The story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I’ve read Daniel Helminiak’s book “What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality” many years ago (it seems). In it, he talked about the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah being actually the sin of hospitality rather than the sin of “homosexuality”*.

How accurate is that statement?
And a smaller follow-up question: For some reason, I remember reading that there were actually two more cities than just Sodom and Gomorrah, is that right?

*Homosexuality in quotes since the term wasn’t created until the 19th century.

I have no clue, but back when I was observant, I recall my rabbi telling me something similar. After all, the whole idea of condemning sexual sins goes out the window with the fact that what’shisname offered his daughters to the townspeople, and the fact that angels are genderless, by definition.

In Judaic literature, it is usually the inhospitality of the people of Sodom and Gommorah that is mentioned as the prime reason for their punishment.

Zev Steinhardt

I haven’t read the book but I saw a show on the History Channel that made a similar case, that the sin was not ‘homosexuality’ (or sodomy) but had to do with aspects of hospitality. No idea how accurate that is, or why the core of the story changed from a focus on hospitality rights to one of sodomy/homosexuality.

-XT

Most likely, pretty solid, though it’s important to note that institutionalized “sodomitic practices” (pfui!, but allow me the term) were a part of Canaanite Ba’al/Astarte worship – not to put too fine a point on it, to assure fertility of your fields, you made a donation to the temple and fucked the priestess or priest on duty. This is the reason for the Leviticus passages, as is made clear in the first verses of the chapter – they’re “abominable acts which the Canaanites practice,” which the Israelites are to forswear as a part of keeping culturally separate from the Canaanites.

There was, however, an underlying cultural standard throughout the Middle East, which has come down to modern times, that the traveler was entitled to rest and hospitality. Much as in Western culture you do not shoot an enemy who raises his arms or flies a white flag, the person of the traveler was sacrosanct. Since much of the area was arid, and oases tended to be occupied, he who needed to travel needed to be assured of welcome, water, and sustenance on his journey, and the principle of fairness said that if you wish to expect that when you travel, you will extend it when others travel and arrive at your home area.

The sin of Sodom was selfish luxury that did not extend hospitality but rather abused the traveler. To “un-man” the stranger in town by knowing him carnally was an element in that abuse. It was not the sex per se but the coercion of the men of Sodom that was held up as an example. The attitude was something like most of us would feel on reading a headline “Would-Be Good Samaritan Shot to Death.”

In referring to the Sodom story in Genesis 18-19, we find that God has already decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for their “wickedness” (exact type unspecified) and lets Abraham know that He is sending his two angels to Sodom to judge it. This gives rise to the famous Abraham-bargaining-with-God scene. Only when the two angels arrive and are hosted by Lot does any question of their sexual abuse come up.

Now, it would be very easy to accept the traditional construction of this passage as another Biblical condemnation of homosexuality. But notice that God is condemning first, the sexual assault comes after, and the fact of its being an assault, not merely a sexual encounter, seems to be important. But the whole thing is wrapped up and tied in a bow by the passage in Ezekiel 16:49-50, chastizing Jerusalem for its abominable behavior, and drawing a parallel to Sodom:

In short “the Sin of Sodom” is not desiring gay sex, but the “He who dies with the most toys wins” “I’ve got mine, the heck with you” attitude that cares only for self and does not extend help to the poor, the needy, the stranger among you, but rather abuses them for one’s own aggrandizement.

When God again judges people for “the sin of Sodom,” there will be some great amazement that it is not the GBLT people but rather the McMansion suburbanites who believe they owe no help to their fellow man who are the true Sodomites.

By the way, the five “Cities of the Plain,” as named in Genesis 14, are Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar, the last-named also called Bela and the place where Lot and family took refuge.

Zev, the homosexual allegations against the sodomites are usually adduced from the Sodomite men’s demand that they be allowed to “know” the angels. I have read that the sexual connotation for “knowing” someone did not exist in Hebrew but is a culturally biased interpretation read into the English.

Is it true that Biblical Hebrew does not use the verb “to know” to indicate sex?

Dio, Biblical Hebrew does not (according to some…more on that next paragraph) have a verb that means to have sex. It uses various euphemisms…to know, to lay with, to reveal nakedness, to possess…to convey the meaning. “To know,” though, is definitely one such euphemism. And Lot’s reaction to the Sodomites’ demand to “know” the angels, that he’d send out his virgin daughters instead, would seem to indicate that the word “know” is indeed meant euphemistically. In any case, the interpretation is Midrashic, well pre-dating the English language.

(There is a verb root SH-G-L which may be the actual Hebrew word for having sex. It appears twice in Scripture, and in both situations, tradition says the word is to be read as SH-K-B, which means “to lay,” substituting the common euphmism. However, others say that it’s just another of many examples where the text is written one way and is meant to be spoken a different way. This is called Kri and Ksiv in Jewish parlance, and there is usually some lesson meant to be derived from such occurrences.)

Thank you, Chaim. I had suspected that may have been a bit of overzealous rhetoric on the part of pro-gay scholars. The context certainly did suggest sex and I think Polycarp’s analysis above seems to be about on target.

Thanks all! A couple other clarification questions.

Is it safe to assume that S&G’s wickedness was inhospitableness of its citizen and its continuance was the reason?

Were Admah and Zeboiim also destroyed?

cmkeller, does Biblical hebrew make a difference between sexual assault/rape to just plain old consentual sex?

stpauler:

Yes.

Yes. Note Deuteronomy 29:23 - “The whole land will be a burning waste of salt and sulfur-nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it. It will be like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the LORD overthrew in fierce anger.”

Yes. The euphemism generally used for forcible sex is one that means “afflicting.”

However, there is no specialized verb for rape in Hebrew. Rape is considered to be a subset of assault, and the laws which punish rape are the same as those that would punish breaking someone’s arm.

For the record, the fact that the angels were genderless doesn’t mean that the townspeople wouldn’t have wanted to rape them; when they arrived at Abraham’s tent, they are mearely called “anashim,” or men, and Lot took them in thinking they were your average group of male travelers. They obviously projected as men.

Exactly, just because the engels did not have sex as such does not mean they did not appear in such a fashion that humans would not have desired it. The sins of Soddom was three-fold: that they were greedy and flesh-hungry, that they willing to engage in casual gang-rape, and that they were twisted. I suppose homosexuality falls in there somewhere, but it’s not nearly as serious as the other things.

Odd hijack here- is this the origin of the term “shagging”?

Yeh-hah, Bay-bee!

A tangentially related question, how can you assume that words written by different people sometimes decades (centuries?) apart? For example if someone wrote 75 years ago that people were evil becuase they had fags in their household they probably meant cigarettes but if they wrote it now it would probably mean a homosexual.

With few exceptions, the writers of the different parts of scripture didn’t write in their colloquialisms. The Book of Esther was written in Ancient Hebrew, not Ancient Persian. The people writing the books modeled their wording on the language in the previous books they studied, and generally, they studied those books pretty exhaustively. So idiomatic evolution wouldn’t really affect the meaning that much.

I’ve heard this argument before, but frankly, I don’t think it fits the greater context of the Old Testament. Inhospitality is never described as a capital crime, but homosexuality is–often in strong terms. If we go strictly by the contextual evidence (setting aside one’s views on the morality of homosexuality), I think it’s a stretch to say that inhospitality was the crime being punished. (This view is expanded upon here.)

treis:

Well, from a religious standpoint, the answer is that since the books in question were written through prophecy and/or inspired by Holy Spirit, the words used would naturally be consistent, because the eternal, unchanging G-d is their ultimate source.

From a standpoint of secular textual analysis, you could still use the contexts to tell that the meanings of words are very consistent over across the Bible. Even if you ascribe the authorship of the books entirely to human hands, it’s very likely that since the books were introduced into a pre-existing canon, that the authors referred back to that canon for phraseology.

JThunder:

Inhospitality on an individual level is not a capital crime by Biblical standards, but on a societal level, it is more than inhospitality, it is a corrupt concept of justice. A society is condemned, in Biblical standards, if outcries against it by its victims are too great for G-d to ignore (Genesis 19:13 - “The outcry to the LORD against its people is so great that he has sent us to destroy it.”)

cmkeller, I agree that Sodom and Gomorrah were guilty of much more than just being inhospitable. I’m just saying that it makes little contextual sense to insist that this was the gist of their sin, or even a particularly bad offense on their part. Clearly, they were guilty of much more, as evidenced by the rape attempt.

If we’re going to go purely by contextual evidence, then there is much more reason to believe that rape and/or homosexuality were among the primary offenses for which they were judged.

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I wanted to thank you for that link. My favorite is their “Vision”:

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