Rethinking Sodom: What's the real sin?
Reconfiguring the Bible's most weaponized text
This 3D cube, staple of bored kid doodles everywhere, actually has a name. This is a Necker cube1, named after Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker.
The first way this wire-frame cube appears is that either its front face is slightly down and to the left, the second, that its front face is upwards and to the right. (I always see down and to the left first. What do you see?) The way your eyes interpret the box first is often hard to shift from; it takes mental effort to snap the illusion into its other configuration.
In a similar way, our next month together will be spent shifting some scripture that has been translated, interpreted, and assumed to be anti-gay into a new configuration.
Now, this subject is no Necker cube. People's emotional cores are tied up in how we interpret these scriptures, no matter how you look at the box. It can evoke many feelings. For some, this will be positive--they will feel more free. For others, it will bring up anger, dismissal, frustration, and even fear of being prodded into new configurations.
That's okay. It's a normal phenomenon called "neural downshifting," and it happens when we necker-cube something that is vital to your personal understanding of the world and how it works. It's a protective brain thing. Breathe deep, take a break, grab some tea, whatever you need. Being curious about a different viewpoint is healthy and safe.
Breathe deep, take a break, grab some tea, whatever you need. Being curious about a different viewpoint is healthy and safe.
At any rate, it'll give you some insight into why there are gay clergy in my denomination.
I also did a whole series on this on TikTok a few years ago; feel free to hop over there if you want to ingest this content in a different way. (This post covers these 1, 2, 3, and 4 videos.)
Today we are going to talk about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. As this story has been weaponized against the LGBTQ+ community, I figured it would be a great place to start.
Let’s get into it.
Sodom and Gomorrah, as a setting, would convey something to the ancient listener. These were cities with distinct personalities in the ancient world, which should prepare us for the type of story that lies ahead. It's like setting a story in Gotham City--we get the vibe. It's going to be gritty, dark, and we're gonna fight some goshdang crime.
But the story isn't about Gotham City; the story is about Batman.
In our case, the story revolves around Abraham.
One of the recurring characters in Abraham’s cycle is his nephew, Lot. We frequently see these two men in stories together, and as with Batman and the Joker, one always emerges victorious.
Story One: (Genesis 13) Abraham and Lot tried living together, but there wasn't enough room for both of their families, and they decided to part ways. Abraham graciously allowed Lot to choose which section of land he wanted to live on; Lot chose the well-watered land.
Story One portrays Abraham as generous and righteous, while Lot is portrayed as greedy and selfish, taking the lush region for himself. This is supported by Jewish Talmud commentary, which describes Lot as having a "lustful character" and even claiming that he "betook himself from the Ancient of the world, saying, I want neither Abraham nor his God."2 (Genesis Rabbah)
And by going to the lush region, Lot moves all the closer to Sodom and Gomorrah. The story sets it up as though Lot is playing with fire, like your college frat brother moving into a suburb of Las Vegas.
You just know something stupid is going to go down.
Story Two: (Genesis 14), Lot gets kidnapped! Lot, his family, and all his possessions are captured by pagan King Chedolaomer. It takes the mighty Abraham to go and wrest Lot and his family back. Abraham puts together a small army and routs Chedolaomer's larger forces in a surprise attack, chasing them far away.
Story Two presents Abraham as a powerful warrior with God on his side. Lot is weak, powerless, and in need of rescue.
These two characters are foils--we understand the story and the characters through their comparison.
Abraham and Lot are foils--we understand the story and the characters through their comparison.
But for some mysterious reason, we don't do that with the third Lot story in the cycle: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
We only take the back half--the Lot section. But we need to know what's going on with Abraham in order to understand Lot’s story. It’s like the Joker walking himself to prison; no Batman, no story.
So we can consider Genesis 18, or the Abrahamic section, as the actual beginning of the story.
The Lord appeared to Abraham, near the great oak of Mamre3 as he was sitting at the entrance to his tent. We see some instability in the text here--who or what shows up is unclear. It is likely indicating two angels of lower status and the Angel of the Lord, an avatar for God in these early stories, all disguised as men. Abraham jumps up and hosts them grandly with a feast, and he stands in protection over them as they eat.
In return, these angels in disguise say that Abraham will father a child by this time next year. This will be the beginning of Abraham's great lineage.
This is a true pinnacle moment for Abraham. Abraham's long-awaited great lineage is about to begin.
After this exchange, we see that God reveal to Abraham that Sodom and Gomorrah are so corrupt that he is planning to destroy them. It's also interesting to note that in this story, God doesn't actually know how bad it is. He's going there to see if it's as bad as people's prayers have said.
Abraham pleads for the cities, working God to a lower and lower threshold of how many righteous are needed in the city for God to spare it. In the end, if even ten are found to be righteous there, God will spare the city.
We know that Lot is in Sodom. He has a whole household there! Surely, Abraham's request will be granted, and the city will be spared.
The second half of the story begins:
The two angels arrived in Sodom in the evening, and Lot is sitting at the city's entrance, just as Abraham was at the entrance of his tent. When Lot sees them, he stands up to greet them and invites them to his home echoing Abraham’s earlier invitation to them, that they refresh themselves before continuing on their journey.
But in each of these comparisons, Lot falls short.
1.) It seems that only the two lesser angels come to Sodom.
2.) Abraham is sitting at the entrance of his own tent, shaded by majestic oaks, while Lot is sitting at the entrance to a corrupt city.
3.) When Abraham invites them in to refresh themselves, the angels say yes. When Lot invites them, the angels say no and must be convinced. This likely implies high and low status, respectively.
4.) Abraham gives them kneaded yeast bread from the hand of his own wife, kills a calf for them, and offers them curds and milk. Lot brings them to his home and gives them some unnamed food and some unyeasted quick bread.
5.) Abraham stands near them while they eat, offering his protection while they rest. But Lot can't offer his protection.
Lot's house is quickly surrounded by his violent neighbors, who demand that he bring out the men and hand them over to be "known," which implies sexual assault of the worst kind.
Lot, the exemplary father that he is, offers up his own daughters to the crowd to be “known” instead.
But the crowd rejects the daughters. Some infer that this is because they were same-gender attracted. Jude, a New Testament letter that was excluded by the ancient canon and remained deeply disputed up to the Reformation4, says it’s because the men wanted “strange flesh”--and whether that means angels or men is unclear. The Jewish sources state that this was an earlier pact made by Sodom residents to humiliate travelers and take their things.5
However, a compelling argument can be made that the crowd's rejection of the daughters stems from the fact that they are not the people the crowd wants to enact violence upon.
Make no mistake about it, we are talking about sexual violence here, not orientation. Assaulting a male in this way was a humiliation tactic in this era, bringing no shame to the man perpetuating the act, only the one receiving it. It was often used in wars, and orientation wasn’t considered.
The crowd pushes forward, intending to take the guests by force, but the angels blind the crowd and tell Lot and his family to leave Sodom before it is destroyed. The family who will go is hurried out, but Lot's wife looks back to the city and is turned into a pillar of salt.
(An aside here: Some archeologists believe that this was an oral story that preserved memory of a real natural disaster like an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, or my personal favorite, a cosmic airburst meteor6 like the one that took down 80 million trees in Siberia. There is a number of evidence pieces of pottery that got “glassed” and mud bricks that appear boiled, indicating a high heat event that could have sent a super-heated brine wave down the Dead Sea, which may be where we see some of the salt mythos comes from.)
Now here is something just a tiddly-bit sketchy.
Someone put a chapter heading at the end of Genesis 19, verse 29. It makes it feel like verse 30 begins a new story. It makes it seem like the end of Sodom is the end of the story, making the destruction the main point.
The destruction is not the main point.
It makes it seem like the end of Sodom is the end of the story, making the destruction the main point.
The destruction is not the main point.
We can’t understand Lot without Abraham. Lot doesn’t get his own stories; Lot gets compared to Abraham.
What is the main point of Abraham's story? Lineage. A baby.
After the destruction, the story continues with Lot creeping about in the mountains with his two daughters. Shaken by these events, Lot's daughters believe that this is the end of their lineage.
So, in a brutal reversal, Lot's daughters take their father, who had offered them up for sexual assault, get him drunk, and sexually assault him while he is insensible. The children that are born from this encounter are named Moab and Ben-Ammi.
And who are Israel's greatest enemies?
The Moabites.
The Ammonites.
This is the story of their lineage.
It's a villain origin story, y'all.
I'll say it again: The story of Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah is the villain origin story of the Moabites and the Ammonites, just as Abraham’s story was the origin story of the Israelites.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is an etiological "why" story. We see these in ancient cultures all the time. Why does the turtle have a shell? Why does the chipmunk have stripes?
Why do we, the Israelites, live in the same region, look the same, and share a language with these people, but hate them? Well, it's because our father Abraham was good and righteous and hospitable and blessed, and their father Lot was weak and sinful and corrupt and had incestuous cave children.
Because ongoing war, hatred, and bigotry can only thrive when fed by a narrative.
Because ongoing war, hatred, and bigotry can only thrive when fed by a narrative.
And the big sin of Sodom? Violence towards those in need of hospitality.
In the West, we don't have the same concept of hospitality as in the Middle East. Hospitality is something you do when you invite someone over for a meal or a night's stay. It evokes a sense of aprons and pies and clean kitchens. Usually, you expect a return invitation.
In the difficult terrain of the Middle East, hospitality is literally the difference between life and death.
Miriam Schulman and Amal Barkouki-Winter write this: “The virtue [hospitality] seems an ineluctable product of the landscape… To refuse a man refreshment in such a place is to let him die, to threaten the openhandedness nomadic peoples must depend on to survive.”7
The guest is vulnerable because, without his host, he might not make it to the next well or settlement. The host is vulnerable to the guest because he is inviting a stranger into his home, knowing nothing about him.
The Islamic version of this tale bears more marks of this custom: Abraham hosts the men, despite their strangeness to his eyes. And when they do not eat his food, he becomes afraid. Hosting is a dangerous job--and to refuse provisions from a host signals that something is wrong. Hospitality is a co-blessing, allowing guests to be fed, and the host to perform a religious duty as an offering to not only their guests, but also God.
There's a Bedouin proverb I like. If a guest tries to thank the host, the host says, "Not my pockets, but God's."
By the way: this is the Qu'ran’s (50:32-36) short take on Sodom:
32. [The angels] said, “We are sent to a people guilty of sin.”
33. “To unleash upon them rocks of clay.”
34. “Marked by your Lord for the excessive.”
35. We evacuated all the believers who were in it.
36. But found in it only one household of Muslims.
Let's see what the Bible says Sodom's main sin is.
Ezekial 16:49-50 says:
“This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.”
The word translated abominable or detestable here is the word "to'evah" and Ezekiel uses it the most out of the prophets. He later defines Israel's "to'evah" abominations as
1.) eating meat with the blood in it,
2.) raising their eyes to idols in worship,
3.) and defiling their neighbor's wife.
The gist is that they were immoral and unethical, but same-gender relationships are not mentioned.
We're starting to see a pattern. Excessive. Prosperous ease. Pride. Excess of food. No help for the poor or needy. These are economic sins, not sexually immoral ones.
Jesus refers to this culture of hospitality when he sends his disciples out in Matthew 14:9-15.
"Acquire no gold or silver or copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics or sandals or a staff, for the laborer deserves his food. And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart… And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town."
The one time Jesus references Sodom and Gomorrah, it is in reference to the expectations of hospitality. He expects his disciples to rely on it. Jesus is not looking for inhospitable people. But there is nothing about gender. Nothing about orientation.
Not to belabor the point, but the Jewish sources corroborate that inhospitality and greed are the main issues with Sodom. I'll skim through some of the Talmudic stories of Sodom and Gomorrah.8
1.) They built a bridge over the river to their city and charged an exorbitant rate to cross it. People who swam the river to avoid the payment were charged double, beaten, and then had to pay the guards that beat them money because blood-letting was a medical service.
2.) A beggar went to the households in Sodom and was surprised to be greeted warmly by each and given coins. Now, the Sodomites would write their names on the coins that they gave the beggar. But when the man went into the city, he found that each shop owner refused the coins with the names. When the beggar died of starvation, the owner of the coins came to retrieve the coins and take the clothes from the beggar. (The original virtue signalling)
3.) Another tale tells that Sodom's guesthouses had short beds, and if a traveller complained, they would hack off his feet to make him fit.
4.) Lot's daughter found a man so hungry he couldn't stand. Every day as she went to the town, she would take food from her table and bring it to the man. The people of Sodom couldn't understand how the man was still alive, until they discovered her secret. They burned her at the stake for it. Her cries for justice were the catalyst of the Lord coming to see if Sodom deserved destruction.
In every case, it signals a rich culture harming the poor, the needy, and the stranger.
The Middle Eastern folks who told these stories were recording their origins—of themselves and of their enemies. They record Sodom and Gomorrah's great sin as being one of deep inhospitality, sexual violence intended to humiliate the vulnerable, and greed in abundance.
This is something that should give us all pause.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is not about sexual orientation. It is not speaking to or about people seeking loving, even covenantal, relationships like marriage or dating that align with their inner attraction matrix.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is a multifaceted narrative that touches on issues of hospitality, ethical behavior, and the deep-seated enmity between ancient peoples. The interpretation that unfairly targets the LGBTQ+ community misses the more profound lessons this story offers.
Actually, in a way, by targeting the LGBTQ+ community with this story, it allows us to wiggle out of the painful things Sodom's story could say to us.
Like the Necker cube, it can be hard to switch our perspective. The image may switch back and forth between the new and original perspectives. Tradition has held this viewpoint for a long time, even if it’s not scripturally-based.
However, as we look deeper into these texts in the coming weeks, we must maintain an open and compassionate attitude toward both those who are exploring a new perspective and those to whom these verses have caused significant harm.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is just one example of how much more there is to uncover in our sacred texts. With a willingness to examine long-held assumptions, we can discover new meanings and insights that enrich our spiritual journeys, and may even put some of our own long-held enmity to rest.
Perceptual-binding in a rotating Necker Cube: the effect of context motion and position - Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-the-Necker-cube-left-The-bi-stable-figure-can-be-perceived-as-a-downwards_fig1_298420887 [accessed 3 Jun, 2024]
Bereshit Rabbah 41:7. Sefaria. Accessed June 2, 2024. https://www.sefaria.org/Bereshit_Rabbah.41.7?lang=bi.
By Copper Kettle - originally posted to Flickr as Oak of Mamre / Мамврийский дуб, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5768021
Gamble, Harry Y. "Antilegomena." Accessed June 2, 2024. https://www.bible-researcher.com/antilegomena.html.
Bereshit Rabbah 50:7. Sefaria. Accessed June 2, 2024. https://www.sefaria.org/Bereshit_Rabbah.41.7?lang=bi.https://www.sefaria.org/Bereshit_Rabbah.50.6?lang=bi
Bunch, T.E., LeCompte, M.A., Adedeji, A.V. et al. A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea. Sci Rep 11, 18632 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-97778-3
Schulman, Miriam, and Amal Barouki-Winter. "The Extra Mile: The Ancient Virtue of Hospitality Imposes Duties on Host and Guest." Issues in Ethics 11, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 12-15. http://hdl.handle.net/10822/933733.
"Merrimack Valley Havurah." "The Actual Sins of Sodom and Gomorrah." Merrimack Valley Havurah, October 30, 2022. https://merrimackvalleyhavurah.wordpress.com/2022/10/30/the-actual-sins-of-sodom-and-gomorrah/.