You Can Take the Girl Out of Sodom ... (Notes on the Story of Lot and His Daughters)

Jan Matsys: Lot and His Daughters (1565)

I.

I've said it before and I'll undoubtedly have opportunity to say it again: the Bible is the world's most transgressive work of literature; a mytho-historical novel that contains page after page of terrible events and wtf incidents.

And there are none more shocking than the story of Lot and his daughters ...

II.

Having escaped the destruction of their hometown of Sodom and witnessed their mother turned into a human condiment, the two young women and their elderly father find themselves seeking refuge in a mountain cave.

Here, according to the account in Genesis [19:30-38], they ply their old man with wine and then engage in drunken sex with him over consecutive nights. This is done not only without his consent, but, apparently, without even his knowledge or memory of what occurred. In this manner, each girl conceives a male child as hoped, thereby illicitly preserving patrilineality or their father's seed.       

Now, I'm no prude - but, really, this is a bit much, isn't it?


III.

Having said that, there is something perversely pleasing about the daughters initiating and perpetrating the incestuous rape of their father, after he previously offered them as sexual playthings to the Sodomites if the latter would but agree to leave his angelic guests unmolested. For it hints at the idea of what Baudrillard terms the revenge of the object. 

However, some commentators prefer to turn the biblical account on its head and insist that women can only ever be victims of patriarchal power. Thus, they argue that it was more likely that Lot raped his daughters and that the narrative we are given in Genesis is a perversion first and foremost of the truth concerning incest and sexual abuse.

Such a cover-up - if that's what it is - may have been done in order to exonerate Lot and preserve the family honour. For whilst he may have been something of a black sheep, Lot was still the nephew of Abraham, father of the Covenant and progenitor of the nation of Israel. It could well be that the familiar practice of victim-blaming and shifting responsibility for sexual abuse away from the male perpetrator is first given religious sanction in this tale.  

Notes 

Readers interested in the idea that it was Lot who raped his daughters rather than vice versa, might like to see the following article by Ilan Kutz: 'Revisiting the lot of the first incestuous family: the biblical origins of shifting the blame on to female family members', in The BMJ, 331 (7531), pp. 1507-1508, (24 Dec 2005). Click here to read online. 

For a sister post to this one on strange flesh and sodomy, please click here.

  

Strange Flesh: Notes On Sodomy

Sleeve artwork for Mortal Way of Life (1988) 

by German thrash metal band Sodom

I. The Sin of Sodom is Polysemic

Sodomy is one of those lovely old-fashioned words that is commonly misunderstood. Many people, for example, think it refers exclusively to anal sex - particularly between two men - and perhaps recall that Oscar Wilde was accused (not unfairly) of posing as a sodomite by Queensberry.

Historically, however, sodomy possessed a much broader meaning and referred to all non-procreative sexual activity, including, for example, oral sex and bestiality. It was often also tied to the practice of pagan witchcraft. Sodomy was thus not simply a form of perversity, but heresy; a rejection of God and a libidinal defiance of his moral authority.

It's hardly surprising, therefore, to discover that sodomy has a biblical origin ...


II. What Begins with the Threat of Angel Rape Ends with Fire and Brimstone 

According to the account in Genesis [18-19], God decided to exact divine retribution upon Sodom after two of his angels entered the city (in human form) and were immediately threatened with gang rape by the inhospitable locals.

Although Lot, who was charged with looking after the divine messengers, offered the townsfolk his virgin daughters as sexual substitutes, the men of Sodom were adamant they wanted to experience strange flesh whilst they had the very rare opportunity to do so.

For the Good Lord, who had long identified Sodom (along with the twin city of Gomorrah) as a hotbed of impenitent sin and sexual depravity, this was the final straw and He unleashed his destructive wrath upon it and its inhabitants in the form of fire and brimstone.

Only Lot and his family were given the opportunity to get out of town, although, unfortunately, their escape didn't quite go to plan after Lot's wife made the fatal mistake of looking back, as if secretly longing to stay and continue her old life in Sodom. For this, as everybody knows, she was turned into a pillar of salt.

(Interestingly - and as perhaps fewer people know - Lot and his daughters found solace in this time of apocalyptic upheaval and great personal loss by entering into an incestous relationship and having drunken sex in a cave ... but that's another story, for another post: click here.)
 

III. On the Necessity of a Little Sodomy

Never one to shy away from these matters, D. H. Lawrence insists that not only can bawdiness be healthy, but even sodomy can be sane and wholesome, provided there is a proper give and take between parties: "In fact, it may be that a little sodomy is necessary to human life."

It's only the fanatic insistence on purity, writes Lawrence, that always leads to madness, denying as it does the simple truth that all men and women are subject to desire and possess "blood and bowels and lively genitals".

The only problem is that Lawrence wishes to restrict acts of sodomy to the right time. But, by definition, such acts occur at the the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong partners and involve a misuse of organs; this is what makes them such unnatural acts.

Nevertheless, it's important to be reminded that however problematic many aspects of his work are for a contemporary readership, Lawrence was not someone who wished to restrict human freedom and experience. Just so long as we don't get our sex on the brain and seek to form an ideal identity upon it, he was happy to acknowledge the necessity of vice as belonging to a general economy of the whole.   

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'What's sane and what isn't', The Poems, Vol. III, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1614-1615.