Read The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible for Free Online Page B

(Gen. 18:1–8).
    God’s traveling companions are on their way to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah “because their sin is exceedingly grievous” (Gen. 18:20). God, who lingers behind, feels obliged to confide their mission of mass destruction to Abraham, apparently out of loyalty to the human being with whom he has recently made “an everlasting covenant” (Gen. 17:8 Scofield KJV). The otherwise compliant and uncomplaining Abraham has the chutzpah to argue with the Almighty over his bloodthirsty intentions toward Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities of sin and wretched excess.
    “Will Thou indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” says Abraham, acting as the self-appointed defender of the Sodomites, among whom his nephew Lot is numbered (Gen. 18:23).
    After much carping and cajoling by Abraham, who haggles with the Almighty like a bazaar merchant, God finally concedes that if he finds as few as ten righteous souls in Sodom, then the whole city will be spared (Gen. 18:25–32). (For that reason, some sources suggest, the minyan or prayer quorum required for a Jewish religious service is ten. 5 ) But we are forced to conclude that the Sodomites could not scrape together even a minyan, because the angelic messengers proceed to destroy not only Sodom and Gomorrah but several other “cities of the Plain” without mercy to man, woman, or child (Gen. 19:29).
    As it turns out, however, Lot and his family
are
spared from the famous “hellfire and brimstone” that sweeps away the rest of the Sodomites, but
not
because they are declared to be righteous by God or anyone else. “[E]ven the righteous in these sin-laden cities, though better than the rest, were far from good,” a rabbinical sage would later say. 6 So Lot’s good fortune is yet another favor from his uncle—or a favor that God is willing to do for the otherwise undeserving kinfolk of his chosen one, Abraham. 7 “God remembered Abraham,” the Bible pauses to tell us, “and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow (Gen. 19:29).

I NCEST IN THE A NCIENT W ORLD
     
    Ever since Sigmund Freud replaced the Heavenly Father as a source of moral law, we have been taught to regard the taboo against incest as something deep and powerful, ancient and universal, and that is why the scenes of sexual intercourse between Lot and his own daughters are so shocking and unseemly when we encounter the story in the Holy Bible. But the fact is that the biblical world (and, as we shall see, the Bible authors) regarded incest with far less horror than we might suppose by reading the catalog of sexual prohibitions in the Book of Leviticus.
    Sexual relations between blood relatives were
not
universally condemned in the faiths and cultures of the ancient Near East. For example,the civilizations of Mesopotamia, the place where Abraham and Lot were born, tolerated incest among gods if not among ordinary human beings. Although a prohibition against sexual intercourse between a father and his daughter is literally chiseled in stone in the Code of Hammurabi, the sacred myths of ancient Mesopotamia depicted the gods in sexual couplings with their own offspring and siblings. 26
    The laws and customs of ancient Egypt, the place to which Abraham and Lot traveled in search of sustenance during a famine, were more evenhanded: Gods and human beings alike were permitted to engage in incestuous marriages under certain circumstances. Since under Egyptian law property descended from a mother to her eldest daughter, rather than from father to son, a father might resort to marrying his own daughter (or a son might marry his sister) in order to prevent the family wealth from falling under the control of an outsider. 27 And a reigning pharaoh might wed his own sister in imitation of the myth of Isis and Osiris, the sibling-lovers with whom the rulers of Egypt identified themselves. 28
    The land of Canaan, located to the west of Mesopotamia and to the north of Egypt, fell within the contesting spheres