There should be a second part of this comic that documents the ending where Lot's daughters fuck their dad to be sure they are impregnated by a "godly" man
There's a theme in the old testament that people become nations, e.g. Israel (Jacob) was one of the the sons of Isaac who begat the tribe/nation of Israel. Lot's daughters who had nonconsensual sex with him while he was unconscious begat Moab and Ammon which went onto create the nations of Moab and Ammon who were neighbors of the ancient Israelites, they were in fairly constant conflict with the Israelites. The story of lot's rape can be interpreted as a very old and elaborate "your mother fucked her father" joke.
It's not just the old testament. That's how those with power tend to think, that their "empire" is a literal physical extension of the self. That's why Alexander the Great declined to pass his throne down to anyone else, and instead made them all fight to build their own empires.
Similarly, the nation directly south of Moab was Edom.
Edom means red in Hebrew, so the Bible has Edom being founded by Isaac's oldest son, Esau, who has red hair and sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a bowl of red lentil stew because he was hungry.
It's less of a jab than the origin of Moab, but it's still not super flattering.
When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife.
Wait, hang on. This particular deity is the one people started to worship during the bronze age collapse, and that belief system has stuck around since the worst dark ages in history? Fuckin hell.
Also explains why it's the most common religion in much of the world. If you have one group of people worshipping a god that says "be cool and don't kill each other," and another group worshipping a god that says "be uncool and kill anyone who doesn't worship me," one of those religious beliefs is far more fit to survive than the other
'Spoils of war' sounds a little different when you consider this, and the medieval blindness to the age of consent. I wonder how many incels of the past joined the crusades to get a pussy without any responsibilities.
Probably a lot. Think about the most rural places in Afghanistan, a culture disconnected from the world without a modern education. That was the majority of people in the past.
People will always draw the line for acceptable behavior just past where they find themselves.
With that in mind we can surmise that the person that wrote this was very likely guilty of war rape, but he thought highly of himself for letting the woman grieve first. Very likely the people he was writing this for were also commonly guilty of war rape and thought little of it.
The whole Bible is full of insane ridiculous shit like this. It baffles me that people say they live their lives by it and don't even know what it says.
No, that's history. Back then taking defeated enemies as slaves was pretty much standard. And with the slavery part of course there also came the rape part. That was how wars were done for the vast majority of human history.
The pillar-of-salt thing is really weird, even for a deity as capricious as Yahweh. He doesn't strike her dead. He turns her into salt. There must be something that got lost in translation there.
I think that area where the story was supposed to have happened is known for having salt pillars, so maybe it was like a warning, "look at all those that got punished"
No, Sodom & Gomorrah were where the Dead Sea is. Very very salty & unique sea. So wife to pillar of salt follows the theme of violent, quick, salty death.
As HAL 9 TRILLION had numerous examples, there are more like John the Baptist's father & Abraham's wife Sarah, etc etc etc. All are related by a general rule: do not question the religion/authority figures of the religion, do not talk back or doubt the religious authority, do as you are told & nothing more, nothing less. The Bible calls for blind, unquestioning obedience in all things. I guess it could also be called 'faith'.
In the story, Lot’s wife had gone around to neighbors asking to borrow salt, which alerted them to the strangers’ presence. Hence the irony of the punishment. Still, cruel and bizarre and more befitting a medieval fairytale than… well, a bronze-age one.
Funny thing. I had an illustrated kid's Bible when I was young. The angels clearly told Lot's feeling family not to look back. Figured it was a FAFO lesson.
Just got done reading the story. No one told anyone not to look back.
No, the angels told them. It's still stupid. God kills a woman for looking back, he kills a kid for picking up sticks on the sabbath, he kills a guy who tries to keep the ark of the covenant from tipping over. He calls up a bear to maul 42 children because they called one of his prophets baldy.
The Biblical God's just complete bullshit, honestly.
@MrJameGumb@zarkanian
That whole punishment for not resisting the temptation of looking back seems to have been borrowed from the Greek myth of Orpheus & Eurydice. Like many other biblical stories.
I've been getting into some early Christian / Biblical textual analysis and history and apparently the people who wrote the Sodom story would not have understood the concept of homosexuality as an orientation, their conception was entirely act-based and focused on penetrator vs penetrated.
So this story, the primary anti-gay biblical story, is better understood as showing the Sodomites violating Guest Right, and Lot being such a good host that he expends resources (gives away his daughters to be raped) to keep his guests safe.
Just goes to show how cultural context is important in reading texts.
The preceding chapter is all about Abraham badgering God over the destruction of a city. He starts by saying "Okay, but would you destroy the city if fifty of its inhabitants didn't deserve it? What about forty-five? Forty? Thirty? Ten, even?" And in the end, God sends Angels down to pull the last righteous man in Sodom out of town before its destroyed.
The guest right passage is intended to illustrate him as a self-less man who would stand at the door before an angry mob to protect his new friends.
apparently the people who wrote the Sodom story would not have understood the concept of homosexuality as an orientation, their conception was entirely act-based and focused on penetrator vs penetrated.
This is true for every culture except the current postmodern context in which we find ourselves.
The development of our current understanding of sexuality is a byproduct of the Green Revolution and the massive abundance of food in the western world. When you're hungry or in fear of being hungry, sex occupies less of your mind.
The story of Lut in Quran is explicitly about homosexuality. Idk how well they understood homosexuality but they were at least aware of it well before the green revolution
I love that it's an anti-gay story, and it was completely made up. Sodom and Gomorrah were not real places. The guy who wrote Genesis literally couldn't think of a real world reason why homosexuality or just sodomy was immoral so he made up a fairy tale.
Maybe it's the primary anti-gay story, but aren't there verses about "not lying with a man as with a woman"? And the punishment for that is to be stoned to death?
There is, but the translation is not perfect and I have seen the argument that the Hebrew translates closer to "you shall not lie with a close male relative as you would your wife" since there is a lot of incest mentioned in the list of prohibitions, or I've also seen it argued that it's implying "male sex worker", the word for "man" in that passage is not the normal word for "man" used in the rest of the Bible.
And I have also heard the context of the entire section being about priestly purity, so it's more like you wouldn't be able to perform rituals after having the wrong type of sex until you are purified, but it's on the same level as women being unclean when they are menstruating.
But the better argument to me is that Leviticus is specifically part of the Jewish Law, and people since the Apostle Paul have been saying you can't keep the Jewish Law and be a good Christian, because Jesus replaced all those rules. So it's actually a sin if you're Christian and insisting people abide by the rules in Levitivus.
But married heteros doing oral, anal, mutual masturbation, or sex during a period is all forbidden. Yet all queer hating Christians don't speak out against any of that hetero/married sin.
All Abrahamich religions that stem from the same root, Christianity was a direct fork from Judism and Islam having its own roots in both and a few other inputs further east of Palestine.
The Holy book of Jews, Christians and Muslims are the same (at the start). They only differ where they stop. New testament is a revision of the old one. So is the Muslim part, but I do not know that too well.
This is why you can always find this and contradictions. They only wrote patches, not erratas.
Other way around actually. Judism/Christianity claim to be 4,000+ years old but there is little evidence to back this claim that wasn't written centuries after the supposed fact.
Hindu religion has temples and manuscripts dating at least that far back and its known that sporadic trade from Rome to China did happen and lands that are now in modern India were a leg on that unofficial trade road. So the various authors of the old testament very well could have had copies of Hindu writing and tales, or been told them second, third or fourth hand through those with a connection to the unofficial trader networks that moved goods and information between the two continents.
Now that's a load of BS if I ever seen one, not as bad in Bible but still par.
Hinduism books based on islamic or Christin ones? Like from 19 th century that's possible, but anything before that highly unlikely.
All Abrahamic shit is just mind control. If there was a Holy Messiah who embodied everything good and pure, do you think he'd want everyone to be an acolytic zealot that follow contradictory and sexist messages written by mortals?
They also conveniently forget about Numbers 5 : 11-31, the only time abortion is even mentioned in The Bible, and if you read The Old Testament, The Mishrad, and The Talmud, you'll realize that The Bible just told you to perform a barbaric abortion method, in case of suspected infidelity. The mother died of the "bitter waters" as well as the fetus, if it was made incorrectly.
For those of you who don't know your full Biblical history, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah continues with Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt and then his daughters get drunk and fuck Lot.
I've always understood it to be the other way around: Lot's daughters force Lot to get blackout drunk, then they fuck him while he's blacked out. Repeatedly.
And the other part of that fucked up story is that the "moral" (and I use that word very loosely) is supposed to be about being kind to strangers in your Country.
What's arguably even more fucked up is that the basic assumption the story relies on is that the audience is intended to see Lot's choice not as a betrayal towards his daughters, but as a personal sacrifice in giving up his property. This was considered to be so obvious to the people of its time that it goes unstated.
Nah, it's guest rites. Or guest rights, depending on your perspective
It's a huge thing in all ancient cultures and probably all religions. Not even just ancient cultures, the US had similar things in the frontier days.
People used to walk across continents - humans can't just hike for 6 months, we're not built for that - we have to take breaks and build up a bit before we keep moving, it takes time to keep yourself supplied.
Humans leap frog, it's how we spread worldwide. We have guest rites - sets of expectations for guests and hosts, and violating them is a major taboo. Even in our media, it still fills us with instinctive revulsion
Is this example ridiculous and morally dubious even in it's own context? Absolutely.
But it's not just about shielding a foreigner, it's about the moral imperative to follow through once you've offered someone shelter
The cartoon is good except they show the daughters as too old. In those times the girls were married off by 16, so if you're showing two daughters they should be more like 15 and 12. Imagine that for a fucking second.
tbf, isn't the whole point of the bible to show terrible stories as bad examples?
like aren't you supposed to draw your own conclusions or whatever from it?
idk i never read it, just know the basic overview of some stuff.
Deuteronomy 22: 28-29. If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.