Disputing God, incest, themes in VaYera

VaYera Genesis Chapters 18-22

By Irv Jacobs, MD

Irv Jacobs
Parasha for November 16, 2019

LA JOLLA, California — This is an eventful parsha, from which I take note of two items: (1) a dispute between Abraham and God, (2) overt incest  between Lot’s daughters and Lot.

I. Disputing God — After the ‘messengers’ revealed intention to destroy the corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham argued with God–“Will you sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? What if there should be fifty (eventually only 10) innocent within the city; will You then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent…?”

I have sought ancient pagan sources that I hoped would address equivalent disputes with deities. There is a Mesopotamian composition known as the “Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,” from the mid 2nd millennium BCE, which presents the complaint of a pious man whose world has crushed about him, despite his punctilious attention to the cultic demands of his gods. He concludes the gods do not operate according to any intelligible norms. [1]

There is little else that I found. Tim Whitmarsh comes closest. His book on ancient atheism makes a compelling case for various forms  of religious disbelief over the past 2-1/2 millennia. Ancients did question their traditional stories about the gods. Their focus was mainly antipathy  toward gods, rather than actual disbelief in their existence.

The ancient Greeks did not assume that the gods are likable or lovable, and indeed hostility to the gods is a familiar trope in Greek literature. The best-known Homeric poems, never treated gods with the reverence of the monotheistic religions, depict anthropomorphic gods who are very much of this world. They characteristically interact with humans, even fight with them on the battlefield. To Whitmarsh these stories express “a kind of atheism, through the narrative medium of myth.” He reports on the archaic tale of Salmoneus, who claimed to be Zeus and demanded sacrifices be offered to him. He created thunder (sparks) by dragging kettles behind his chariot. Whitmarsh suggests that this story raises disturbing questions for gods’ believers: “If gods can be fashioned by mortal imitation, how real can they be?”

In the fifth century BCE, there arose more convincing examples of persons we moderns might identify as atheists. Protagoras declared, “I cannot know whether gods exist.”

In the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, among Greeks the nature and existence and non-existence of the gods was reconsidered by several schools of philosophy. Stoics identified god with nature and fate. Epicureans had a notion of gods who were composed of a different, thinner type of matter from all the entities in the universe, and lived “between the worlds,” affecting nothing but dreams and the imagination. Skeptics argued that all beliefs rest “on shaky foundations,” including belief in gods. This latter smacks of atheism. Carneades, of this same school, wanted to prove that belief in the gods was logically impossible.

Whitmarsh, in assessing the Greek society as really a group of independent city-states, considers Greece as more a set of local cults than a centralized religious system. Rome, which followed, as a centralized power, with its more unified paganist religion, and politics, was more conducive to the rise of an atheist class. As Romans tended to equate their empire’s success with divine providence, any skepticism of the empire naturally opened the door to an equal skepticism of its pagan religion. This died out, as the empire, becoming increasingly difficult to govern, became receptive to Emperor Constantine’s strong useful introduction of Christianity.
Of course, Christianity also became vulnerable to an atheist group of dissenters, but the Nicene Code, with punishment of death to dissenters, dissuaded an open argument for disbelief.

There had been even a little of this type of suppression in ancient Greece. An example is the sentence to death, via hemlock, of Socrates because he had expressed “non belief” in the gods of his city. [2]

To me, it seems that the direct challenge by Abraham to God is a uniquely Hebrew literary innovation.
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II. Incest — After Lot and his two virginal daughters escaped Sodom’s destruction, the daughters assumed that they were the only surviving humans in the world. To begin to repopulate their world, they proposed incest with their father. One said, ” Our father is old and there is not a man on earth to consort with us in the way of all the world. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and let us lie with him…”

Incest, and specifically that between father and daughter, was known in ancient times, even described in ancient novels, which were available into medieval times, e.g. Clementine Recognitions and Appollonius of Tyre. [3]

Leviticus, Chapter 18 lists prohibited sexual relations, including varieties of incest, but notably does not specifically include a father-daughter prohibition. This provoked controversy in the early 20th century. The French Bible scholar, Guillaume Cardascia (1914-2006) argued that this omission should be taken at face value. He concluded that biblical authors permitted, or at least ‘tolerated,’ sex between a father and daughter. His thesis has been supported by, among others, Tikva Frymer-Kensky (1943-2006) of the University of Chicago and Jonathan Ziskind of the University of Louisville. Their argument is that in the biblical world, and in the ancient Near East in general, a father was considered the owner of his daughter’s sexuality. It was within his right to marry her to whomever he chose, and the marriage was sealed with a “bride price” paid to the father by the prospective husband.

If a father had full ownership of his daughter’s sexuality, the argument goes, he could not be prohibited from having sex with her. This does not necessarily mean that such relations were considered desirable, but forbidding them outright would have been construed as undermining the patriarch’s authority.

The other side of this argument is that father-daughter sex was not permitted, despite the omission in Chapter 18. Hittite and Babylonian fathers had the same jurisdictional rights as Hebrew fathers, yet they were forbidden to have sex with their daughters. The Laws of Hammurabi state “If a man should carnally know his daughter, they shall banish that man from the city.” Israelite society in the Middle East, it is argued, was not unique in this respect, In fact, the Leviticus incest laws are overall more extensive than that of Hammurabi and the Hittites.

Some scholars suggest that father-daughter incest did not need to be addressed explicitly because the text of Chapter 18, verse 6, forbade it implicitly: “No man among you shall come near anyone of his own flesh.” [4]

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[1] Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary, The Jewish Publication Society, 1989, p.133
[2] Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, Tim Whitmarsh, 2016, Deckle Edge, 2015
[3] The Flight From Incest: Two Late Classical Precursors of the Constance Theme, The Chaucer Review, Vol. 20, No. 4, Penn State University Press, Elizabeth Archibald,1986, pp. 259-272
[4] Does the Torah Prohibit Father-Daughter Incest? Dr. Eve Levavi Feinstein, in dissertation: “Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible,” Harvard University, 2019

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Irv Jacobs is a retired medical doctor who delights in Torah analysis.  He often delivers a drosh at Congregation Beth El in La Jolla, and at his chavurah.