Moab

Moab, the son of Lot and Lot's daughter, yearns to find his father and be closer to his grandfather, not realizing that Lot is both.

Context

• Reference: Genesis 19:36

• Lot, leaving the point where his wife had been turned into a pillar of salt, arrived at his daughters' camp.

• His daughters, fearing that they were the last people in the world, got him drunk and slept with him.

• They gave birth to sons, Moab and Ben-Ammi.

Aftermath

• Moab's descendants, the Moabites, became one of the most powerful tribes in the region.

• Millennia later, the Moabite Ruth married the Israelite Boaz.

• Her great-grandson was King David.

Notes

This was the first of the Book of Voices pieces (not counting Moses, since I hadn't considered his piece as part of the book until later). The random number table found Moab's name elsewhere in the Bible, and immediately confronted me with one of the key challenges in writing these texts.

I had known of Moab as a tribe, but had to look within the text to find the story of Moab as a person. And while I had known the general story of Lot and his daughters, I had forgotten that their sons were Moab and Ben-Ammi.

The Moabites (descended from Moab) and Ammonites (descended from Ben-Ammi) were often derided, and were considered enemies of the people of Israel. Indeed, this story of the Moabites' and Ammonites' parentage may have come about to cast them as the bastard descendants of Terah, in opposition to the direct and more valid genealogy of Abraham's children.

But here I was challenged to view the story through Moab's own eyes. Looking into the text, I found Moab as a child. His parentage may have been kept as a secret, even from him, but he may have been treated as a cursed mistake. With Lot's having lost his wife in the destruction of his city, I picture him as remaining lost, alone with this most dysfunctional of families, embracing with them what remains of his past and of the love now gone.

Thus, rather than seeing Moab as a father to an enemy tribe, I kept coming back to the image of this child sitting alone, confused, frightened, and ashamed on the side of the mountain.

I have a moral hunch, which is reflected in many of these stories: almost no one views himself or herself as a bad person. Indeed, the only people whom I have ever heard say "I'm a bad person" were very good people who held themselves up to impossible standards. It was key here, as it is in so much of life, to try to see this person as he would see himself, not as a figure of evil, but as a person trying to live up to some standard of good, often in a world and circumstances that he could not understand.