Image Details

Photo by Gerard Blot/Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY/©2001 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris

A daughter of Lot holds the bottle of wine that allowed her to seduce her unwitting, drunken father while he slept (Genesis 19:32). Her sister will employ the same trick the following night; the siblings fear that they and Lot are the last people on earth and set out to repopulate world. The incident is one of three cases of “sperm stealing” in the Bible, all of which are illustrated here by Marc Chagall (1887–1985).