Biblion Bible Commentary
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The cave above Zoar
Genesis 19:30-38
30 Lot went up out of Zoar, and lived in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he was afraid to live in Zoar. He lived in a cave with his two daughters. · WEB
The man who chose the best land ends in a cave, and two nations are born out of a night his daughters arranged.
The last we see of Lot is a study in everything lost. He had lifted up his eyes and chosen the well-watered plain; he had sat in the gate of a city; and now Lot went up out of Zoar, and lived in the mountain — the very place he had begged not to be sent to — for he was afraid to live in Zoar. He lived in a cave with his two daughters.
He has no wife, no sons-in-law, no property, and no city. He is in the mountains he refused, in a cave, with the two children he had once offered to a mob.
What the daughters do is reported without a word of approval and with their own reasoning quoted in full, which is the narrative's usual method with things it will not defend. Our father is old, and there is not a man on the earth to come in to us in the way of all the earth.
That sentence tells us something about what they had been through. Their world had ended in fire the day before yesterday; the men they were pledged to had laughed and died; and they seem genuinely to believe the destruction was wider than it was. Their concern is stated twice as preserving their father's family line, which in that world was the one thing a woman in their position could be ruined by failing to do.
None of that makes it anything other than what it is, and the account does not pretend otherwise. They make their father drink until he does not know what is happening, on two successive nights, and both conceive.
Lot is not excused either. He is drunk enough on two consecutive evenings to be unaware, which is the same condition Noah was in at the beginning of the world after the flood, and the parallel between the two survivors is hard to miss — a man preserved through a judgment, alone with his children, undone by wine.
The sons are named, and the naming is the point of the whole episode: Moab, and Ben Ammi, the father of the children of Ammon to this day. Two nations on Israel's eastern border, both of whom will fight her, both of whom are here given an origin nobody would invent for a neighbor they respected. The passage is often read as a piece of national polemic, and it may well have functioned that way; what it plainly is, in the book, is the end of the line that began when a man looked at a plain and took it.
And the line does not end there, which is the thing worth holding. Generations later a Moabite woman refuses to leave her mother-in-law, gleans in a field at Bethlehem, and marries Boaz — and Scripture traces the descent from her to David and from David to Christ Ruth 4:17 Matthew 1:5. The most disgraceful origin in Genesis is in the genealogy of the Messiah, and the New Testament names her there without embarrassment.
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