.jpg "Qetanah, Lot's Daughter")
Setting: Genesis 19:30-38
Extra-biblical Sources: Bereishit Rabbah 51:8
They gazed upon the burning rubble of the sister cities and I wondered why they did not become salt as Adith had. Was it because she betrayed her husband with salt when he showed hospitality to the men who were with him?
They gave us a hut on the edge of the town, but it was mildewed and drafty and not fit for sons and daughters of the patriarch Terah, who they tell me reigned in Ur, as a spiritual elder alongside Queen Puabi. Lot lay there all that day, and he strictly forbade us to leave the hut, and he lay in silence, and his eyes seemed distant, and he did not cry or say a word.
That night when it was dark, he rose up and said that we must go to the mountains, as the men of God had originally ordered. We fled and escaped from that dreadful plain of fire and brimstone, and we turned aside into a little cave, and thus we called it Adullam, and there we remained many years.
Outside of the cave Lot planted a vineyard which produced enough wine for the three of us. And I believe he would have lived out the rest of his days, shriveling away, on nothing but wine. But I told Maleb that we must find good food, and husbands, to replace those we lost, and so it became our habit to get him drunk in the evenings and sneak out in search of stray sheep or unwed men.
But we found the city of Zoar scorched and empty, and we never found a living soul in the land, and thus we knew that God had destroyed the whole world, save for us and our father.
And so one night I said to my sister, “our father is old, and there is no man in the earth to come into us after the manner of all the earth. Come, we will make our father drink wine as at other times, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of Lot our father." And we made Lot drink wine until he was senseless, and I lay with him, and he did not know when I lay down and when I rose up.
And the next night I said to my sister, “Look, I lay last night with my father. Let us make him drink wine again tonight also; and you go in. Lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of Lot our father." And again he did not know when she lay down and when she rose up.
So we both lay with our father, and we both conceived and bore sons, and I called the name of my son Mo-ab, saying, “from my father did I conceive him.” And I prophesied that night that he would be the father of a mighty nation. And Maleb called her son Ben-ami, saying, “he is the son of my own kinsmen,” and I prophesied over him, also, that many more kinsmen would come from him.
Lot did not ask us how we had become pregnant, but somewhere in the hidden places of his heart he surely knew. Then one day we went away from there, and dwelt on the other side of the Jordan, just the five of us. And Mo-ab and Ben-ami, the sons of Lot, grew up and took themselves wives from the land of Canaan, and they begat children and they were fruitful and multiplied. And so we became Canaanites.