The Catholic Church teaches in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (article 1867, italics in original):
What does “sins that cry to heaven” mean? What are the consequences of this crying?
What does the blood of Abel refer to?
What does the sin of the Sodomites refer to?
What does the cry of the foreigner refer to?
Why do these particular sins, instead of and not including others, cry to heaven?
WRS
It gets god’s attention in a big way.
Murder.
Rape, presumably.
Not sure.
Because of their seriousness the put the actor in a state of seperation from the church of god, in all its forms, unless the actor repents.
Not just murder, but the murder of a brother and for no real reason.
That’s a great debate in itself.
Well, these would be direct violations of “Do not put a stumbling block before the blind man, the widow, or the orphan. But fear God” and “Be kind unto the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” Sins against the blindman, widow, and orphan are considered especially cruel as they were helpless. The same is true of a foreigner.
Idunno, constitutional ammendment?
Torah scholar all agree, the sin of Sodom was inhospability. Much as I would like to blame the torah, the fault lays in an intentional mistranslation, interpreted just the way it’s meant to be, not the real words.
Inhospitality?
Squink Yep. Ihosptality. A traveller arriving at Sodom or Gamorrah (or generally any other town in the middle east) didn’t have enough food and water to make it to another town. If you turned them away, they died. Rather than taking in travellers and giving them food and shelter, the people of Sodom and Gamorrah laughed at them, played tricks on them, and were rude. There’s a Jewish folktale that every citizen of Sodom had a special gold coin bearing their personal mark. Whenever a stranger arrived in town, the people would happily give them a gold coin and direct them to market to buy provisions. The merchants would refuse to sell the stranger a crumb of food or a drop of water. The stranger would wander around town, begging for food and offering a fortune for it. Eventually, they would die of thirst with a sack full of gold on their back. Then, the people of Sodom would strip the corpse and take back their coins, which they knew by the mark.
There’s a midrash about a woman of Sodom who provided food and water to strangers. When her neighbors found out what she had done, they covered her with honey and tied her to a stake to be attacked by biting insects.
The people of Sodom were also supposed to be callously indifferent to the needs of their own people. Specifically, it is said that they did not provide for the widows and orphans among them.
I’d just like to pop in and say that I already find this thread fascinating. As for “sins that cry unto heaven”, I’d use the following description…
We live in a world where people sin almost constantly. You could callously call most of them background noise: the easy lie, the quick scam, ignoring the pain of another… at some point, we are all guilty of at least one. We can even sometimes justify them. There are other crimes without justification beyond the desire for pain or vengeance, crimes that no person should ever commit in their life: despicably inhospitable treatment to others, violence towards one who loves you, crimes committed on the weak and powerless around you. These are sins that go beyond the pale of human fallibility, beyond the point of easy explanation. They are sins that cry to heaven for justice.
Thanks DC. Once in a while I run into a word in these religion threads that I have never seen before. You make the Sodomites sound pretty damned inhospitable!
I found it interesting too. I understood about hospitality being their crime, and suspected cruelty was involved, but had never really heard the ugly details. So, it was not only inhospitality, it was a sneaky and cowardly form of murder by deliberate neglect. Bad enough to leave someone in a desert without supplies, even worse if he is that way because you made it so on purpose. They got what they earned.