3. Lot and his virgin daughters
In Genesis chapter 19, two men identified as angels and later as men visit Lot in the city of Sodom, and as word of their presence in Lot’s home spread a crowd gathered outside. The men outside Lot’s home demanded that he release the two visitors to the crowd. “And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them”. Lot, determined to protect the visitors under his roof, went out to address the crowd, asking them not to treat the visitors “wickedly”, and offered the men of Sodom an alternative.
“…I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes…” The crowd was unimpressed with Lot’s offer, demanded again that the two men be handed over to them, and ordered Lot to stand aside, “and came near to break the door”. As Lot continued to remonstrate with the crowd, the visitors in his house pulled him back inside, and blinded the men pressing against the door, “so that they wearied themselves to find the door”. The visitors then warned Lot of their intention to destroy the city, and Lot and his extended family prepared to flee Sodom the following morning.
4. Lot and his two daughters, part two
After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which Lot’s wife witnessed and was thus turned into a pillar of salt, Lot and his two daughters, the same he had offered to the mob in Sodom, dwelt in the mountains outside of Zoar according to Genesis. The daughters, fearful that the isolation meant they would never find husbands nor give birth, hatched a plan. “Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father”. The firstborn of the two “lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose”. The following night the younger of the two repeated the act.
“And they made their father drink wine that night also”, with the insensible Lot not aware of what had happened, according to Genesis. Both daughters became pregnant from their one night stands, as it were, with their father. The firstborn daughter, “bare a son, and called his name Moab: the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day”. The second daughter too had a son, which she named Benammi, “the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day”. Whether Lot ever discovered that he had fathered sons through his own daughters is not specified in Genesis 19, which from beginning to end is about intimate practices.
