Lot’s daughters, in contrast, are treated sympathetically. The midrash observes that, by strict law, the daughters deserve to be burnt by fire for having lain with their father (Aggadat Beresh*t[ed. Buber] 25:1), but the Holy One, blessed be He, who knows man’s thoughts, judges them by their thoughts and not their deed. The daughters’ true intent was not to lie with their father, on whom they had no sexual designs, but to save the world from total devastation. The daughters thought that the entire world had been laid waste, as had happened during the Flood, since they saw no living souls wherever they went; they did not know that only Sodom had been destroyed. They said: “The Holy One, blessed be He, has rescued us so that the world will exist through us, so that the human race shall continue.” The Holy One, blessed be He, knew their honest minds and good thoughts and rewarded them for their actions. Accordingly, when he commanded “no Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted into the congregation of the Lord”(Deut. 23:4), this prohibition against intermarriage applies only to the males, and not to the females(Pesikta Rabbati42).
The underlying reason for the sympathetic treatment of the daughters of Lot apparently stems fromRuththe Moabite’s tracing her lineage to them and the subsequent descent of King David and, eventually, of the Messiah, from Ruth’s marriage to Boaz. According to the midrashic account, when Lot was commanded to rescue his two daughters from the destruction the angels already foresaw that Ruth the Moabite andNa’amahthe Ammonite would descend from them(Gen. Rabbah50:10). In addition, when Scripture tells of the incestuous act by the daughters of Lot, who say: “that we may preserve seed from our father”(Gen. 19:34), it uses the wordzera(“seed,” or “offspring” in a more general sense), and not “son,” since the intent of the Holy One, blessed be He, was related to the Messiah(Gen. Rabbah51:8). Thus, from a historical perspective, this act was essential for the future advent of the Messiah.
This action also explains the midrash (Gen. Rabbah, loc. cit.) that Lot’s daughters had no wine; a miracle was performed for them, and the cave in which they lived became a portent of the World to Come, dripping with wine, as in the depiction of the World to Come: “And in that day, the mountains shall drip with wine”(Joel 4:18). An additional wonder: the rabbis mistakenly believed that a virgin does not become pregnant from her first intercourse, while Lot’s daughters, who were virgins, did become pregnant from this initial act(Gen. Rabbah51:9). This midrash reiterates the purity of their intentions, since they lay with their father only a single time, to ensure the continuity of the world. Just as Ruth acted for an ideal when she went down at night to the threshing floor of Boaz, so, too, the daughters of Lot acted altruistically(Gen. Rabbah51:10).
