Reading Genesis

Thanks due to the Guardian's excellent weekly 'wrap roundup', for my discovery of a highly entertaining blog about the Torah on Slate. It is a relief and a pleasure to discover that even those with faith in God find the Old Testament stories - as I do - to be at best morally ambiguous, and at worst to make some of Hollywood's most gratuitous recent excesses seem positively tame (though perhaps Sin City, which I saw for the first time today, might give Genesis a run for its money; it's not for the faint hearted). Here's an excerpt (I had exactly these kinds of thoughts when I attempted the bible properly for the first time a few years ago). The full blog is here.

Chapter 19

This chapter makes the Jerry Springer Show look like Winnie the Pooh. The Sodom business is worse than I ever imagined. Two male angels visit Lot's house in Sodom. A crowd of men (Sodomites!) gathers outside the house and demands that the two angels be sent out, so the mob can rape them. Lot, whose hospitality is greater than his common sense, offers his virgin daughters to the mob instead. Before any rapes can happen, the mob is blinded by a mysterious flash of light. The angels lead Lot, his wife, and daughters out of the city, and God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with brimstone. Lot's wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. (God may have listened to Abraham's rebuke, but He surely didn't heed it. What of all the innocent children murdered in Sodom and Gomorrah? What of Lot's innocent wife?)

But the chapter's not over. After the attempted mass gay rape, the father pimping, the urban devastation, uxorious saline murder, it looks like Lot and his daughters are finally safe. They're living alone in a cave in the mountains. But then the two daughters—think of them as Judea's Hilton sisters—complain that cave life is no fun because there aren't enough men around. So, one night they get Lot falling-down drunk and have sex with him. Chapter 19 poses what I would call the Sunday School Problem—as in, how do you teach this in Sunday school? What exactly is the moral lesson here?