What Does Genesis 19:32 Mean?

"Let's get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father." The plan the daughters devise is the most radical possible response to their perceived situation. The plan involves deception, incest, and the manipulation of their father through wine, a combination of wrongs that the narrative records without editorializing, leaving the reader's moral assessment to inform itself from the outcome. The daughters are trying to solve a genuine problem (the continuation of the family line) through means that are comprehensively wrong, from the deception to the incest to the use of intoxication to obtain what would not be given sober.

The parallels to the Noah drunkenness narrative of Genesis 9 are significant: a father drunk in a tent or cave, sexual violation by his descendants, and the origin of nations from the event. In both cases, the drunkenness is not presented as the primary sin of the passage; in both cases, what happens during the drunkenness has long-lasting genealogical and national consequences. The connection between the two narratives is the Bible's way of presenting the generational consequences of moral failure as real and traceable across time, without letting the generational consequences of the ancestors define the irredeemable destiny of the descendants.

The plan the daughters devise is the desperate action of people who have watched everything familiar be destroyed and who cannot see how the future they need can come through any ordinary path. The moral failures of desperate people in impossible situations are part of what the covenant narrative records honestly and without idealizing. The God who brought Lot out of the catastrophe "because He remembered Abraham will bring the nations of Moab and Ammon from this episode, and eventually the line of Ruth, the Moabite ancestor of David, through the catastrophe of the daughters' decision. The worst human choices do not exhaust God's ability to work redemption through the consequences.