Lives of Scripture

After the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot fled with his two daughters to live in a cave in the hills, afraid to stay even in nearby Zoar (Genesis 19:30). Convinced that no husbands remained for them anywhere and desperate to preserve their father's line, the daughters made a plan: on successive nights, they got Lot drunk with wine and lay with him, and "Lot did not know when she lay down or when she arose" (19:33, 35). Both daughters conceived. The younger bore a son and named him Ben-ammi, "son of my people" -- he became father of the Ammonites, a nation that lived east of the Jordan and remained Israel's neighbors, sometimes trading partners and frequently adversaries, throughout the rest of the Old Testament, down through the periods of the judges, the united and divided kingdoms, and the exile (Genesis 19:38; Judges 11; 2 Samuel 10; 2 Chronicles 20; Nehemiah 13; Zephaniah 2:8-9). Scripture records the episode without excusing it -- the incest and deception are stated plainly, born out of the daughters' fear and desperation in the aftermath of catastrophic judgment on Sodom rather than out of any statement of approval. It stands as one of the Bible's frank accounts of a patriarch's family unraveling even after being spared.