- Text of the passage in Nawat
In this respect, Lot is an interesting character, whose very ambivalence indeed contributes to the book's literary stature and makes the story that much more interesting. We should resist, as readers, any invitation to divide the entire world of Genesis into "good" and "bad" people. The fact that Lot is not our patriarch (he is not an ancestor of the Israelites, only a relative) makes him a useful character for the book because the audience, who are Israelites, needn't feel as embarrassed about anything he got up to as they might if they were his direct descendants. This makes him good for certain roles where we perhaps would prefer not to see Abraham, Isaac or Jacob cast; and the fact is that none of the parts he plays is especially flattering, whether it be in the division of their territories and his choice to go to Sodom, of all places; his assisted eleventh-hour escape from Sodom in circumstances of no particular dignity; and now, for his last exit from the stage, this strange business with his daughters! But then, doesn't folklore always thrive on such imperfect "heroes"? Without Lot, we couldn't have those stories!
Another of the important purposes of this episode (from the original point of view, anyway) is to record a folk tradition about the source of two neighbouring nations that played a part in the early history of Israel. Genesis is full of such ethnic etiologies, the outward sign of which is the explanation for their names, no matter how far our credulity is stretched in our own scientific age. The general idea is this: you take the name of a country (X) and assume that this is due to it having been founded by someone by the same name (X), who becomes a character in your story and whose name, in turn, comes from some striking circumstance surrounding his birth, so that his mother or father (sometimes it's one, sometimes the other; in this story it's the mother in each case) therefore decides to call her son X. And he was the father of the X'es, so those people are branded forever as coming from the original X who.... You don't want the story surrounding X to be too flattering because this is not us now, it's the other country: in this instance, Moab and Ammon directly to the east of Canaan. Interestingly, though, in this approach, even though "we" are always the good guys (of course), it is conceded that the others are in the last resort our relatives.
One other function of a character such as Lot in the narrative is to provide a foil for the hero (in Lot's case, that's Abraham). When they part ways, Abraham, as the older gentleman, brings things to a head (before matters get any worse, some suggest) by pointing out that they need to split up, and then gallantly invites his nephew to choose for himself which side of the river he prefers (Lot, of course, chooses the wrong side and will pay the price); in ch. 14, in which Lot also appears, he gets caught up in a war and it is Abram who intervenes militarily and saves Lot's neck; and finally, with Lot and his family comfortably established in Sodom completely oblivious to the impending disaster, Abraham steps in one more time, pleading with God to spare the town if ten righteous people can be found (and as it turns out, the most righteous people there are Lot himself and his family!); and to make sure we know who Lot should thank, in today's passage we read (19:29, JPS): wayyizkor elohim et avraham way'shallax et loT mittokh hahafekha 'God was mindful of Abraham and removed Lot from the midst of the upheaval.' Moral of the story: it's good to have an uncle with friends in the right places. So again, the story needs a Lot in order to use the narrative to depict the goodness of our hero Abraham, who didn't treat Lot so harshly, so perhaps neither should we.
19:27 wayyashkem avraham babbóqer
Concerning wayyashkem see my note on 19:2, but I would like to copy in their entirety the eloquent observations on the same question found in CB (p. 222) in connection with the present verse: "[v.] 27. gat up early: a single word in the Hebrew; the translation is misleading. Etymologically the word has nothing to do with 'early.' In one way the rendering is correct, because in hot countries people get up at what we should consider an early hour in order to do their work before the heat becomes intolerable. But the English Version gives the impression of 'unusually early,' and this is wrong. With very few exceptions whenever we read of any one getting up, we are told - according to the English Version - that he 'got up early.' Perhaps 'got up and dressed', though prosaic, would be a more exact rendering."
19:29 way'shallekh et loT mittokh hahafekha bahafokh et he‛arim etc.
There is repeated information here: we already know about God's having rescued Lot from the destruction, this was the subject of the prec. passage. Perhaps in the literary piece as it stands this is acceptable as a recap before moving the action forwards; as regards sources, however, this single verse is considered an insert from P whereas the rest of both the last passage and this one are solidly attributed to J. The noun hafekha 'upheaval, destruction' is a hapax legomenon but the verb root from which it derives and which provides the next word in this text, h-p-k, is well attested. Its primary meaning is 'to turn', from where come other senses such as 'overturn, overthrow, defeat, destroy' etc., and elsewhere 'turn around, transform, change, pervert' (CHALOT and EK). In the hitpael binyan, it gives us the verb hithappekh which describes the 'sword that glitters and turns guarding the way to the living tree' (3:24) at the end of the Eden story (haxérev hammithappékhet). In the sense of 'destroy', it has just been used by God (or his angel) when speaking to Lot in the immediately preceding scene of the night before (19:21): hinne nasáti fanékha gam laddavar hazze l'vilti hofki et ha‛ir asher dibbárta 'Very well, I will grant you this favor too, and I will not annihilate the town of which you have spoken' (i.e. Zoar). It seems to have been suggested (e.g. EAS p. 143) that this one verse may actually represent P's entire treatment of the event of the destruction of Sodom: "P's one-sentence summary of the episode ([v.] 29) - unmistakable in its wording, style, and approach - is an example of scholastic succinctness at its best."
18:30 ki yare lashévet b'tzó‛ar
Lot left Zoar and took to the hills because he was afraid to live in Zoar. There is no indication of what he was afraid of, and there are several possibilities but we shall never know which it is, apparently.
18:31 lavo ‛alénu k'dérekh kol ha'áretz
For the (sexual) meaning of the phrase lavo el, see the note regarding bo na el shifxati in 16:2. I have failed to find out why on this occasion the preposition used is ‛al rather than el as expected. I also assume that k'dérekh kol ha'áretz simply means what it says: 'in the manner of the whole world.'
18:32 un'xayye me'avínu zára‛
The verb form n'xayye is from the piel (intensive) binyan of x-y-h 'to live'; as the qal (simple) form can also mean 'to stay alive' or 'to cure', so the transitive piel here may be understood as 'to keep alive'. The intention of the sentence is ambiguous: "Let us keep alive from our father seed" might mean either "Let us keep life going by means of our father" or "Let us keep the seed from our father alive." There are correspondingly two interpretations, each with its adherents: maybe she meant that they should save the human race from extinction, re-seed it effectively, by having children, with their own old father as the only male available for the purpose; or alternatively, she might just have been saying that Lot's line would only be kept going if they made babies and there was nobody else around to do it with. But either way, the implication is that there were no other men left. This is problematic because, of course, it was only Sodom and the towns nearby that had been destroyed; it has been suggested that maybe the daughters thought the whole world had been wiped out (as in the Flood, though not this time through a flood). Yet even so, supposedly the small town of Zoar had been spared: what was wrong with the men there? It hardly helps to suggest things such as: "Maybe Zoar was also destroyed after Lot decided to leave it." If this were historical research, that could be so, but this is a story, and the question is: why isn't the story making sense? Given the authors' attention to detail at other moments, we can hardly assume they were likely to have forgotten to tell us! Probably therefore, either something has deliberately been omitted or altered from the narrative, or the text here too is ultimately a composite one, with several ur-versions having been combined, and the solution to our puzzle has been lost because it is not among the component fragments that were pasted in. Clearly, there are some things about such stories that we cannot hope to resolve with the data we have. The solution, then, is to read on.
18:33 w'lo yada‛ b'shikhvah uv'qumah
This is the usual device of naming two extremes (here, temporal extremes) to signify the whole range, so this means something to the effect of 'he didn't know anything about it.'
18:37-8
Concerning mo'av and ben ‛ami, see my discussion of name games.
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