Bad Girls of the Bible: Lot’s Daughters – The Survivors with a Scandalous Plan

If Tamar makes church folks squirm, Lot’s daughters practically blow the doors off the Sunday School classroom. Their story in Genesis 19 is short, shocking, and often whispered about: two sisters who got their father drunk and conceived children by him.

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They’ve been branded immoral, perverse, and shameful for thousands of years. But when you step back, their story looks less like scandal and more like survival. These weren’t reckless temptresses - they were women trying to preserve their family line after losing everything.

The Story as Written

Genesis 19:30–38 picks up after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot flees the city with his two daughters. His wife turns back and becomes a pillar of salt. Suddenly, the daughters are isolated in a cave with their father, watching smoke rise from what used to be their home.

They believe the world has ended. No husbands. No future. No family line to carry forward.

So they hatch a desperate plan:

“Come, let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father.” (Genesis 19:32)

Two nights, two daughters, two pregnancies. Each bears a son: Moab and Ben-Ammi, who become ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites - nations that play a major role in Israel’s history.

The Skewed Facts

For centuries, Lot’s daughters have been reduced to a salacious story of incest. They’re remembered as immoral and deviant, their children as proof of their shame.

But the text doesn’t accuse them of sin. It doesn’t condemn them at all. In fact, the narrative presents their actions plainly, almost matter-of-factly. They weren’t driven by lust. They were driven by survival.

They had lost their home, their community, their security. In their eyes, humanity itself had been wiped out. They acted not for pleasure, but for continuity.

And yet, instead of being remembered as survivors, they’ve been caricatured as sinners.

Lot’s Daughters in the Bigger Picture

Here’s what’s remarkable: their children are not erased. Moab and Ammon become full-fledged nations with complex relationships to Israel. And later, Ruth the Moabite - descendant of this so-called scandal - marries into Israel and becomes the great-grandmother of King David (Ruth 4:18–22).

That means the line of David, and ultimately Jesus, carries the blood of Lot’s daughters. Even their desperate act of survival becomes part of redemption history.

The Modern Connection

Lot’s daughters remind us of a painful truth: when systems collapse, women often carry the burden of survival.

How many women today are criminalized for the choices they make under desperate conditions?

• Mothers prosecuted for “endangering” their children when poverty leaves them no options.

• Sex workers stigmatized for using the resources available to them to survive.

• Survivors judged for strategies that look messy, complicated, or morally uncomfortable from the outside.

Lot’s daughters were navigating trauma and isolation, trying to preserve a future when the world as they knew it had ended. Their actions may look shocking, but the driving force was the same one that drives women’s survival strategies today: life must go on.

Reclaiming Lot’s Daughters

Lot’s daughters weren’t perverse. They were survivors in a world on fire. Their story challenges us to look past labels of “immoral” or “bad” and ask harder questions: What pressures shaped their choices? What desperation drove them? And why do we always find ways to shame women whose survival makes us uncomfortable?

Their legacy - Moab, Ammon, Ruth, David, Jesus - shows that survival, even messy survival, can carry forward life and hope.

Maybe that’s the real scandal: not that Lot’s daughters did something unthinkable, but that the system left them with no other options.

✍️ This post is part of SWOP Behind Bars’ series “Bad Girls of the Bible,” exploring how women’s reputations have been shaped by stigma, and what that means for sex workers and criminalized women today.

Learn more at www.swopbehindbars.org