Vayera, the Torah portion read this week, is one of my favourites

Vayera, the Torah portion read this week, is one of my favourites. Besides Abraham's circumcision and the news of Sarah's pregnancy, it tells how Abraham pleads for mercy for Sodom, yet the angels save from the city's inhabitants only the family of Abraham's nephew Lot. His wife, in defiance of the prohibition, turns round and is changed into a pillar of salt, while the rescued daughters, convinced that they are the last people on earth, resolve to sleep with their father. The girls made Lot drunk and lay with him:

“And the firstborn said unto the younger: …there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father… Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father. And the firstborn bare a son, and called his name Moab: the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day. And the younger, she also bare a son, and called his name Ben-ammi: the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day.”

In that universe, spinsterhood was considered so great a disgrace for a woman that the maidens preferred seducing their own father to a life alone.

Lot's progeny from this sinful union with his daughters forms the kingdoms of Moab and Ammon. They would become famous not only for a loathsome religion with child sacrifices, but also for constantly harming the Jews and seeking to destroy them. For example, they would offer no water or food to those coming out of the desert, and would summon Balaam, renowned for his curses, to bring the Jews to ruin. The Torah forbids men of these tribes to join the Jewish people or to marry Jewish women. In Ammonite cities archaeologists find horrifying altars on which children were burned alive, and entire cemeteries of charred children's remains.

In short, the portion holds a great deal of interest: how Abraham was ready to offer his child as a sacrifice to God, and how, at the instigation of the newly delivered Sarah, he drove from his house the concubine who had borne him a son while the old wife was barren. Ishmael, the banished son, very nearly died in the desert. Quite fertile soil for moral lamentation.