Another mini hijack:
Lot was damn lucky to have Uncle Abraham, otherwise he would have gone up in flames too.
What kind of #%(#%(#% offers their daughters to a crowd to be raped, sheesh?!?!
We all know what “sodomy” is – but what were they doing in Gomorrah? What is “gommorramy”? Is it fun? 
It’s fun until you get a bad case of Gommorrhea.
You don’t want to know.
But notice that Scripture consistently pictures the unsaved as “the goats.” :eek:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom:
Yadda-yadda-yadda! 
And to the saved as “sheep.” Better to be a goat than a sheep, I say! I mean, on a purely relative scale, which is more attractive to human herders? 
Yes, and to further hijack it, the delicious article from the same website:
All I’m saying is that you might not wanna quote from that site, JThunder.
Actually, I’m more concerned about Onan.
God slew him because he “spilled his seed upon the ground.” This is a obviously a cause for great concern, but it also leads me to consider that the God defined in the Old Testament is very different from the God in the New Testament. Personally, I believe mostly in God as portrayed in the book of Job. Maybe we are just here for his amusement.
No, God slew him because he refused to get his dead brother’s wife pregnant like he was supposed to. Because the baby would be counted as his brother’s, not his. Ultimately, the sin is selfishness and disobedience, not premature ejaculation or money-shots (or else Bukake actors would be thin on the ground)
::Un-hijacking, but also whining Mode ON::
JThunder, say you! I say that the article you are lining to just is a buncha’ whining about how homophobes are afraid of one of their greatest weapons being taken away from them. I love pointing out each and every fault I can find of religious groups, and even I don’t see how anything but an ignorant outlook, or a deliberate mistranslation, could mean what you would like the story to mean.
::points to BrainGlutton’s post 25.::
See what I mean? Either the people didn’t get a good look at them, or their looks where ambiguous, in the story.
::Un-hijacking, but also whining Mode OFF::
That’s all, feel free to talk about Levite marriage, and Onan or whatever.
Actually, it gets even nastier than that. And despite what your seventh-grade Sunday School teacher may have told you, it has nothing to do with masturbation.
Judah. Wealthy landowner with three sons, like Fred MacMurray. He marries eldest son Er to Tamar. Er dies, childless. So he marries No. 2 son, Onan, to her.
This is the point at which we pause and talk about Jewish inheritance laws. Ever notice the big hoohah in the Bible about “firstborn son”? That’s not just “Hey, I’ve got a son to carry on my name!” rejoicing. Rather, under the inheritance laws applicable at the time, the firstborn, or his heir, gets a double portion. You take the number of sons, add one to the total, and divide the patrimony up evenly among the sons, giving the portion left over to the firstborn so he gets twice as much as the others.
And if a person dies leaving a brother but not a son, it’s the obligation of the brother to beget a boy baby on the person’s widow, who for inheritance purposes is counted as the son of the deceased, not of the brother. (You fourteen-year-olds out there snickering about this: remember the widow may now be fat and ugly. And it’s your duty to keep screwing her, with no knowledge of cycles of fertility, until she gets pregnant with a boy – who gets all the neat stuff your big brother had that you wanted.)
So picture the situation, pre-Tamar: Three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah. (Life ain’t easy for a boy named Shelah, either! ;)) When Old Man Judah kicks the bucket, property is going to be divided in fourths (to permit the double-share of the patrimony to the firstborn): 50% to Er, 25% to Onan, 25% to Shelah.
Enter Tamar. Now it’s Er’s responsibility to support her, and his son’s to support his own mother after Er’s death. Call this hypothetical son Ben-Er, as the Jews would have (but avoid any stupid jokes about chariot races, thank you!). Er kicks the bucket, right on schedule, as in the Bible story. No problem: Ben-Er gets half of Grampaw Judah’s patrimony to support himself and the Widow Tamar.
But in point of fact, according to the Bible, Er dies without having fathered that son. So it’s up to Onan to do it.
Now, examine the laws of inheritance at this point. With Er out of the picture, and no Ben-Er, Judah now has two sons, of whom the elder surviving son is Onan. Tamar doesn’t get diddly-squat; as a woman, she’s supposed to be provided for by her husband, or if widowed by her son. Neither of which she has. Meanwhile Onan is sitting pretty: he gets 66.7% of Daddy’s estate, with Shelah getting the other 33.3%.
However, it’s his job to “go in to” Tamar and beget a son on her. And not his son, but the one that is legally Er’s son. The one that, if conceived and born, gets 50% of Judah’s estate, as heir of the firstborn. The one that will become Ben-Er, just as if Er himself had begotten him.
So Onan gets to up his share of the inheritance from 25% to 66.7%, simply by committing coitus interruptus. It isn’t his fault that Tamar is barren, after all! And she has no claim on Grampaw Judah, or Onan, at all…
So Tamar gets screwed, in the *non-*Biblical sense. Screwed out of a husband, a son, and any property to secure her future. And her brother-in-law, who is screwing her two ways, gets 2/3 of the estate. (Is this beginning to sound like someone cast Eric Braeden as Onan?)
Again, our laissez-faire attitudes towards inheritance and our focus on sex make this whole thing sound like a sexual offense, just as with Sodom. It wasn’t; it was Onan’s attempt to rip off his widowed sister-in-law, and do her and her theoretical son out of their (lion’s) share of the inheritance.
And that is what Onan is condemned for. Not for coitus interruptus, per se, and certainly not for jerking off. For refusing to do his duty by his late brother and give him an heir, screwing Tamar out of any future, and ensuring that he and not his nephew-by-law and son-in-fact gets the firstborn’s share of the patrimony.
It’s instructive to see what happens after Onan is duly punished for converting Genesis into a two-millennia-too-early version of “Dynasty”. Judah refuses to marry Shelah to Tamar, justifying it on the basis of his youth. After all, he’s already lost two sons after they went to bed with her. The Deadly Bride, indeed! (What he doesn’t say is that Shelah’s probably run off to Uncle Issachar’s place and is hiding behind a camel; if that’s what happens when you sleep with a girl, he’ll stick with sheep!) So Tamar gets even by seducing Judah, by pretending to be a prostitute. And her twins by him, in consequence, inherit alongside Shelah. And by patriarchal Israelite mores, she’s justified in doing this.
It doesn’t have to do with sex; it has to do with inheritance. Which any estate lawyer could have told you.
BrainGlutton:
I’m not going to quote the whole article you snipped there, just suffice it to say that it’s speaking out of its nether orifice. “Anashim” means “men” and while the word may be used for a mixed-sex group of people (reflecting an almost-universal form of male chauvinism), a group of only women would be “Nashim.” Since the Bible uses the word “Anashim” for them in the story independently of the Sodomites’ request that they be handed over, it’s pretty clear that at least one of them had male appearance, and there is no reason to contort logic to say that the Sodomites’ use of the word “Anashim” (which may not even be the actual word they used, was Canaanite/Sodomite identical to Hebrew? The Bible is obviously written for a Hebrew-reading audience) indicates an uncertainty as to the visitors’ sex. The Biblical text also has the Sodomites using the male “they”/“them” pronoun in reference to the visitiors.
It’s a shame for modern homosexuals that the evils of the Sodomites has become conflated with their homosexuality (or bisexuality, if Lot expected them to be satisfied with his daughters…or more likely than either, their habitual sexual predation against strangers, as occurs in prisons amongst folks who would not normally be identified as gay or bi). The passage from Ezekiel quoted earlier in this thread makes clear that Sodomite homosexuality (such as it was) was incidental to the reason they were destroyed. But to deny that the Sodomites in the Bible meant “men” when it uses the word “Anashim” is incorrect, and no amount of gay-rights wishful thinking changes that.
Good grief, it’s amazing that I have to point this out again.
At the time that this story occurred, Sodom and Gomorrah had already been judged and sentenced. Nothing in this story has anything to do with their crime.
Listen, if Scott Peterson rapes somebody, whether it be a prison guard or inmate, whether it be male or female, it doesn’t change the fact that his execution will be because of murder.
AFAIK, there’s nothing in Genesis describing why God decided to destroy these towns. We’re left up to Ezekiel to figure out what their crime was.
“Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” (Eze 16:49 AV [KJV])
There is the answer to the OP. Case closed. Homosexuality had nothing to do with it.
- Rucksinator
- Don’t feel too bad guys; the author of Jude made a similar mistake himself. He thought that their crime was trying to have sex with angels.
Why it is that cities are considered almost entities in the bible?
Speculation not seen elsewhere:
Taking the whole tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, and what happened before and in between, I always wonder if there is also an allegory of how many years does it take to become responsible for our own acts:
Before the destruction, the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fought bravely against an invader and Lot gave the loot of the defeated king to the king of Sodom! Sandwiched in the middle of the Sodom and Gomorra tales, we have the birth and growth of Ishmael and his circumcision at 13.
I don’t think the age of Ishmael and the richness of the loot are to be ignored; I see that it shows Sodom in an even worse light since Sodom had the goods to even give a royal welcome to the angels. And the 13 years? To show that god can wait up to 13 years, but then, no one (even a city) can evade responsibility.
Much the same way nations today are taken.
Even we say France has done this…, Germany has done that…
Back then cities were similar to nations, they were nations, city-states.
Cities stayed, rulers came and went. So it’s easy to say something ‘Babylon, that whore, is a pain in the ass and she always has been.’
While it is true that the story of the desire for the angels at Lots house comes after the decision to destroy the cities, it doesn’t mean that it has no relation to the decision to destroy the cities. In the parlance of the SDMB, perhaps after telling us the judgement about to be executed, God is giving us a cite.
That is to say, using your example, if Scott Peterson were to murder someone before he is put to death, it may lead people who doubted his guilt (were there any) to lean more to believing. In other words, establishing a pattern.
So, just because you can say that the specific story given doesn’t apply to the judgement, you also can’t say that it isn’t indicative of a pattern of behavior that is being judged.
As far as Ezekiel goes, don’t leave off verse 50 from the quote. I believe that preconceptions play some part in the interpretation here. That is to say, the word “abomination” used in verse 50 is part of what is being described as one of the sins of Sodom and Gommorah. So if you have the preconception that homosexuality is an abomination, then Ezekiel does nothing to prove that homosexuality wasn’t at least some part of the judgement. If you come to the discussion with a preconception that homosexuality isn’t a sin, you will be less likely to attribute the abomination to that act.
Finally, I admit to not being a greek expert in nuances and idioms, but I’ve never heard that the “strange flesh” in Jude refers to angelic sex. But even if it does, it doesn’t support or refute the idea that one of the sins that Sodom was being judged for was homosexuality. In fact, it rather supports (as does Exekiel 16:50) the idea that there was something more than just inohospitality going on. Whether that “extra” abomination was homosexuality or a sexual predatory/rape
nature must be determined some other way.
There is no good argument for “homosexuality” being the sin of Sodom and there has never been any such interpretation in Judaism. Seizing on the word “abomination” despite the fact that pride, gluttony and sloth were specifically named as the cause of sodom’s downfall is just a desperate bit of specious and a priori, selective intepretation designed to force an anti-homosexual message into the text where none exists.
Ruck also makes a good point that the judgement on Sodom had already been made prior to the visit of the angels and I don’t find it legitimate exegesis to try to deny or twist the plain chronology in order to serve the same predetermined desire to find a gay-bashing message where none exists.
I won’t deny that a taste for anal rape of men was among the sins for which Sodom was condemned. But notice the wording of that: it’s not two men meeting at a gay bar and deciding to have anal sex together, with one willingly bottoming. It’s anal rape. And that’s part and parcel of the complexus of sins, the general sinful attitude, for which Sodom is condemned. Not because they wanted hot guy sex. But because they thought they could just take what they want, live in luxury themselves, and never give anything to others who needed it. Including but not limited to the buttocks of visiting angels.
As for Jude, it’s instructive to look at the original Greek for strange flesh": ’ eteroV sarkoV (heteros sarkos). Lusting after angels may constitute “desiring strange flesh” – but that “heteros” should stand out pretty clearly to anyone wanting to use that passage against gays.
What exactly was the significance of male-on-male rape in the OT world?
The “that we may know them” request of the Sodomites is mirrored very closely by the tale of the Levite and his concubine (except it’s Benjamanites instead of Sodomites, and to the best of my knowledge no clergymen still condemn Benjamanites, and instead of the virgin daughter the men seized the concubine and gang raped her until she died). Was male-on-male rape a common form of humiliation?
Regarding the words for “to know”, I won’t say that it doesn’t have a sexual context when the Sodomites asked “to know the men” (yadha yadha 
), but it would seem perfectly natural to want to know the strangers. They were, after all, angels, so it would be presumed there was something unusual about their appearance, and it was not customary to let strangers within the gates at night, and daughters were essentially property to be used at a father’s discretion (or indiscreetly as it turned out). Is it not conceivable that their purpose was “to KNOW” (as we understand the term, not euphemistically) the strangers (with violence clearly intended, but not necessarily sexual violence)?
Also, the close parallels between the story of the Levite and the story of Lot- is it possible they are both based on the same tale?
I was going to respond to that, but I see that SCCajun beat me to the punch. Well done.
In brief, there is simply no good evidence that inhospitality was the reason why Sodom and Gomorrah were being judged. Heck, there isn’t even any good reason to believe that it was particularly high on the list.