Lot in the Christian Tradition

The story of Lot and his daughters strikes us today as disturbing, perhaps even immoral. But in Christian tradition Lot came to be revered and honored as Saint Lot. There are two explanations why this happened. According to the first, God did not blame Lot for the sin he committed with his daughters because they had made him drunk beforehand. The plotting daughters, for their part, seem to have been excused because they recognized the need to regenerate the world after the terrible annihilation they had witnessed. According to the second view, the story of Lot and his daughters, like others in the Old Testament, was written by Israelites who were perpetually at war with the Moabites and the Ammonites; the story is seen as having been written to discredit the origins of the Israelites’s traditional enemies to the east.