Genesis Presents: More Fun With Incest! (Starring the Only Righteous Man in Sodom)

Every once in a while, the Bible likes to throw in a story so insane, so debauched, so completely and utterly disgusting that it outshines all of the other craziness around it like a corpse in a hoarder's basement.  You may have thought that Sodom's city-wide angel gang-rape was that story for Genesis.  You would be wrong.  That honor goes to the story immediately following Sodom's destruction, the delicately titled Sin of Lot's Daughters.

You may remember Lot as the guy who was unfortunate enough to have the entire city of Sodom show up at his door demanding he bring his angelic houseguests outside to be ass-raped in the street.  The reason he had angels staying at his house in the first place was because he was the only righteous man in the city, and so he got to be escorted out of Sodom before God shat on it.  Take a guess at how long that righteousness lasts.  Now half it, because this is the Old Testament and people are a little messed up by default.

Lot and his two daughters, whom you may remember as the virginal young girls he offered to the rapists in place of the angels (stellar guy, this Lot), shack up in a cave after the annihilation of their home.  Things are a little boring living in a cave, and so the girls want to find some way to entertain themselves.  Understandably, one girl turns to the other and says:

"Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father." - Genesis 19:32

Man, kids in 3000 BCE, am I right?  Always a handful, getting their parents smashed so they can sex them up in the night and -- what the flying fuck, Bible?  Just ... just what the fuck?

So this girl, who can't be more than fifteen, gets Lot so drunk he literally doesn't notice her having sex with him:

"And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose." - Genesis 19:33

Then, the next night, the younger daughter (who must therefore be less than 15) does the same thing:

"And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose." - Genesis 19:35.

And if you're thinking this is all to teach some kind of valuable lesson about sin, this is clearly your first time reading Zero Contradictions.  The story ends like this:

"Thus were both the daughters of lot with child by their father.  And the firstborn bare a son, and called his name Moab: the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day.  And the younger, she also bare a son, and called his name Ben-ammi: the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day." - Genesis 19:36-38

That's it.  There's no divine punishment, no moral to the story.  In fact, this is the last time Lot appears in Genesis.  It just ends with them naming their sons/brothers and the reassurance that a couple of ancient Israel's neighbouring nations were founded on incest.

Now, I want to ask a few questions:

A) What the hell kind of father is okay with getting blackout drunk with his two teenage daughters?

B) What the hell kind of human being, even when drunk, doesn't notice that they're having sex with their own children?

C) What the hell kind of messed-up teenager wants to rape her father (since that's what it is really - rape) so she can get pregnant with her own sibling?

D) What kind of fucked up city was Sodom that the first thing the most righteous man living there does upon his escape is knock his own daughters up?

E) Whey the hell do they have so much wine in a goddamn cave?  Is that all they grabbed when they were leaving Sodom?  Leave all of our belongings, but save the wine?

All right, so maybe I understand wanting to save the wine, but what about the rest?  I can forgive things like God forgetting he's omnipresent and Cain magically having a wife, but this is one story so inexplicably awful that it needs a reason to exist.

I did look, and the best explanation I could find was the Catholic Encyclopedia's insistence that the Israelites just thought the Moabites and Ammonites were such terrible people that they created this myth to explain why.  So yeah, there is really no reason for it to have survived in a holy text to the present day.  It's just a disgusting, awful story whose only real purpose is to remind us that God has a twisted sense of humour.  And really, there are enough of those as it is.