Okay, so, here's a thing about this story, and the wildly entertaining experience that is being inside my head: I start with these last 8 verses of Genesis 19 and end up wanting to convert to Judaism.
Obviously, I can't. I am so into Jesus it's kind of bizarre to people who know me; in fact, part of my desire to start the Bible with Genesis (apart from the obvious addiction to making things hard for myself and the chronology related OCD) is that I want to flesh out my experience of the Trinity a little. (The rest of the Bible is there for a reason, right?)
But man, do I love the concept of midrash. And I wish there were a way to go to synagogue and not feel like a voyeur, since I am not and can't be Jewish. I want to be, because I crave community. Because I am -- at heart -- a scholar. Because I love that someone besides me (Rabbis!) are obsessing about Lot and his daughters. What I want is Christians who act like Jews. What I want, basically, is to be Lauren Winner.
Anyway. Lot and the cave.
In OA, people talk about fear as a character defect; it is evident that Lot never got that far in the 12-step process (unfortunate, since I would say that "waking up and realizing I had knocked up both of my daughters" would make a pretty solid rock bottom.) But it seems like equivocation is a kind of elephant-in-the-cave kind of issue for this family. From the beginning of the chapter, where he is looking out of the city, but not leaving, to his begging to stay in Zoar, then being too afraid to do that, to his getting too drunk to hold off his virgin daughters, Lot seems more pitiful than evil. He's not exactly collaborating with what's going on around him, but he's not standing up to it, either. In a lot of ways, I guess, what we have here is a foil to his uncle, right? I mean, Abraham is here, approaching God himself to save this nephew who was last seen grabbing up all the good, easy land for himself. Lot's parallel seems to be a. the "operation-human-shield" he plays with his daughters and the Sodomoites, and b. negotiating the Zoar deal on the basis of "I can't handle fleeing to the mountains," only to reneg and end up groveling in a cave.
He's so human, is the thing. He's so much the result of a world with no code or order or spirit. He is broken, and debased, and shamed. Shamed by the compromises he has made, or attempted to made, then shamed again by the daughters who were hurt by those compromises and essentially objectify him. A lot of the commentary I found suggest that Lot's biggest parenting misstep was to take his girls to Sodom in the first place. I think the bigger error was to be conformed to Sodom, to be so unwilling to either take a stand or follow through that he can't father them as much as sire them. He is powerless.
And I think that may be a truer understanding of the human condition than is the understanding that says we tend towards evil. Here, the "protagonist" is less evil than he is helpless -- but, like Abraham, he doesn't see it. He keeps trying to come up with these solutions, but each one seems to fail more spectacularly than the last. And his daughters, girls after his own heart, and Abraham's, pick up the trend. According to Lot's daughters, God -- despite smiting the entire world they know, but miraculously sparing them -- is not sufficient to continue their family. It's clear to them that they need to take matters into their own hands and get moving on the incest thing. (How long had they even been in the cave before they came to that conclusion? What else did they try first? Not much, it seems from Genesis 19).
And yet. The narrative commentary on this little chapter -- basically, the last chapter in Lot's family until we pick up with Ruth the Moabite -- is that: out of this spinelessness and backwards family planning, we get two entire nations. An inauspicious start to a new people, I guess, but then, no more so than the Cain and Abel story, or Babel. It seems like almost every family and every nation in the Bible has some fundamental shame or another. We come from dirt, from murder, from incest, from rape. There is nothing in our human genealogy to recommend us, is the point.
This is maybe more significant than it seems, at first, since I think there is this basic trend towards humanism in the "sophisticated" classes of each era. The answer to a Divine source of human value, now and before, seems to be a human, material, or immediate source. There may not be a God, but there is a higher plane of existence that we attain independent of God. This story -- like about fifty other ones in Genesis, I think -- says, not so much. Scratch the surface and the very best the world has to offer is still weak, pitiful, and naked; conniving, not even out of evil, but out of desperation. This is what we are without God -- this kind of perversion is not even worthy of comment, here. It's just the way things are when we are left to our own devices.
Because I can say this for the Lot family: this is before all those books of Law that make it clear that rape and incest are abominable. They hadn't been told this yet. So the Law -- which seems like such a strange thing to love the way the Pslamist seems to love it -- is the corrective, not to our evil nature, not to us, but to our suffering, to the kind of degradation that lawlessness creates.
Put that way, the Law becomes a kind of salvation rather than the thief of joy you'd think. Before Christ, the law is what takes us out of our caves.
The tendency to see God as this big killjoy or impossible judge dissipates when you really look at what anarchy looks like here. It's less this Rousseau-ian garden and more this incestuous cave. Just like academic and physical discipline elevate couch potatoes into scholars and champions, spiritual and ethical discipline elevate us from cave-dwelling victims to children of God, to chosen people, to disciples.
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