I’m reading in Genesis as I write Sarai’s story, and have been looking for ways to deepen the characters of Lot and his wife. As I read Lot’s story, I came to the part after Sodom is destroyed and Lot’s wife turns into a pillar of salt. (Read about it in Genesis 19.) Lot’s daughters are living with their father in a cave and fear they will never marry. (The guys they were engaged to had died in Sodom.) So they got their father drunk and slept with him – one each night – each getting pregnant by their father. (Yuck!) But the interesting thing I noticed was how Lot acted when he was drunk. The Bible says, “He did not know when she lay down or when she arose.” It says that twice, of both daughters, each night, which tells me Lot was pretty drunk! And obviously, he did not recall anything he did drunk, or he wouldn’t have done it again.
2 Peter 2:7 tells us that Lot was a righteous man, so it seems to me, if he’d been more aware and more in control of himself (not getting drunk in the first place) incest would not have happened. But it did. That didn’t mean Lot was no longer righteous, just that he messed up big time. (Like David did during a much later era.)
During David’s day, we come across drunkenness again, only this time it is David trying to get Uriah drunk so he will go home and sleep with his wife to cover David’s adultery. David did manage to get Uriah drunk, but in this case, the Bible says, “…and he (Uriah) ate in his (David’s) presence and drank, so that he made him drunk…but he did not go down to his house.” Even drunk, Uriah was in control of himself and knew what he was doing, unlike Lot who let himself drown in his wine-induced stupor.
So here we have examples of two men – one who can handle wine and one who can’t. I’m not here to make a judgment on such things. But I love the little details God gives us in Scripture. There is much to ponder, not only as character studies of two very different men (both righteous, by the way) but much to learn from even the smallest bit of Bible trivia.
Until next time~
