The Old Testament captured the Anglo-Saxon imagination in some unexpected ways, as one of the poetic riddles in the Exeter Book testifies:

The conundrum by which twelve people turn out to be only five finds its explanation in the book of Genesis, where it is recorded that Lot's two daughters lay with him and each had a son by him. Yet if this poet found such episodes a gleefully unembarrassing source of wit, other Anglo-Saxon writers clearly found them a troubling challenge, finding it necessary to argue against taking the morals of the patriarchs as any sort of precedent for present practice.