This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Dr. Cécile Bruriah Gonçalves, Hebrew Seminary Rabbinical Student, has been sponsored anonymously.
Note: This week’s commentary references domestic violence.
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וַתֹּ֧אמֶר הַבְּכִירָ֛ה אֶל־הַצְּעִירָ֖ה אָבִ֣ינוּ זָקֵ֑ן וְאִ֨ישׁ אֵ֤ין בָּאָ֙רֶץ֙ לָב֣וֹא עָלֵ֔ינוּ כְּדֶ֖רֶךְ כָּל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃
And the elder said to the younger: Our father is old, and there is no man on earth to come to us in the way of all the earth. (Genesis 19:31.)
Parashat Vayyera concludes abruptly and disturbingly in a cave where Lot’s daughters intoxicate their father and lie with him “to preserve seed from our father” (Genesis 19:30–38). In their expressing “וּנְחַיֶּ֥ה… זָֽרַע׃” (unchayyeh zara,“let us make seed live”—Lot’s daughter evoke the biological dimension of procreation and Israel’s very vocation: to transmit, against all odds.
Reading this narrative of incestuous transgression publicly before an assembly demands multiple hermeneutical commitments. As we draw from this reading a moral and liturgical significance, we must neither reduce the text to a salacious anecdote nor sanitize the horror it contains.If we take the text seriously, neither absolving nor condemning it too hastily, it should be situated at the intersection of two complementary methods of reading. First, we must uncover the text’s understanding of paternal responsibility and the power dynamics that structure this cave scene. Second, we must recognize the daughters’ agency, produced within a framework of extreme constraint, as an act of survival and a gesture of preservation—if not prophesy.
The Chilling Sobriety of the Biblical Narrative
The biblical text reports this episode with striking narrative economy. The setting established is decidedly liminal: Lot’s wife petrified into a pillar of salt (as per Genesis 19:26); the cave; the night that swallows all deeds. The cave functions as a narrative “non-world” where ordinary social norms are suspended. In this context of absolute isolation, the obsession with lineage emerges: without men—or believing none remain—the continuity of the paternal line threatens to end.
The text formulates no explicit moral condemnation, no equivalent to Genesis 38:10’s disapproving words of וַיֵּ֛רַע בְּעֵינֵ֥י יְהֹוָ֖ה (“it was evil in the eyes of the Lord”). Our cave text merely states the facts with a dryness that echoes horror: the deed is given; the community is summoned to hear it.
Unlike Dinah (Genesis 34), Tamar (Genesis 38), or Potiphar’s wife (Genesis 39), Lot’s daughters are neither punished nor praised. The narrator simply reports events as they unfold, almost mechanically: they made their father drink, lied with him, became pregnant, named their sons. Yet within this brevity of verbiage, an ethical and theological tension pulses.
This narrative neutrality can thus be understood in two ways: either as an invitation to reflect on the complexity of human ethics in extreme situations, or as the mask of an ancient paternal violence that the patriarchal text refuses to name explicitly.
Intoxication as Absolution
The text insists on a troubling detail: Lot is so intoxicated that he does not know בְּשִׁכְבָהּ וּבְקוּמָהּ—”when she lied down or when she arose” (Genesis 19:33 and 19:35). This precision, repeated twice, can be understood according to two opposing interpretations.
On the one hand, this detail establishes the father’s unconsciousness and thus the daughters’ total agency. On the other, our text reproduces a classic pattern of an abusive father’s self-exoneration: I was drunk, I didn’t know what I was doing. This narrative strategy recalls the defense mechanisms documented in contemporary judicial records of incestuous abuse: the father denies responsibility, invokes alcohol, and attributes seduction to the children.
The Rabbinic Reading: Moral Attenuation and Collective Survival
The rabbinic tradition proposed a moral attenuation by reframing the act within a logic of cosmic survival. The French commentator Rashi (c. 1028–1040) and certain midrashim, notably Bereshit Rabbah 51:8, emphasize that Lot’s daughters acted לְשֵׁם שָׁמַיִם (leshem shamayim, “for the sake of Heaven”). Convinced that the entire world has been destroyed, as during the flood episode, the daughters believed it now fell to them to repopulate this world.
This reinterpretation transforms the transgression into a collective duty and allows the integrity of the patriarchal narrative to be preserved in the community’s eyes. On a liturgical level, this reading offers a framework that does not negate the gravity of the act but reconfigures it as a gesture of redemption.
However, it comes at a considerable hermeneutical cost: by moralizing the act through necessity, the rabbinic reading diminishes the visibility of paternal violence and the power dynamics that predated the cave.
The Antecedent: Offering the Daughters to the Inhabitants of Sodom
Lot, indeed, does not appear merely as a vulnerable old man, since he had already been implicated by his earlier gesture: offering his daughters to the inhabitants of Sodom to protect his angelic guests.
הִנֵּה־נָ֨א לִ֜י שְׁתֵּ֣י בָנ֗וֹת אֲשֶׁ֤ר לֹֽא־יָדְעוּ֙ אִ֔ישׁ אוֹצִֽיאָה־נָּ֤א אֶתְהֶן֙ אֲלֵיכֶ֔ם וַעֲשׂ֣וּ לָהֶ֔ן כַּטּ֖וֹב בְּעֵינֵיכֶ֑ם
Behold, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as is good in your eyes. (Genesis 19:8.)
This gesture, of unspeakable violence, reveals the daughters’ position in the patriarchal economy: they are merely negotiable objects, currency to be exchanged to protect masculine hospitality. Reading the cave episode independently of this antecedent produces a false rupture.
Rather, the cave scene appears as the extension of a relationship of domination: Lot’s paternity unfolds as an authority capable of sacrificing feminine dignity to preserve other values (the honor of guests, the sanctity of hospitality). Lot’s intoxication in the cave and his apparent oblivion do not neutralize the power structure: on the contrary, they reveal a system where masculine responsibility falls silent yet remains structurally co-constitutive of the act.
The Parallel with Noah: A Patriarchal Diptych
The Torah offers an instructive parallel with the post-diluvian episode of Noah (Genesis 9:20–27). There too, collective survival leads to an act of intoxication and exposure that troubles family relations. In Genesis 9:20–27, Noah, intoxicated, becomes the ‘victim’ of his son Ham who וַיַּ֗רְא… אֲבִ֣י כְנַ֔עַן אֵ֖ת עֶרְוַ֣ת אָבִ֑יו (“saw the nakedness of his father”) (Genesis 9:22), an expression that can be understood as a euphemism for rape. Similarly, in Genesis 19, Lot, intoxicated, becomes the ‘victim’ of his daughters who transgress the incest taboo. The Lot episode, therefore, evokes the memory of a flood—by fire this time—where he and his daughters would have been the sole survivors. The theme of wine and intoxication reinforces this parallelism.
לְכָ֨ה נַשְׁקֶ֧ה אֶת־אָבִ֛ינוּ יַ֖יִן וְנִשְׁכְּבָ֣ה עִמּ֑וֹ וּנְחַיֶּ֥ה מֵאָבִ֖ינוּ זָֽרַע׃
Come, let us make our father drink wine, and let us lie with him, that we may preserve seed from our father. (Genesis 19:32.)
Reading this verse challenges us and invites a radical rereading: Does this narrative not reproduce the typical narrative strategies of accounts where abusive fathers exonerate themselves? All the characteristic elements are present: the mother is absent (transformed into a pillar of salt); the father is drunk and thus “not responsible;” Noah’s son Ham or the daughters are presented as the active instigators of the stratagem.
These narrative constants appear disturbingly in judicial records of incestuous abuse: the father denies responsibility, invokes alcohol, accuses the children of seduction. The narrative structure itself conceals the possibility that it is the father, not the daughters, who is the primary agent of violence.
The Revealing Names: Moab and Ben-Ammi
The children’s names bear the trace of this fundamental ambiguity. Moab (מוֹאָב) means “from my father”—a name that publicly reveals the incestuous origin. Ben-Ammi (בֶּן-עַמִּי) means “son of my people”—a name that attempts to preserve a certain discretion (as per the Babylonian Talmud, Horayot 10b).
These ‘names of incest’ leave the door wide open to the suspicion that something other than what the narrative claims to tell may have occurred. From this perspective, Lot’s daughters would use their father not only to repopulate the world but also to avenge his proposal to deliver them to the mob to protect his guests.
A Reading of Dual Responsibility
The episodes of Noah and Lot form a diptych where the salvific pater familias becomes a source of moral dysfunction. This comparison must invite the community to a demanding moral reading: a man’s salvific position is not synonymous with ethical impeccability. Historical salvation does not exonerate individual responsibility.
Thus, as in Noah’s story, it is not Lot who explicitly transgresses the incest taboo, but his daughters. Yet the narrative structure itself invites us to question this apparent obviousness. The liturgical reading of this text must hold together these two demands: recognizing the desperate agency of the daughters in a context of survival, while refusing to obscure paternal responsibility and the structural violence of patriarchy that makes abuse possible—and perhaps conceals it.
The text offers us no easy resolution. It confronts us with the irreducible ambiguity of the human condition, with the shadows of transmission, and with the necessity of reading vigilantly those narratives where masculine power retreats behind intoxication, oblivion, or purported passivity.