Did Lot Get His Just Desserts? Trauma, Revenge, and Re-enactment in Genesis 19.30-38

Abstract

In Genesis 19.30-38, Lot’s daughters commit incest with their father to save his seed. Earlier in Genesis 19.6-8, Lot offered his daughters to be raped by the men of Sodom to save the honour of his male guests. Reading these stories together, in the latter, we observe an inverted world where victims become perpetrators and vice versa. If read through trauma theory, the inversion could imply that the daughters’ rape of Lot was motivated by revenge; however, traumatic re-enactment, where the daughters repeat their earlier trauma but also invert it, could also suit the textual evidence. Verses 30–38 could be read as an attempt to master previous trauma through repetition, where the recurring descriptions of design and act of rape are central to the interpretation of the narrative. This reading does not lessen the horror of the passage but rather adds to our understanding of trauma in Genesis 19.30–38.