What Does Genesis 19:38 Mean?

The younger daughter also had a son, and she named him Ben-Ammi; he is the father of the Ammonites of today. The second etiological naming: Ben-Ammi means "son of my people" or "son of my kinsman," encoding in the name both the kinship origin and the unusual progenitor. The Ammonites, like the Moabites, are Israel's kin through Lot, and their land was similarly protected from Israelite encroachment in the wilderness period (Deuteronomy 2:19). The symmetry of the two names, both given by their mothers, both encoding the origin, creates the founding parallel of the two nations that chapter 19 ends with.

The "Ammonites of today" parallels "Moabites of today" in verse 37, connecting the same pattern of etiological naming and present-day reference to both nation origins. The Ammonite nation that appears throughout the subsequent biblical narrative, in Jephthah's wars, in the opposition to Nehemiah's rebuilding of Jerusalem, in the regulations of Deuteronomy, all carry the origin story of the cave. The narrative of Genesis 19 is the backstory of every subsequent biblical reference to Ammon and Moab; to know their origin is to understand their relationship to Israel.

The chapter that began with the arrival of Angels at the gate of Sodom ends with the naming of the ancestors of two nations from a cave in the mountains above the destroyed plain. The angels who investigated and then destroyed the city, who rescued Lot by the hand and withheld the judgment until he was safe, who were sent because the Lord remembered Abraham, those same divine agents have produced not only the destruction of the wicked but the preservation of the seed through which unexpected redemptive trajectories would eventually run. The cave that is the low point of Lot's story is the origin point of the national histories that Ruth's faithfulness and Jesus's genealogy will eventually redeem. What God begins in judgment He does not leave without the mercy that reaches even into the most compromised corners of the story.