In the Cave: A Feminist Descent into Genesis
I want to begin not just with the passage — but with my relationship to passages like this. Because my draw toward what Phyllis Trible called “texts of terror” did not begin in a library. It began in prayer.
Years ago, before I began training for ordination, I found myself in conversation with God about human trafficking and modern slavery. And I remember asking, in that slightly accusatory way we sometimes do:
“God, what are you doing about human trafficking?”
And the response that came back was as simple as it was disarming:
“What are you doing about it, Gemma?”
Which, I’ll be honest, was not the answer I was hoping for.
But once the question had been asked, I couldn’t un-hear it.
So I did what any modern discerner of vocation does…I turned to google…
I typed: “Where is human trafficking worst in the world?” The UN reported at the time that India was the most dangerous place on earth to be a woman — and Mumbai housed the largest red light district in the world. And I remember thinking:
Well… if I’m going to do something about it… I probably need to go to the worst place, right?
I handed my notice in at work, early, ahead of starting ordination training and went to India instead. And in many ways, that journey, that deep care for women and girls who were traded for sex, became an unexpected aspect of my call to priesthood, which I recognise is not necessarily the most typical discernment pathway. But it is also the reason passages like this one refuse to remain abstract for me.
Because once you have sat inside systems of sexual violence… once you have listened to women whose survival stories defy moral neatness… texts like Lot and his daughters stop being ancient scandal. They become mirrors rather than myths.
And you begin to realise that the cave in Genesis is not distant at all.
So let us step toward the cave, where a drunken Lot lies unconscious, and his daughters stand outside, anxiously scheming survival, and explore three different caves that we might recognise here and now, to give us a different insight into this text of terror…
We begin with the widest chamber — the cave of the world.
Lot and his daughters arrive in the aftermath of catastrophic societal collapse. Violence. Terror. Cities reduced to ash.
For many women across the world, this cave is not metaphorical. I spent months working in Mumbai with women and girls trafficked into the sex industry — women whose bodies had become commodities in vast patriarchal economies. Hundreds of thousands of women in that district alone. Many sold as children. Many trafficked by family members. I remember sitting in a brothel drinking the most delicious mango juice I had ever tasted; so beautiful because it was bought for me by three girls who paid for it with money they had earned through sex. Squirreled the money away that was meant for the brothel madam and instead welcoming their unexpected guest.
And I remember learning something unforgettable there — that even in places engineered for degradation, beauty and tenderness will always survive. That does not soften the cave. It simply tells the truth that God’s image is not extinguished by it.
Trafficking reveals what happens when patriarchy is industrialised — when women’s bodies become currency, when survival is negotiated through exploitation. This is the cave of the world. Dark not because light is absent — but because power operates unchecked. How manipulated and tricked and frightened and longing for freedom those precious children are. And how comparable that is to those sisters, Lot’s daughters, enticed into the cave of patriarchal structures that says childless women are worth more dead.
The Cave of the Home
But the story narrows. Because the cave is not only global. It is domestic.
While I was in India, I undertook a research project in Bangalore with teenage girls trafficked across the Bangladeshi–Indian border. I asked them how they had been recruited… who had taken them. All but one had been trafficked by someone they knew — a family member, a boyfriend, someone they trusted.
Only one had been taken by a stranger. Trafficking does not begin in brothels. It begins in relationships, and homes, and in the fragile architecture of trust.
And suddenly the cave of the world does not feel far away at all. Because when harm enters through the family system…when coercion hides inside intimacy… when power operates in the place meant to protect…we are also speaking about family and domestic violence. And suddenly we aren’t in India, we are right here in Australia.
So I need to say that my reading of this passage is not only shaped by what I witnessed in Mumbai. It is also shaped by what I have lived. My first marriage was an abusive one. And for a long time, my home was very much my cave. Which meant that when I began listening to women’s stories of coercion and survival… they did not feel distant. They felt familiar. When the person we are supposed to be able to trust most of all, like a partner or a parent, becomes our captor or our chief threat, our world gets smaller, our options reduce, our hope is diminished and our life choices are all impacted by that. We do things and become things that aren’t who we once were and we almost become part of our own entrapment.
The Cave of the Heart
As my own healing unfolded, I began to realise that leaving the cave of the home was only part of the journey, because there was another cave I still carried within me.
Healing from family and domestic violence is not only about physical safety.
It is about confronting the internalised misogyny…the patriarchal scripts…the survival beliefs that have taken root in your own heart. The voices that tell you what you are worth. The shame that was never yours to carry. And I began to realise that my heart, too, had been shaped into a cave. Which is why I cannot read Lot’s daughters as abstract moral figures. I read them as women formed inside patriarchy… navigating survival inside collapse… carrying caves within them long before they entered the literal one. And I read them with far more grief than judgement.
Where Is God?
And I really wanted to explore this passage today, because it doesn’t come up in the lectionary, we always look away, and I find this one of the hardest passages to preach, because it resists resolution. It almost defies the gospel; No angel intervenes. No divine voice explains. No redemption arc tidies the story. We are left in the hideous hangover of regret and shame and incest and trickery, and I am left asking:
Where is God when humanity descends this far?
Perhaps God is present not as rescuer from above…but as witness within the cave.
Present in the grief beneath survival. Present in the longing for a world where women are not forced into impossible moral terrain, because patriarchy can mar the image of God…but it cannot destroy it.
And if this text tells the truth about the caves women are forced to survive in, then the Church has to become cave-literate. We have to know how to enter those spaces — not with judgement, not with easy theology — but with presence. We have to dare to go where harm, abuse and shame festers. Sit where stories are unspeakable. Carry light where light has been extinguished.
We are called to descend — into the caves of the world, the home, and the heart —
not as rescuers, but as witnesses, companions, and truth-tellers. And where those caves are sustained by patriarchy, violence, and silence the work of the Church is not only pastoral…but prophetic. Not simply to sit in the cave but to help bring about a world where no one is forced to live there again.
Our belief is that the gospel does not fear caves. It descends into them…and refuses to leave anyone there alone.
The call of the church is to raze those caves to the ground, along with the systems, structures, and ideologies that sustain them. And if we know anything about caves as a faith, it is this: they could not keep death captive.
May that continue to be so.
Holy Adventures 