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themselves to find the door” (Genesis 19: 11). The angels told Lot

to leave Sodom because they were going to destroy it. Lot told his

sons-in-law, but they did not believe him. In the morning, the

angels told Lot to take his wife and two unmarried daughters; he

lingered, the angels transported Lot and the women outside the

city. God told Lot to go into the mountains and not to look back;

Lot pleaded to be able to go to a nearby city; God said he would

spare that city for Lot’s sake: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom

and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of

heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the

inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground”

(Genesis 19: 24-25). God remembered Lot, and spared him, and in

the wave of destruction of cities, God sent Lot into the mountains,

where Lot lived with his two daughters: “And the firstborn said

unto the younger, Our father is old, and 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” (Genesis 19: 31-32). On successive nights, each had sex with her drunken father and both became pregnant. Both had sons, a blessing, and each of those sons became the father of a whole people, a blessing.

That the people of Sodom meant the strangers harm is clear.

The nature of that harm is less clear. The demand of the mob to

bring the strangers out “that we may know them” is sexual because

the use of “know” usually is in biblical diction. The attempt of Lot

to substitute his virgin daughters for the men suggests that the mob

would have gang-raped the men. Whether the women in the mob

were voyeurs or purveyors of other forms of violence is impossible

to know: and yet the threat to the men does not seem to be only

sexual; it seems to include sexual assault by men, beating, maiming, and murder. The mixed mob indicates the breakdown of male class power in the same w ay that the assault on the male visitors

does: the rules that keep men exercising power as a class over

women as a sexually and socially subject group have broken down

absolutely; that is the destruction of the city. The destruction of

Sodom is certainly not for breaking a sexual prohibition on homosexuality. The daughters who get their father drunk to have intercourse with him and bear his children also break laws: yet they are blessed. The lesson is not that the inferred homosexual assault is

worse than the accomplished incest because one is homosexual and

the other is heterosexual. Laws against incest come first in Lcvit-

icus and are repeated or invoked in other parts of the Old Testament. The lesson is that when men are not safe from other men— a safety that can only be achieved by keeping women segregated and

for sex— the city w ill be wiped out. The daughters, in committing

incest, broke the law in order to perpetuate patriarchal power: as a

result of what they did, peoples, tribes, cities, were created. W hatever furthers male dominance, even when forbidden, will not destroy the city but build it. Sin, in the Old Testament, is first of all political. Law in the Old Testament is the regulation of society for

the purposes of power, not morality. The Old Testament is a

handbook on sexual politics: the rights of patriarchs and how to

uphold them.