The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (6 page)

Neither daughter slept soundly. Nightfall came early, if only because the day was turned into twilight by the bilious clouds that boiled up out of Sodom and drifted overhead. All the while, they were afflicted by the stench on the wind that blew from the direction of Sodom, the greasy smoke and the settling ash that was carried along with it, and the occasional rumbles and shocks that could be felt before they were heard.

If one of Lot’s daughters succeeded in drifting off to sleep, she would
awake with a start at a sound that seemed to come now from the street outside, now from the roof, now from the very next room. Yet if one of them rose and peered out, she found the courtyard of the house and the street beyond utterly empty. And when they found their father in the kitchen the next morning, already swigging a bottle of wine, they discovered that he, too, had been stirred by these ghostly sounds.

“I swear the place is haunted,” he said. “We will not stay here another night.”

“But where will we go?” his older daughter asked mournfully. “Sodom is destroyed, and everyone with it. Even our poor mother!”

Lot considered for a moment, took another long pull on the bottle, and then nodded.

“The mountain,” he announced in a voice that struck his daughters as almost cheerful.

No one spoke of it, but Lot’s younger daughter thought to supply the little band of survivors with a few supplies from the house. When at last they trudged out of town, she pulled along a wooden cart loaded with skins full of water, sacks of flour, and a few sealed clay jars, some filled with wine, some with oil. Her sister carried a bundle of blankets and cloaks on her back. Lot led the way, wielding only a long wooden staff that he had found by the threshold of the house.

Once they cleared the last stand of date palms and joined the road out of town, they began to see the aftermath of what had happened on the day their mother was turned into a pillar of salt. Corpses of men, women, and children could be seen here and there along the roadside and in greater numbers at the crossroads. Their packs and carts were broken and overturned, their household goods scattered in the sand. Their animals had fled, and the hot wind was already turning their remains into mummies.

At the crossroads, Lot and his daughters kept their eyes down to avoid even a glimpse in the direction of Sodom, and turned instead toward the low range of ash-gray mountains on the horizon. The highest one, studded with crags and peaks, seemed only a short distance off, but they would have to cross a vast expanse of cracked hardpan and sharp stones before they reached the place of refuge promised to them by the strangers.

Lot’s younger daughter soon showed herself to be adept at finding food and water and shelter even in the forbidding reaches of the hill country. She scouted out a cave where they spread their bedding and stored their provisions. She caught small animals in a snare fashioned out of twigs and strips of cloth torn from her own clothing. She found a desert plant that was prickly on the outside but sweet and wet on the inside. As she grew braver, she explored the rocky peaks above the cave, and she found a hidden canyon that offered a stand of date palms and a spring of water deep inside a grotto. It was then she realized that, even if the rest of the world had been blasted into salt ash, they would not die after all.

“We will be all right, sister,” the younger one said one day. “We have enough to eat and drink.”

“Yes, but what kind of life will we have here?” the older one complained. “We are alone in all the world. Everyone else is dead. Do you know what that means?”

The little sister looked at her quizzically.

“It means that we will never see a man other than our father for as long as we live,” the older one said. “We will never marry. We will never bear children. Our father is already an old man and growing older fast, as you can see for yourself. When he dies, we will be alone in this miserable place until
we
grow old and die.”

The little one considered her sister’s dire prediction. True enough, they had seen no living human being since the morning they rushed out of Sodom. And she, too, had noticed that her father seemed older, grayer, and more feeble as each day passed.

“I wish Momma was here, don’t you?” she said at last.

“But she isn’t,” the older one said in a sharp voice that reminded the younger one of their mother. “And that means there is only one solution to the problem.”

“What do you mean, sister?”

“We will lie with our father,” she announced grimly, “and
he
will give us babies.”

“Lie with Father?”

“Don’t pretend to be so innocent. You heard what the women used to talk about when you were drawing water from the well. You know how babies are made.”

“You want to make a baby with our
father?”
she squealed. “What a horrible thought!”

“We will make babies so we will not be alone when he dies—and so there will be someone left here when
we
die.” The older sister seemed angry. “It’s the only thing left for us to do.”

“If we were back home,” the younger one said, “we would have proper husbands to lie with us and give us babies, as our poor dead sisters did with their husbands.”

The older sister laughed out loud. “Have you already forgotten what men were like in Sodom? Anyway, they’re all gone now, and the only man left is our father.”

The younger one thought for a moment and then nodded.

“Tell me what I need to know,” she said. “Tell me what I need to do.”

The older one had contrived to put aside a couple of jars of wine from the oasis town, and she kept them hidden even when Lot’s supply ran out and he began to groan in despair over the lack of something to drink besides water. Now she fetched the wine from its hiding place,
and she appeared at his alcove as the sun was setting and the shadows inside the cave were deepening. Soon, she knew, it would be so dark that neither of them would be able to see the other at all.

“Look, Father,” she said cheerfully. “Look what I found.”

“What is it? I can’t see a thing.”

“A jar full of wine,” she announced. “From the house back in that little town.”

“Where the devil did that come from? I
knew
I had another jar somewhere. Have you been hiding it from me, you ungrateful child?”

“Oh, no, how could you think such a thing of me?” she said coquettishly. “I found it among the rocks outside the cave—we must have dropped it on the way up the mountain.”

“Well, then, give it to me—”

“Here it is, Father,” she said. “Drink your fill.”

She hung back in the shadows while her father pulled the stopper and lifted the heavy jar to his lips. He drank greedily, but took care not to spill even a drop of the precious stuff. Then he pushed the stopper back into the mouth of the jar.

“I’ll save some for tomorrow,” he announced virtuously. “I’ll make it last.”

“No, father, drink your fill Actually, the truth is that I found two jars. So you will still have a drink tomorrow.”

“Two jars you have hidden?” Lot said. He drank a long draught, belched loudly, and then drank again. Deprived of wine for so long, he seemed to feel the stuff boil up into his head as soon as it touched his lips. His eyes blurred, and his head swam. To his amazement, his daughter seemed to disappear before his eyes, although he could not be sure because the cave itself seemed to tilt crazily and slip into profound darkness as the sun went down. He took another long sip and allowed himself to doze.

Lot’s daughter, crouching a few feet away in the darkness, heard the rhythmic sound of his breathing. She sighed, then unfastened her robe and set herself to the task at hand. Her father was heavy and hard to handle, and she was panting with exertion as she struggled to position him. So drunk was her father that when she emerged from the cave some time later, he did not even stir.

———

The younger sister was waiting at the mouth of the cave, watching the reflection of the full moon on the far-distant waters of the Dead Sea, when the older one joined her at last. She half-expected her older sister to look somehow disfigured, somehow tainted, but the moonlight did not reveal any obvious scars. She noticed only that her sister seemed pale and fatigued and vaguely disheveled.

“What happened?” the younger one asked with urgent curiosity. “What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything, thank God,” the older one said grimly. “He was too drunk to even notice.”

“He didn’t notice when you—”

“He did not even know I was there,” her older sister interrupted, as if afraid to hear spoken out loud what had happened back in the cave, “and he didn’t even know when I left.” She paused. “I did what I had to do, and when I was done, I left him fast asleep like a beast.”

“Well,” the younger one ventured, “that makes it all a little easier, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does,” the older one said. “And tomorrow, little sister, it’s your turn.”

The younger one was silent.

“But there are some things you’ll have to know,” the older sister began. “Some things you’ll have to do.”

“You’ve already told me how to make a baby—”

“Well, as it turns out, there’s more you need to know,” she said. “At least, when the man is dead drunk on the floor, there’s more.”

“What do you mean, sister?”

Lot’s older and now wiser daughter pulled the younger one to her side and began to explain.

If Lot remembered anything of what happened on those two nights on the mountain, he said nothing of it. Even when the bellies of his daughters began to swell, even when it was quite obvious that they had lain with
someone
long after the last man in Sodom had been slain, Lot was silent.

When Lot’s daughters gave birth, the older one called her son Moab, which means “from father,” and the younger one called her son Benammi, which means “son of my kin.” But Lot gave no sign that he understood the message that his daughters intended to send him.

The Sacred Incest of Lot’s Daughters