Genesis 18-21:7

We have two storylines - Abraham and Lot

Abraham

Three people visit Abraham to tell him he will have a child. We find out later that they are God and two angels. I wonder when exactly Abraham figures out that there is something unusual about them. I suspect it is when the text changes to using the word "Lord". Sara overhears and laughs because she is too old to have children. I think this provides some indication of the human aging at this time. They still seem too old to be moving around as much as they do.

Strangely, but she is not too old to be taken into another man's harem. Jumping to Genesis 20, Abimelek, another king, takes her into his harem and God intervenes by a dream. Here, there seems to be a fine line, perhaps an implicit endorsement that polygamy is at least morally OK, for it is because Sara is already married that God is angry and not because Abimelek is already married.

I think their is a strong political undercurrent to marrying Sara. Sodom and Gomorrah were both wiped out for mysterious reasons. Both of these cities were alligned in the great war that sets the background of the Abraham story. Here comes Abraham, who actually bailed out the King of Sodom. The alliances of power are shifting now with Sodom and Gomorrah being destroyed. Marrying Sara would bring in Abraham's army through alliance, so regardless of her age, he thinks it is a smart move.

Lot

Lot is morally ambiguous. Is he good? Or a scumbag that, in our judgement, perhaps should have been destroyed in Sodom? On first read, I thought the latter, but as I thought his story, I became more sympathetic

We find him sitting at the gates of the city when he meets the two angels. They are not at his home, but he immediately greets them with hospitality. That alone seems strange. I can think of three possible reasons why this might have happened. First, he immediately knows that they are angels. We (the reader) knows they are and the text uses the word, as opposed to "visitors", which is how they were introduced to Abraham. Second, for reasons not stated, he expected important visitors that day. Finally, he may have actually have had a pattern of rescuing visitors from the abusive people of Sodom. This might even explain why he offers up his virgin daughters, as this may have worked in the past somehow, but the mob refused if his daughters are virgins.

The irony of Sodom is that these two angels were sent as scouts to find 10 innocent people, yet they want to abuse them. Here is where moral ambiguity crescendos - Lot offers his virgin daughters instead. From our perspective, Lot does not come off looking good here. But God intervenes and the angels strike the mob with blindness.

Lot and his family escape to the mountains. The rest of the story plays out like a nuclear apocalypse sci-fi story.

As the fire falls, his wife looks back against explicit instructions to not do so. We do not know anything else about her, except that she is turned to a pillar of salt. At first blush, she does not come off well.

It is totally understandable why Lot's wife wanted to watch the fire drop from the sky and consume her home, her neighbors, her life....what she saw may have been so horrifying that it turned her to salt. But like when a nuclear bomb goes off - do not look! Plus, the rest of her life was omitted from the text. We can assume that Lot had a wife if he had daughters, but we did not know where she was until she's looking back and turning to salt.

Finally, Lot gets seduced by his two daughters because they think the whole world has been destroyed and they will have to repopulate it. It is through this incestuous union that we find the origins of two more groups of people - the Ammonites and the Moabites.

Gross. Let me repeat, gross. Are these examples of men of faith?

Going back to the nuclear apocalypse analogy, the daughters survived a mass destruction of everything they know. They are refugees in the mountains. They turned to survivalist instincts to keep the human race alive. They would not have prefered to have been with their father, but they're taking it for the team to keep humanity alive. What they did was totally gross, yet I find some honor in that.

Finally, jumping ahead to Ruth and Matthew, it is through the Moabites that we get the lineage of Ruth, King David, and then Jesus.