The Genesis of Justice (14 page)

Escape for your life, do not gaze behind you, do not stand still anywhere in the plain:

to the hill-country escape, lest you be swept away!…

But YHWH rained down brimstone and fire upon Sedom and

Amora, coming from YHWH, from the heavens
,

he overturned those cities and all of the plain, all those settled in

the cities and the vegetation of the soil
.

Now his wife gazed behind him, and she became a pillar of salt
.…

Lot went up from Tzo’ar and settled in the hill-country, his

two daughters with him, for he was afraid to settle in Tzo’ar
.

So he settled in a cave, he and his two daughters
.

Now the firstborn said to the younger:

Our father is old
,

and there is no man in the land to come in to us as befits the way of all the earth!

Come, let us have our father drink wine and lie with him

so that we may keep seed alive by our father
.

So they had their father drink wine that night
,

then the firstborn went in and lay with her father—

but he knew nothing of her lying down or her rising up
.

It was on the morrow that the firstborn said to the younger:

Here, yesternight I lay with Father
.

Let us have him drink wine tonight as well
,

then you go in and lie with him
,

so that we may keep seed alive by our father
.

They had their father drink wine that night as well
,

then the younger arose and lay with him
,

but he knew nothing of her lying down or her rising up
.

And Lot’s two daughters became pregnant by their father
.

G
ENESIS
19:4-36

A
fter agreeing with Abraham that he would not destroy Sodom if he could find ten righteous people, God sends two messengers
(or angels in disguise) to the city. They encounter Lot, who invites them to his home, which the men of the city then surround,
demanding that Lot give his guests to them for their sexual pleasure. Lot responds in a remarkable manner: He offers his two
virgin daughters to the crowd in place of his guests. But the crowd rejects Lot’s substitution and presses against the door
in quest of the men. Lot’s guests protect their host and warn him to remove his family from the city, which is about to be
destroyed. Lot, his wife, and his two daughters are told not to look back at the devastation, but his wife disobeys: She is
turned into a pillar of salt. Then, after escaping the fire and brimstone, Lot is made drunk by his daughters and seduced
by each of them so that they may become pregnant and keep their seed alive.

The story of Lot is really the story of the three women in his life—none of whom is named—and tells much about the Bible’s
attitude toward the female sex.

Lot is saved because God “remembered Abraham.”
¹
This suggests that he remembered Abraham’s argument about not sweeping away the righteous with the unrighteous, and Lot was
more righteous than the other Sodomites. But was he really a righteous man? By offering his daughters to the crowd, did he
demonstrate righteousness? By the standards of his time and place, the answer is yes. After all, the patriarch Abraham, who
is regarded as a paragon of virtue, twice offered up his own wife for the sexual pleasure of those who might threaten him,
in order to protect himself. The first instance took place when Abram and Sarai (their names were later changed to incorporate
God’s presence) journeyed to Egypt. Abram had his wife pose as his sister—subjecting her to sexual conquest but saving his
own life. She was eventually returned to her husband after God afflicted Pharaoh with plagues.
²
The second instance took place after the destruction of Sodom, when Abraham and Sarah were journeying to the south and encountered
Abimelech, the king of Gerar. Again Abraham subjected his wife to possible adultery, saying she was his sister.
³
Again she was saved, this time after God came to Abimelech in a dream and threatened him with death. Abimelech, who had not
yet touched Sarah, made a brilliant argument to God in his own defense: “Will you slay even a righteous nation?” These words
are reminiscent of Abraham’s own plea to God on behalf of the possibly innocent people of Sodom. It also introduces the legal
principle that an honest and reasonable mistake of fact, which negates culpability, will generally be defense to a criminal
act. By thus invoking Abraham’s own argument in the Sodom case, Abimelech persuaded God to spare him. God replied that if
Abimelech returned Sarah, then Abraham would pray for him, and since Abraham is a prophet, his prayers would be answered.
Nachmanides boldly states that Abraham “sinned a great sin” by exposing Sarah in the way he did, but he inexplicably characterizes
the sin as “unwitting.”
⁴
It was anything but, since Abraham calculated the risks to his wife’s virtue and weighed them against the risks to his own
life. This sort of cost-benefit thinking seems to run in the family: Isaac later did the same thing to his wife. It has been
argued in defense of Abraham and Isaac that since they had prophetic powers, perhaps they knew that God would rescue their
wives from the would-be seducers. Although Lot lacked such powers, maybe he realized that the sexual preferences of those
demanding his male guests would cause them to turn down his daughters. His offer was simply a ruse to gain time. Even if these
ploys could somehow be justified, they still used women as sexual commodities. It is fair to conclude, therefore, that righteousness
was not measured in the Bible by how a man treated
his
women—wives, daughters, sisters—even if he bartered them to others for their sexual satisfaction. There is another, less
sexist and more universal interpretation, which is suggested by the bizarre episode that ends the Lot story. His daughters,
believing that the entire world (at least the entire world to which they had access) had been destroyed, feel it necessary
to seduce their father in order to bear children. They are not punished for their incest. Perhaps the message is that the
perpetuation of life is more important than the rules of sexual propriety. In the case of Lot’s daughters, they may have believed
that the continuation of humanity depended on their breaking the taboo against incest and even rape. After all, the act of
getting a sexual target drunk and then having sex with him when he’s unconscious is rape. Thus the first example of “acquainance
rape”—really intrafamilial sexual abuse—in the Bible is by women against a man. Why am I not surprised!

At a more general level, the message may be to favor a kind of situational ethic—at least when sex is involved—over a more
categorical imperative. Some rules of conduct are relative, while life is absolute. Jewish law eventually adopts this approach
for most rules, permitting them to be broken in order to save life (
pikuach nefesh
). Deuteronomy mandates us to “choose life.” During the Holocaust many women had to choose between their sexual virtue or
their life. Those who chose life were not condemned by rabbinic authorities.
⁵
They had followed the examples of Abraham’s wife and Lot’s daughters.

In the case of Abraham, the patriarch placed his own life above the sexual virtue of his wife and acted without her consent.
In Lot’s case, the women acted without the consent of the man. (Lot also acted without the consent of his daughters in offering
them as substitutes for his guests.) In these instances, life was perpetuated.
⁶

It is interesting to contrast the actions of Lot’s daughters with those of Noah’s sons. Noah—also a virtuous man in his generation—became
drunk and “uncovered” himself within his tent. His son Ham saw his father’s nakedness and told his other two brothers, who,
“walking backward” so as to avoid seeing their father’s nakedness, covered him. When Noah awoke from his drunken stupor and
learned what Ham had done, he cursed his progeny, the Canaanites.
⁷
Commentators interpret Ham’s actions as more than mere voyeurism. An imaginative midrash says that Ham attempted to “perform
an operation upon his father designed to prevent procreation.”
⁸
Rashi suggests that Ham “indulged a perverted lust upon him.” But whatever Ham did, it was not for a procreational or lifesaving
purpose; thus Ham’s descendants were cursed and Lot’s daughters forgiven. The children born to Lot’s daughters became the
leaders of the Moabites and the Ammonites. Sforno observed: “Because the intention of Lot’s daughters had been good, their
descendants inherited the land.”
⁹

What about Lot’s wife, whose only crime was to look back after an angel dressed as a man told her not to? Does her entirely
understandable need to glance backward at the family she left behind warrant so severe a punishment? Even the midrash acknowledges
that “her mother love made her look behind to see if her married daughters were following.” Is that a crime? What does her
death tell us about the value placed on the life of a woman? Commentators have struggled mightily to justify the death of
Lot’s wife. Rashi speculates that her real sin had been to refuse “salt”—that is, hospitality—to Lot’s angelic guests. Well,
I guess that deserves death instead of a rebuke from Emily Post! Others come up with equally implausible justifications. The
pillar of salt was a visible symbol of the wages of turning your back on God. Augustine says that Lot’s wife “serves as a
solemn and sacred warning that no one who starts out on the path of salvation should ever yearn for the things that he has
left behind.”
¹⁰
But if “the things” left behind are family members, such a command defies human nature. During the Inquisition many Jews
who converted to Christianity looked back in distress as their own flesh and blood were murdered. Josephus, the Jewish historian
who abandoned Judaism but repeatedly turned back to write about the Jews, wrote that Lot’s wife was “overly curious” about
Sodom and was changed into a pillar of salt. Ironically, Josephus was accused by some of his Roman contemporaries of being
“overly curious” about his own heritage.
¹¹
Josephus demonstrated his own ambivalence about his rejection of Judaism by testifying: “I have seen this pillar, which remains
to this day.” Contemporary Israeli tour guides also point to a salt pillar near the Dead Sea—a natural part of the Niegev
landscape—claiming that it bears a resemblance to a woman looking over her shoulder.

The narrative of Lot and his wife and daughters continues the theme of woman as seducer, entrapper, disobeyer, sinner, sexual
commodity, and—ultimately—procreator. She may be bad, but she is never as bad as the worst of men. For example, when Lot’s
house is surrounded by sexual predators, they are all men. But she is rarely as good as the best of men. A midrash does praise
Sarah as ranking “higher than her husband” in prophecy. “She was sometimes called Iscah ‘the seer’ on that account,” but this
is an exception.
¹²
Biblical woman may be more crafty and conniving than her male counterpart, but she is not generally as morally elevated (though
there are exceptions). God does not usually speak to her directly, but He punishes her for disobeying the commands issued
to men. This subordinate yet blameworthy role of women in the Book of Genesis will recur in several subsequent stories. Indeed,
in the very next story—the binding of Isaac—the silence of Sarah is deafening, as her only child is led by his father to the
slaughter.

1.
Several commentators interpret this verse as saying that Lot was saved on account of Abraham, because he was the patriarch’s nephew or because he moved to Sodom at Abraham’s behest. Yet another early example of virtue-by-status.

2.
Genesis 12:10-20.

3.
Genesis 20:1-18.

4.
Quoted in Riskin at p. 11.

5.
See at Oshry, Efroim,
Responsae from the Holocaust
, pp. 183-94.

6.
Ginzberg at p. 255.

7.
9:21-25.

8.
Ginzberg at p. 165.

9.
Soncino at p. 99. Some commentators criticize Lot’s older daughter for naming her child Moab, which identifies the child as her own father’s. The younger child, whose name did not explicitly identify its father, was rewarded by being a fore-bearer of David and the Messiah.

10.
Kugel at p. 192.

11.
Jewish tradition forbids criticizing non-Jews in the presence of converts, recognizing that the convert will retain a natural affinity for his non-Jewish heritage and family.

12.
Ginzberg at p. 203.