Shock and Awe!

Man fathers children with his two daughters, shock, horror!

Upstanding member of the community found to have married his half-sister; people are stunned!

Although these sound like headlines from a tabloid newspaper, they are actually facts (with a little bit of sensationalism added by me for effect) from Genesis 19:36 and Genesis 20:12. We have all probably read these passages dozens of times, yet I have no doubt we haven’t let those facts sink in, either because they are not palatable considering they are in God’s word, or we don’t focus on what we are reading at the time, or that God has not chosen, through His Spirit, to make them known to us. When it comes down to it the word of God, as expressed in the Bible, is as shocking as an 18 rated Hollywood movie, perhaps it should have a warning banner on the front similar to that we see on Sky:

What we read in those blessed pages may assault our twenty-first century sensibilities, even to the point that we subconsciously refuse to register what we have read, especially in the case of anything to do with sex, but the fact is the Bible, especially the historical narratives, reflect real life where these things did happen. It would be good if when we read something distasteful, we paused for thought and ask ourselves “why” this happened and “why” it is documented in God’s word. After all, whilst tradition states that Genesis was written by Moses some 1,400 years BCE, the reality is that it is a redacted text (in this context meaning it was compiled, edited, or rearranged by Hebrew scholars and priests) with some of it written as late as the third century BCE, so what is in there is there for a purpose, notwithstanding the acceptance that both the original and redacted script was inspired by the Holy Spirit.

In the case of Lot and his daughter’s scholars have as many theories as there are scholars, but the trend seems to be that both the supposed scarcity of men following the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the influence of the way of life of its inhabitants that normalised incest in their eyes was what resulted in their actions. Namely, they were worried that their fathers bloodline wasn’t going to continue and they saw nothing wrong in their solution to this problem. Scholars also point out that the girls (assuming they were such) did not know that waiting on the Lord would have been the correct course of action. For me there is also another lesson to learn here; the way in which society can normalise behaviour for our son’s and daughters that might be wrong in the eyes of God. Jesus teaches us to be ‘in the world but not of the world’ and whilst exercising this teaching in our own lives might come easy, what of our children who are constantly bombarded by the temptations and carnal appetites of the world? I’d like to think that it is doubtful that the world will ever encourage incest, yet is that so far off considering the world’s obsession with redefining gender?

Despite it being written generations before we were born, in a time that was so different from our own that one is completely alien to the other, the warnings and teachings given through real life examples of people and situations of that time are still relevant and appropriate for teaching us today and no matter how unpalatable they are and how uncomfortable we may be acknowledging their presence in our holy scripture we would all do well to embrace them, learn from them, and use them to enlighten us and those precious to us against the predicaments and stumbling blocks of the time we live in.