Genesis: Chapter Nineteen (Sodom and Gomorrah Destroyed, Lot and His Daughters)

In which we learn that rape and incest are okay as long as there aren't any balls touching.

God promised in the last chapter that he wouldn't destroy the city of Sodom if he could find so many as ten good men in its entire population. Not being omnicient and not being one to do legwork, God sends two angels. They are greeted by Abraham's newphew Lot at the gates of the city. He recognizes them as angels, kowtoes, and offers them his house, where "you can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning."

They're here on business, not just passing through, so they refuse and say, "we will spend the night in the square." (19:1-2)

But Lot insists and they give in. He feeds them unleavened bread. But before they can make it to their beds, the entire male population of Sodom surrounds the house and ask for the angels to be turned out into the street for sex. No, I'm not making this up.

...all the men from every part of the city of Sodom — both young and old — surrounded the house. They called to Lot, "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them." ~ Gen 19:4-5

Lot refuses. He pleads with the men, "Don't do this wicked thing." (19:7)

How nice of him. Lot's standing up for the visiting angels and telling them not to engage in this terrible, wicked act, this rape of the two angels staying with him.

"Look," Lot continues in 19:8, "I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don't do anything to these men."

Apparently, I was mistaken. The "wicked thing" he's trying to convince the entire male population of Sodom to not do isn't rape at all! It's homosexuality! He's just told them, "Hey, entire male population of Sodom, don't rape these guys! That's gay and icky and stuff. Here, rape my two virginal daughters instead. That's way more acceptable than doing any of that nasty queer stuff!"

But the men will not relent. They don't want his surely attractive virginal daughters. These men are hell-bent on raping angel dudes. In 19:9, they become quite xenophobic, claim Lot is an alien to their city and therefore can't possibly bear a considerable opinion, and threaten that if Lot doesn't give up the visitors, they'll rape him worse than the angels. Nice guys!

They even try to break down Lot's door, but the angels are there to save Lot. They immediately blind the crowd in punishment. They tell Lot that they're about to destroy Sodom (ignoring all of the women, of course — they never really count, do they? — there certainly weren't ten straight men in the city) and that Lot and his relatives will be spared for their hospitality.

Lot rounds his daughters up, but the men they're pledged to be married to don't believe him when he says the angels are going to tear the place up.

As dawn rises on Sin City, the angels try to hurry Lot up. Lot hesitates (for no reason stated here), so the angels get fed up and lead Lot and his daughters out of town. "Flee for your lives!" one of them says. "Don't look back, and don't stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!" (19:17)

In 19:18, Lot tells them the mountains are too near and that he and his daughters won't survive the oncoming debacle. This is an interesting thing for him to say, though. It suggests either or both of these things:

1. Lot doesn't trust the angels to contain the blast. They've already told him that his family will be spared, yet Lot doesn't trust their judgment in safe locations.
2. A tragic natural event happened to a town called Sodom (or whose name eventually became Sodom through centuries of people telling the story orally until it was finally written down by someone intelligent enough to do so), and the main character of this story thought that the mountains were not distant enough to escape such a disaster. In other words, there are no angels, this is not a story of God's revenge for debauchery, and science is about to happen. Having half a brain, Lot is trying to guage the best place for his own safety because he fears imminent death at the hands of Mother Earth.

At any rate, Lot suggests that he go to a nearby town (which is somewhat contradictory to his problem with the mountains being too close — why would he give up the shelter of apparently close mountains for a nearby town if proximity is an issue?), and the angels agree.

So Lot and his daughters make toward this town, Zoar (which means small, and whose meaning bears some significance to 19:22 that I can't make sense of). Zoar is apparently close enough that he can walk there with two women in tow in a few hours or so. After all, the angels hurried him out of town "with the coming of dawn" (19:15), yet "by the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land" (19:13).

And then God rains down his sulphur on both Sodom and Gomorrah. "He overthrew those cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities — and also the vegetation in the land." (19:25)

But Lot's heretofore unmentioned wife looks back at the city as it's being destroyed. This is against the commands of the angels in 19:17, so "she became a pillar of salt." (19:26) So believable. Surprisingly, it's more believable that she turned into Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate, which is what you get when you mix magnesium with sulphur and oxygen: MgSO₄) considering that magnesium is the earth's eighth most common element and found in the crust (and I think we all know where to find oxygen).

In the morning, Abraham wakes up and sees the smoke from the burning cities.

This portion of the chapter ends with an interesting passage which confirms the common theory (which is ubiquitous in this particular chapter) that Christians tend to attribute common things to God:

So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived. ~ Gen 19:29

Even (read: especially) if you accept the entire story up to this point as truth, it's hard to believe the previous quote. According to the story we've just read, God didn't remember Abraham once in his freeing of Lot from certain death. No, Lot just stood up for some people who wanted to have man-sex with what must have been some truly attractive angels. That's all. Lot decided that homosexuality was such a sin that it would be better for his virgin daughters to be raped by an entire freaking town than to allow gay sex to occur.

Lot wasn't saved because God was thinking of Abraham. Lot was saved because he hated gay men. I guess the Westboro Baptist Church has it right. God hates fags.

In 19:30, Lot moves to the mountains because he's afraid of living in the city.

*sigh* Why didn't Lot just go to the mountains in the first place like the angels said he should. They obviously weren't affected, and now "he was afraid to stay in Zoar." So they up and leave and go live in a cave. Seriously.

But then his daughters get to talking. The eldest daughter says, "Our father is old, and there is no man around here to lie with us, as is the custom all over the earth. Let's get our father to drink wine and then lie with him and preserve our family line through our father." No, seriously.

Apparently, in their rush to get out of Sodom and later during their fear of Zoar, they managed to pack up enough wine to get their father so trashed he'll fuck his own daughters. That's the plan, at least.

And it works. No, seriously, guys. This stuff's in the Bible.

That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and lay with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. ~ Gen 19:33

See? Rape's okay! Even incestuous rape with a male victim and a female perpetrator. If we were living by the rules of the Bible, this would be a seriously broken world.

But then the next day, the older daughter suggests that it's her sister's turn to do it. So they get him drunk again and then the younger daughter has sex with her drunken father. Seriously! This is like Norman Bates's fantasy! And Lot still doesn't notice!

Not radical enough for you? How about this? Both of the daughters get pregnant from doing it with their own dad. Both of them! And evidently, Lot never questions how those babies got made. My opinion: Lot knew. He wasn't that drunk. But since his wife turned into salt and it's really hard to keep it up when you're having sex with salt, he just didn't say anything. Those virginal daughters of his had probably been looking better and better since he offered them up for sex to the entire city.

Both of the kids turned out to be boys. One of them was Moab and the other was Ben-Ammi, and they both went off to father entire cults of people named, respectively (and predictably), the Moabites and the Ammonites.

So let's not forget the values that we should be instilling in our children through use of the Bible:

• Hate fags.
• Fuck your dad.
• Unless you're a dude.

Genesis: Chapter Eighteen (The Three Visitors, Abraham Pleads for Sodom)

In which Abraham orders his wife to make bread out of two gallons of flour, and in which God decides it's okay to kill up to fifty good people if you think they're surrounded by evil.

The first two verses of this chapter are disconnected.

18:1 — It's mid-day in the middle east. It's hot. While Abraham sits beneath a shady tree, God appears to him.

18:2 — Abraham looks up and sees three men who are not God.

The second verse is the important one. The first one only establishes the presence of God (because he's apparently not as omnipresent as Christians would have me believe). But then in 18:3, Abraham speaks to the three men (whose feet he is bowing at) as if they were God, and offers them water and food. Through 18:5 he refers to himself as their servant, and he is acting very much like a sycophant to these men.

The men demand that he do what he offered.

Being a man, Abraham's not one to take on a woman's duties, so he commands Sarah to "get three seahs of fine flour and knead it and bake some bread." (18:6) In case you were wondering, a seah is "a unit of dry measure ... which equals one-third of a bath", which is about twenty-two liters, making one seah about 7 1/3 liters or nearly 2 gallons. Of flour alone. That's way too much bread for three men.

Being a slave-owner, Abraham's also not about to take on a slave's duties, so he has a slave kill and cook a calf as well as bring along some milk and curds (18:7-9).

Abraham watches them eat while they question him about the location of Sarah. He answers, and suddenly God is back saying that he'll be back in about a year "and Sarah your wife will have a son." (18:10)

Apparently, Abraham never bothered to tell his wife that God had spoken to him and told him that they'd have some babies eventually (she probably would have thought Abraham delusional) because she overhears the conversation and laughs. I wonder what she thought Abraham was doing that one time when he went around and chopped everyone's dick off. It's not like that's a rational thing to do. She must have asked what the deal was. She must have wondered why Isaac was hobbling around bowlegged looking despondant and in massive amounts of pain. Something's amiss here, and it smacks of an abusive relationship.

Back to the point. In 18:12 Sarah laughs and makes the rational thought, "After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?"

But she's caught red handed! God says to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh ... Is anything too hard for the LORD?" Then he confirms, "I will return to you at the appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son." (18:12-14)

And then this exchange happens, which is too funny not to print in full:

Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, "I did not laugh."
But he said, "Yes, you did laugh."

At first she was all :P but then she serious'd. (18:15)

Later on, the three visitors get up to leave. They start heading in Sodom's direction, and Abraham follows them briefly to see them off into the desert heat. God randomly thinks to himself throughout 18:17-21:

Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just, so that the LORD will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.

The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.

Cliff notes: God's heard rumors about the kinds of terrible things they do down in Sodom (even though the Bible's audience doesn't know what those are yet), but he wants to verify that the rumors are true (because he's not as omnicient as everyone would have me believe), so he's going to physically travel to Sodom (because God has a physical form that he designed man after, being that it's such an intelligently designed one that men are born with the foreskins he despises so much) and take a peek around, and he's going to do all of this because... Well, because Abraham's awesome.

The visitors leave. Abraham grows a pair of balls and talks Serious Business™ to God. I feel the words in 18:23-25 are of particular importance, so I'll let them speak for themselves:

Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing — to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?

Abraham is basically asking God if God's history of amounting innocent deaths to collateral damage is the right kind of impression that the being we're all supposed to follow, worship, obey, and (most of all) mimic should be making. It's an important question that can be applied to any time of war the human population has ever been involved in. With one difference. God is the judge of all humanity. He decides what's wrong and right. God's answer to Abraham's question will be an insurmountable, immutable law seared into the very flesh of time, history, society, and government forever. God must choose his answer wisely. And what he comes up with in 18:26 is:

Well, if the collateral damage is less than fifty, it's acceptable.

Did you hear that, warlords and world leaders? Did you hear that, Dead Hitler? If you reckon something to be wicked, just kill it. As long as there aren't a whole fifty good people in range, just drop that bomb. Words of wisdom from the Amazing God Almighty. Praise Jesus! Hallelujah! Amen!

Abraham is no more a fan of this (non-)logic than I am, and he further questions God (after a little brown-nosing) throughout 18:27-32, saying, "Well, what if there are less than fifty good people in Sodom? Will you still kill them?"

And God changes his mind. "Okay," says God, "If there are forty-five good people, I will spare the city."

Abraham says, "What if there are forty good people there?"

"For the sake of forty, I will not kill everybody."

"How about thirty?"

"Fine," says the Lord, "I won't kill everyone if I find thirty nice guys."

Abraham pushes his luck: "Twenty?"

"Okay, okay," says God, "I will suffer them if there are twenty good people."

Abraham: "Ten?"

"For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it."

Abraham's a hell of a negotiator. Having talked the odds of God comitting genocide again down to something favoring the continued existence of the Sodomites (Abraham may have been motivated to do this by caring for his Sodomite nephew Lot), God leaves Abraham to his thoughts. After a while, Abraham goes home.