselves.
And what do we ultimately learn?
We ultimately learn the shameful origins of the Moabites and the Ammonites.
Guess what their relationship becomes with the people of Israel.
They are not fans.
The Israelites are not fans of the Moabites and the Ammonites.
And this story provides a kind of cultural judgment upon people who will ultimately be,
in many instances,
their enemies.
Yeah, we once again struggle to connect with stories like this because we don’t
really carry in our public consciousness this idea of the Moabites and the
Ammonites.
So no one joining us here would be able to point to a map in the world and say
that’s where the Moabites live.
And so it becomes a little bit trickier to really get the force of the story.
But yeah, ultimately this story actually is multilayered.
It’s not just an insult, interestingly,
because think of some of the images that
we have here back when Lot was back in Sodom,
remember who he offered to the
city was his daughters.
So I mean, now suddenly his daughters have flipped in the role.
And while Lot was willing to give them up to the men of that city,
now it’s actually his daughters who take agency and they’re the ones who initiate this
kind of action in this story.
It’s a strange twist that comes at the end where it’s the very daughters he was
willing to give up to take matter into their own hands,
that makes this new kind
of relationship with the Moabites and the Ammonites,
which as you will guess,
it’s not an incredibly close relationship.
And yet there’s a kind of kinship to it.
There’s a kind of connectiveness to it,
even though they are enemies.
So yes, the force of the people story,
you know, to hear you frame it,
Clint, as the people story versus God’s story.
If you hold that image loosely,
I do think there’s some explanation happening
here as to the world in which the Israelites are inhabiting.
I will also say, though,
you can’t, you really can’t pass by Clint the connection
to the fact that Noah,
when he gets saved from the flood,
what does he do?
He plants a vineyard and gets drunk,
that gets him into trouble with his kids.
Now, a lot gets saved from destruction and he gets drunk and that caused problems as
well.
So you also see this connective tissue back to the previous stories once
again that we’ve had in Genesis.
And I think while this story may not directly invoke God’s name,
I think in the
same way we saw God active in Noah’s story,
we see God active in that overture
kind of sense in this story,
this umbrella sense where God’s plan continues to be at
work even while humans are screwing it up at every turn.
Right. And I think your words earlier are helpful, Michael.
You know, the Bible,
this story isn’t condemned as we would
expect it to be.
And some of that is that we struggle with the idea that these two women are at a dead end.
They have,
they need to continue their lineage.
The reason they exist really in their culture,
in their day, is to produce offspring and that is not available to them.
So they make a way forward,
but they do it shamefully in a way that disgraces even
the very lineage that will come from this act,
the Moabites and the Ammonites,
that they carry that association with them in the eyes of Israel really throughout the
rest of their history.
So a strange story to us may be from our perspective difficult to see the layers in
it, in its time, in its place, in its context,
a story with several things happening at once,
but not a particularly inspiring story.
I mean, there’s nobody’s I doubt that this story gets preached very much.
It’s certainly not one that’s not a lot of edification in this story.
It’s not going to read this one for devotional material.
So it’s really interesting you say that,
because that’s actually what I was kind of
reflecting on there, Clint.
And the reason why,
well, besides just the sheer difficulty of this subject matter.
But I think one of the reasons this text would be hard to preach is because its
meaning is only clear in context.
And what you would have to have stuck with us in this study,
and for all of you who
have been with us in the study,
I hope that you can see how a story that if you
had just picked it out and you had just read this story,
you would be left with
this kind of abject judgmentalism,
this kind of idea of like,
what in the world?
When you put it in the context of,
okay, this connects to Noah’s story.
Wait a minute.
Do you remember earlier where Abraham is up on the hills and these two men tell
Lot he should go to the hills?
Well, now, wait a minute.
Where’s Lot end up going because he’s afraid of being in Zor?
Oh, he goes up into a cave hiding in the hills.
I mean, like, once you start to see the way that the text has blended these
things together, you begin to see that stories that unto themselves are
troubling, I’m not diminishing the troubling nature of this larger story of Solomon Gamora,
Lot and his daughters.
But when you then put that into the context,
like a puzzle piece into the larger puzzle,
you begin to see how this isn’t devotional,
but it is God
referential, right?
It does point once again to the faithfulness of God,
which is, as we said from the beginning, the point of Genesis.
And so I just want to encourage you.
There’s no human action that is done in Genesis that’s outside the bounds of
God’s ability to bend it to his will.
It does, you know, explain when you look around you,
why the world is,
is messy, why there’s divisions and anger and fighting because fundamentally humans
have been creating pathways to that through all time,
but God is still
faithful and that purpose and that theme of Genesis remains true even in stories like this.
Yeah, I think the only thing I might attach to that Michael would be that in
the book of Genesis and in many parts of the Old Testament, that faithfulness is
specifically attached to Israel and in this case to Abraham.
So is God faithful to Lot?
That’s really not part of the story.
Yes, in some larger sense,
but right now the focus is so clearly on Abraham and
later Israel that those stories are tangents in which God is in the backdrop,
but it’s not the action of God that occasions the story or really has
anything of consequence to say about the story.
So honest question, push back on me here,
does that not expose on some level our
tacit individualism or assumption that fundamentally the gospel is all about
the individual person?
Because there’s a sense in which these texts don’t,
they don’t ask the same
questions that we ask about these individual daughters or about even, you know,
Abraham and Sarah and their decision making about Hagar,
right?
Like these characters in Genesis can sometimes seem like pawns and there’s a
way in which Genesis is looking at it from such a high view that when it’s
talking about God’s faithfulness,
we might zoom in on what about this person?
Genesis is saying that God’s plan is over the whole.
I mean, is that an unfair reading?
No, I don’t think so.
I think the way I would say that,
Michael, in my estimation is that the
scripture tells us what it wants us to know and there is a reason it wants us
to know that.
So why do we need to know this story about Lot?
Because the Moabites and Ammonites are tangentially important in Israel’s
story and knowing where they came from matters to Israel and therefore matters
in the backdrop of their story as the recipients of God’s covenant.
And that’s all layered together.
I think sometimes we,
you said it well,
I think sometimes we put those things in
their boxes and we don’t let them connect the way in which I think the authors intend.
So we’ll be interested to see what you think.
We’ve taken what may seem to some like a very strange turn in the story and now
we sort of get back to the through line of Abraham and Sarah.
And so we hope that you’ll join us as we continue on with our study tomorrow.