Free The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels by Thomas Cahill Page A

Lot, who tries to buy time with a ploy that might not have occurred to most of us in his situation:
        Now pray, I have two daughters who have never known a man,
        pray let me bring them out to you, and you may deal with them however seems good in your eyes;
        only to these men do nothing,
        for they have, after all, come under the shadow of my roof beam!
     
     
    Of course, the Sodomites aren’t interested and roar that they will bugger Lot, too, once they have broken down the door. But no one gets buggered; and the Sodomites get theirs—fire and brimstone from heaven—once Lot and his family are out of the way, save, unfortunately, for Lot’s wife, who looks back on the raining destruction, even though she has been told not to, and gets turned into a pillar of salt—another wifely pawn.
    This unhappy episode, beloved of sexually repressed fundamentalists through the ages, may leave most of us with the same reactionEvelyn Waugh described one of his fellow officers as having. The young man, an empty-headed dilettante right out of the pages of Wodehouse, had never read anything, but during the longeurs between military engagements he decided to while away the hours by reading a book for the very first time, and the Bible was all that was available. Having read part of Genesis, he soon gave up the pursuit, exclaiming: “God, what a shit God is!”
    It is only somewhat mollifying to realize that the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality but inhospitality. You can’t tell from this episode whether God is against buggery, but you can be sure he takes a dim view of raping perfectly nice strangers who come to visit. Also, we know from widespread Mesopotamian evidence that Sumerians and other ancient peoples of the Middle East preferred rear entry, both vaginaland anal, for their sexual encounters. To the descendants of Avraham, who viewed such posture as subhuman (“like a dog”), the whole sexual repertoire of their neighbors may have come to seem suspect—bestial and unnatural.
    But now we go from the fire and brimstone to a real wonder:
        Sara became pregnant and bore Avraham a son in his old age,
        at the set-time of which God had spoken to him.
        And Avraham called the name of his son, who was born to him, whom Sara bore to him:
        Yitzhak (He Laughs) [Isaac in traditional English translation].
        And Avraham circumcised Yitzhak his son at eight days old, as God had commanded him.…
        Now Sara said:
        “God has made me laugh.”
     
     
    God had made her laugh before—by suggesting the impossible. Now Sara the pawn is given the only thing she ever wanted, the very thing she knew she could not have. She wanted this child much more than Avraham did—however keen his desire had been—for he could have children by other women. It is one of the hallmarks of the handiwork of Avraham’s God that his purpose for one human being spills over into the lives of others, creating bliss even for the story’s supernumeraries. The conversation between these two (who have barely conversed before, at least in our presence) is rich and poignant, and the speech of her who has hardly spokenhas a pathos such as we would expect only from a great writer of dialogue:
        “God has made me laugh,
        all who hear of it will laugh for me.…
        Who would have declared to Avraham:
        ‘Sara will nurse sons?’
        Well, I have borne him a son in his old age!”
     
     
    God has made Avraham laugh, God has made Sara laugh, God makes Yitzhak laugh. And: “The child grew and was weaned, and Avraham made a great drinking-feast on the day that Yitzhak was weaned.” At this point, winter has been dispelled and everyone’s nightmares are over.
    N ot quite.
    For one thing, Sara is determined thatHagar the Egyptian will not share in the laughter and drives out her and her son for good (though they remain under God’s protection). And then, in