Commentary for Genesis 19:32

THAT WE MAY KEEP ALIVE SEED FROM OUR FATHER. The intent is perhaps that they said: “Let us do what we can, so that G-d should have mercy, and we shall give birth to a boy and a girl from whom the world shall be sustained, for the world will be built with kindness,²⁷¹Psalms 89:3. and it is not in vain that G-d has saved us.” Now they were modest and did not want to tell their father to marry them, as a Noachide²⁷²See Seder Bereshith, Note 288. is permitted to take his daughter.²⁷³Sanhedrin 58b. It may be that the matter was extremely repulsive in the eyes of the people of those generations and was never done. Our Rabbis,²⁷⁴Bereshith Rabbah 51:11-12. in Agadic expositions, likewise discredit Lot very much.

לכה, we have already explained the meaning of this expression on Genesis 11,9 as well as the meaning of the word לכו, the same in the plural mode.

לכה נשקה את אבינו יין, “let us give our father wine to drink preparatory to sleeping with him.” Even though, halachically speaking, it was permissible for a father to have sexual relations with his daughter, so that there was no legal impediment to their father marrying them, it had become a universally accepted norm after the deluge that fathers would not touch their daughters, sexually. The matter is discussed in Horiyot, where deviates were described as being guilty of committing an abomination.

נשקה את אבינו יין, enough to make him drunk, so that he will not know what to do when we sleep with him. He certainly would not agree to sleep with his daughters while in full possession of his faculties. Anyone subscribing to the cultural mores of an Avraham would not knowingly engage in such a practice. This story is related in order to teach us that even people not subscribing to the moral standards of the Torah would not stoop to this kind of sexual licentiousness. The entire story reveals the origin of the peoples of Ammon and Moav, two nations who will feature prominently in Jewish history from the time even before the Jews entered the Holy Land until the destruction of the first Temple. G’d prevented the Jewish people under Moses from attacking these nations seeing that their founder, Lot, had been a nephew of Avraham. Also, the Jewish people were not given any part of the lands occupied by these nations at the time when Moses and Joshua were involved in conquering the lands which became their home land.