Lut: Difference between revisions

The detail of Lut offering up his two daughters to the crowd of rapists ({{Quran-range|15|67|71}} and {{Quran-range|11|77|79}}) is a detail from the original story (the Bible, Genesis 19:8) which has survived the Islamification of the text and story. In the original story, the angels sent by YHVH to Lot's houses are Lots guests, and Lot as a good Middle Eastern host is required to offer them good hospitality and protection, while the wicked men of Sodom and Gomorrah accost their house demanding to rape them, which is not a very hospitable thing to do. Although to later readers and listeners the salient point of the story appeared to be the lust of the men of Sodom and Gomorrah to rape other men, in fact a close reading of the original text of Genesis appears to cast their prime sin as inhospitality to guests and foreigners: Lot offers his daughters because he is a righteous man who takes care of foreign visitors as a good guest should, even at the cost of his own daughters' precious virginity. His willingness to sacrifice his daughters to the rapist mob is proof of his good hospitality. In the Qur'anic version, though, by which time the homosexuality of the people of Lut has evolved into their prime sin, this gesture makes little sense since purely homosexual rapists would theoretically have no interest in his daughters (and the offering up of the daughters to be raped likely appeared as strange to the first generations of Muslims as it does to modern readers). It survival shows its salience in the original story, even if devoid of context here.