Was Lot a righteous man?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

It has traditionally been taken that Lot was a righteous man who was saved from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah because of his righteousness.  Problem is, I don't see any support for that idea in Genesis.

Consider the conflict between Lot and Abram in Genesis 13.  They both had gotten to the point where they were both so rich that the land could not support both their flocks grazing at the same time, which had led to conflict between Lot's herders and Abram's herders.  It's takes Abram to point out the problem and he offers to solve it by splitting up and lets Lot choose which lands he'll graze his flocks on. Lot chooses to keep the best lands for himself.
However, that is minor compared to what happens in Genesis 19.

Let me leave aside the issue of exactly what the Sodomites meant when they demanded to know the two visitors as irrelevant to whether Lot was righteous. In Genesis 19:8, Lot makes this offer: if you will leave my two visitors alone, I'll give you my two virgin daughters for you to rape instead. This is a righteous man?

Then, when Lot is informed of the judgment upon Sodom in Genesis 19:12 is instructed to get any other righteous people out of Sodom?  No.  He is instructed to get his sons-in-law, sons or daughters, or anyone else in the city who belongs to him out of Sodom, without regard to whether they are righteous or not.  The three people who do manage to escape Sodom with Lot are his wife and his two daughters.  The promptness with which his wife is turned into a pillar of salt shows a lack of righteousness on her part, and the lengths to which his daughters later go to get sons show a lack on their part.

Speaking of what happened with his daughters, while one might give Lot the benefit of the doubt for what happened with the elder daughter, once can't do the same with what happened with the younger. Even if he recalled nothing else, he would certainly know what quantity of wine was enough to get him so blind stinking drunk that he had no memory of what he had done, and yet he did it again!

It seems to me that the answer for why Lot was saved is to be found in Genesis 19:29.  Lot was not saved on his own account, but for Abraham's sake since Lot was his nephew.

[The Mikado]

Lot decides to go to the better pastures...and doesn't.  Somehow, he gets sidetracked and abandons his shepherd's occupation altogether to go settle among the Sodomites.  He gets warning number 1 when Sodom is sacked in the war of Genesis 14, when Sodom and its allies are saved by Abram and his private army.  And yet he chooses to return(!) to Sodom.  While he clearly understood the meaning of hospitality better than the rest of Sodom (don't rape your angel houseguests), his bizarre action in offering his daughters can either reflect that in the eyes of his time, preventing his angels from getting raped was so important as to render other things moot, or simply say that Lot was a terrible, terrible coward.  Either way, he was a dreadful dad, but does wanting to save your visitors at all costs make you "unrighteous?"  It's also important to point out that the angels prevented Lot's daughters from being raped.

As to his subsequent rape of Lot by said daughters, the Bible is very fond of responding to an evil done by a person by doing that same evil on them.  Lot tried in desperation to offer his daughters up for rape, the daughters end up raping Lot.  Certainly Lot's excessive drinking does not reflect well on him, but Noah is considered one of the most righteous men in Genesis and spent most of the end of his life passed out naked.  Also, the act of naming Lot's sons/grandsons Ben-Ammi (Ammon) and Moab was so brilliant that I don't know what to say.  The Israelites' two Eastern neighbors are the inbred products of parental rape!  It fits right in with making Esau/Edom an idiot (albeit a very sympathetic one, and you can easily make the case that he was a better man than Jacob/Israel), and making Ishmael a disinherited abandoned child in terms of discrediting the Israelites' neighbors and portraying them as lesser inheritors of the legacy of Abraham while recognizing their kinship.

[Insula Dei]

I always liked Esau better than that damn Jacob.

[minionofmidas]

Maybe God just has some pretty warped ideas of what constitutes righteousness.

[Mechaman]

Not really.

First off, I doubt that the reason why the discontent of Abram and Lot's men was due to the size of the flocks of both men.  It probably was because the land really couldn't handle two different groups of people (the men of Abram and the men of Lot) managing flocks in the same land at the same time.  These two men were like brothers (at least that's what I've been led to understand while reading the bible) and then they decide to leave each other because of some squabbling amongst the men?  Surely there must've been another factor, like a difference in lifestyle amongst the two different groups.  After all, remember that Abram and his family had migrated from Mesopotamia, a different culture than biblical Israel.  Abram might've been the only son of Terah who actively sought and followed God.  This could be true, considering how quiet God had been towards mankind since the incident at Babel.  In the centuries that followed, with the creation of other languages, cultures, and systems of beliefs, it is likely that by the time of Abram very few people knew God (especially considering how polytheistic the most ancient cultures were).
I happen to have a New Living Translation version of the Bible on my Kindle, so allow me to quote Chapter Ten of Genesis:

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See the bolded part.
I bolded the mention of "many children" to bring up a very big question: How many is meant by "many"?  It is very common to read in the bible of men having a son (usually mentioned by name) and then for the bible to say "and then later on in life he had other sons and daughters".  Considering that the plural form of "son" and of "daughter" is used I'm going to assume the grammar is correct and that it means the individual men listed had at least two more sons and two more daughters.  That means the men had at least five kids.  So by measure of degrees I would presume that the word "many" means an extraordinary amount of people, like the amount of people in ancient nations "many".  As point of evidence I will continue citing Chapter Ten of Genesis:

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This outright states that the sons of Noah and their spouses and their children reproduced enough to create whole nations of people.  With that many people being created there would be enough opportunity for the dilution of religion, that is people becoming further and further removed from the original teaching of God and setting up their own systems of beliefs.  Somewhere along the way the divisions amongst the children of Noah gets so vast as to the rise of different languages amongst the people (as told in the story of Babel).  Using this as a pretext I could theorize that by the time of Abram very few people still retained even the knowledge of God and thus “righteous men” were few and far between.  If we go further back to the story of the flood there is mention of God finding mankind “full of violence” and “evil” and that out of all the people on earth only Noah and his family were deemed worthy of salvation.  Noah is also called “a righteous man”.
If you keep on reading Chapter Ten of Genesis you’ll notice that while there are mention of men and their descents forming nations, there is no mention at all of any of those descents being “righteous”.  Could it be that many centuries after Noah his descendants lost the knowledge of God?
In fact, I think the question of whether Abram was a “righteous man” before the Lord spoke out to him might be brought into question.  Before Genesis 12 there is no mention of the “righteousness” of Abram.  In fact his wife Sarai’s barren womb is mentioned but there is no mention at all of Abram being “righteous”.  The lack of mention of Abram having any other woman besides Sarai may support he might’ve been a righteous man, but he still could’ve been oblivious to the word of God.
Anyway, back to Lot.
There is no mention of Lot’s relationship with God, just that Lot was with Abram when he went to Canaan.  Could it be possible that the disputes between the men of Abram and the men of Lot might’ve had something to do with men of different cultures interacting?  You know kind of like how different cultures in some of our inner cities have strife between them?  I think it’s very possible that the story of the conflict between Abram’s men and Lot’s men is an ironic continuation of the story of the Tower of Babel: that the differences that had developed between men had become such that not even people of the same family shared similar cultures.  Two men of the same family with different values…..surely a situation that could cause strife between their followers.
Not here to debate morality or my take on what “Righteousness” really is, just a possible interpretation of parts of Genesis.

Part II of my reasoning on why I don't think Lot was a "righteous man" will continue after I finally eat something today.  Man, who thought a Religious discussion would get me into writing such a longwinded post!?

[minionofmidas]

Not really.

First off, I doubt that the reason why the discontent of Abram and Lot's men was due to the size of the flocks of both men.  It probably was because the land really couldn't handle two different groups of people (the men of Abram and the men of Lot) managing flocks in the same land at the same time.

Well yeah, as doing so is impossible without a fairly strong degree of cooperation - enough to make them subgroups of the same group, rather than two groups. Nothing at all remarkable or outside the experience of any group of nomads in this phrase.

[Mechaman]

Not really.

First off, I doubt that the reason why the discontent of Abram and Lot's men was due to the size of the flocks of both men.  It probably was because the land really couldn't handle two different groups of people (the men of Abram and the men of Lot) managing flocks in the same land at the same time.

Well yeah, as doing so is impossible without a fairly strong degree of cooperation - enough to make them subgroups of the same group, rather than two groups. Nothing at all remarkable or outside the experience of any group of nomads in this phrase.

This is true.

[minionofmidas]

Yeah, I nicked it off Bruce Chatwin.

[The Mikado]

Mechaman, Genesis Chapter 10 is nicknamed the "Table of Nations" for a reason.  Each of Shem, Ham, and Japeth's sons (and grandsons) forms his own nation that bears his name, and is the origin of that peoples, according to the Bible.  Ham has the sons Canaan, Kush (and Kush's son Nimrod, the "great hunter" is stuck in there as a great king), Put, and Mizraim.  Canaan fathers Canaan, Kush fathers Nubia, Put Libya, and Mizraim Egypt, and so on.  Same with Shem (whose immediate kids father the Assyrians, Syrians, Elamites, Chaldeans, and Lydians) and Japeth. 

The 10 generations between Shem and Abraham are nearly 500 years apart, given the longevity of each generation (and Shem himself lived long enough that he would've still been alive during the early years of his greatx8 grandson Abraham).  This is more than enough time to repopulate the "known" parts of the Earth (the Bible's lack of knowledge of the East Asians and Native Americans is the biggest obvious flaw with this theory, leading to the hilarious retcon called the Book of Mormon). 

Anyway, the point of all that is that with the ridiculous longevity and the sheer number of kids people were having (as you pointed out), there's no reason not to think that the Canaan of Abram and Lot wasn't as crowded as the Bible makes it out to be (in story).  Lot's error wasn't his decision to take the good land, it was that he didn't actually do that but was sidetracked and moved to Sodom, not a good move for a shepherd.  (Cities and flocks don't mix)

Isaac Asimov described Genesis as one of the few books in existence that takes the side of the nomad in the ancient settler vs. nomad dispute, and it's an interesting point.