Lot, His Daughters, and Their Descendants Moab and Ammon : Familiar Otherness in the Hebrew Bible

Peter J. Sabo explores the multifaceted biblical portrayal of Moab and Ammon, from their incestuous origins as the descendants of Lot and his daughters to the prohibitions of exogamy against them, to the marriage of Ruth and Boaz. Sabo demonstrates that Lot’s kinship with, yet separation from, Abraham functions as a paradigm of the relationship between the descendants of Lot and Abraham in the Hebrew Bible, thereby revealing a complex network of intertextual connections that play off each other. Furthermore, he analyzes the gendered dimensions of this relationship in which these Transjordanian neighbors are imagined as sexually deviant—subverting, threatening, but also establishing the patriarchal norms of ancient Israel.

Beginning with a close reading of Lot''s story in Genesis, Sabo focuses on how Moab and Ammon act as a foil to Israel in its desert wanderings, and explores how Moabite women subvert patriarchal gender roles and present a threat to Israelite identity, even as they are used to affirm it as well. Highlighting the supposedly tenuous connection of Rahab''s aid of Israel, Sabo analyses how both the Lot and Rahab stories play with issues of insider-outsider relations, and further assess the archetypes of Moab and Ammon''s descendants in Judges, Samuel and Kings; from Ehud the Benjaminite and Jephthah the Gileadite and his daughter to Nahash the Ammonite and Mesha the Moabite. Culminating in Ruth, a foreigner-kinswoman and a character who combines the identities of Israelite and Moabite and marries Boaz, Sabo argues that this intermingling of incest and exogamy relates to the complicated navigating of territorial boundaries, proper sexual behaviour, and kinship relations that are consistently present in biblical stories of Lot, his daughters, and their descendants.