Sodom Isn't About Sodomy

 

Sodomy, a term from the medieval Latin, refers to anal (and, in American law, oral) sexual intercourse. It derives from the city of Sodom in Genesis. Sodom's exact location is disputed, but it was one several Cities of the Plain, ruins that in Biblical times dotted a plain near the Dead Sea. In his Jewish Antiquities (c. 94), Josephus reports visiting the site and seeing a rock formation shaped like a woman, presumably related to Lot's wife who turned into a pillar of salt.  

         In his monumental How to Read the Bible (2007), Hebraist James L. Kugel characterizes the Sodom story as etiological, its purpose to explain how things came to be as they are (pp. 129-130). More recently, archeologists have found geological evidence of a meteor burst c. 1700 BCE that leveled then-thriving cities and poisoned the land, presumably leaving legends of a once prosperous plain (https://phys.org/news/2018-12-meteor-air-years-obliterating-dead.html).

But there is a moral purpose in the story too, to show the power and justice of Abraham's God in the context of this etiological and perhaps historical material. The people of Sodom were destroyed because they were very, very bad. How bad? The account in Genesis 19 piles sins upon sins, and I'll attempt to sort them all out. Anyway, it seems that anal sex might be the least of them. 

         Abraham and his nephew Lot, originally from Ur, a major city in northern Mesopotamia, migrate to the provincial city of Haran, and later establish ranches in the hills of Canaan. They become so prosperous that there isn't enough land for all of their flocks, so Lot relocates to the nearby plain and lives in Sodom, one of the cities there. One day Abraham receives three visitors. They seem to be men at first, but later he recognizes them as the Lord and two angels. Their purpose seems to be to tell him that his elderly wife Sarah will bear a son, but as they leave, Abraham sees them walking toward Sodom, and the Lord lags behind to tell Abraham why. 

The Lord (who is at this point in theology neither omniscient nor omnipresent) has heard outcry against the Sodomites, and he is sending angels as spies. If Sodom is as wicked as the outcry suggests, the Lord will destroy it. Because his nephew lives in Sodom, Abraham haggles with the Lord to save the city. If the angels find fifty innocent people, will the Lord spare it? When the Lord agrees to that, Abraham works down to forty-five innocent people and ultimately to ten, but the only innocent people the angels find are Lot and his family. 

Initially ignored by the Sodomites, the angels offer to spend the night in the square, but Lot, a model of hospitality, invites them into his home and prepares a feast. Soon, however, the men of Sodom, young and old, mob his door and demand that he send out the two angels--whom everybody assumes to be mortal men--to be gang-raped. Lot offers his virgin daughters as substitutes, "but do not do anything to these men, since they have come under the shelter of  my roof."  When the Sodomites refuse, the angels pull Lot back into his house, blinding the crowd with a flash of light. 

This seals the fate of Sodom. Lot's married daughters are trapped in the city after their husbands laugh at his warning. The angels hustle Lot, his wife, and his two unmarried daughters out of the city and tell them to flee without looking back. The wife, of course, looks back and becomes a pillar of salt. The Lord rains fire and brimstone on Sodom. Lot retires to the hills, where his lovelorn daughters seduce him, get pregnant, and found two tribes of eponymous bastards (more etiology according to Kugel). On this sordid note, Sodom's history ends. 

          Medieval Latin, the language of monks, referred to anal sex as peccatum Sodomiticum 'the sin of Sodom,' planting the act like a flag on the pile of potentially distinct sins proposed or committed in Lot's city and giving us the English word sodomy. But is this is a fair assessment? If the main sin condemned here is anal sex, what must the lesser sins of Sodom look like?

1. Withholding hospitality from travelers.

2. Attempted unmarried sex.

3. Threatened violence against guests.

4. Attempted rape.

5. Conspiracy to gang sexual assault.

6. Attempted homosexual practice.

Obviously, the story isn't only about the sixth sin on this list. For that to be the case, we'd have to accept violent gang rape of female guests as a blameless recreation. Besides, if the main interest of the men of Sodom had been venting homoerotic urges, they'd have stayed home and banged each other. The mob is obviously not about sexual need. They do reject his virgin daughters (whom they could have raped any day of the previous week), but this can't be because they are indifferent to women and shun reproductive sex. If that were the case, there'd be no men of Sodom begin with. No, something much darker is happening here.

A good place to start is with the withholding of hospitality. All six sins (with the exceptions of 2 and 6 in other circumstances) violate hospitality, which was a sacred obligation for the ancients, not just a polite gesture. I first became aware of the ancient institution that the Greeks called xenia, translated 'guest-friendship,' while teaching Homer's Odyssey. Xenia is the Greek version of a pattern found all around Mediterranean, a set of mutual obligations enforced by the highest gods. A stranger at a householder's door should be received as an honored guest, and, if the stranger plays his part in the ritual, the two (along with their descendants) become, in effect, members of one family, ritual brothers. Bonds so created held the larger society together.

Strangers were protected by the gods and might even be gods (or angels) in disguise. When Odysseus has returned home in disguise as a beggar and one of his wife's suitors (who are later killed for their violations of xenia) throws an ox's hoof at him as a "gift," the other suitors worry that the offender is doomed if Odysseus is a god in disguise. Indeed, Athena had earlier visited the house in disguise and rewarded Odysseus' son for his hospitality to her. In the Hebrew version of this motif, when Abraham sees the Lord and two angels standing near his tent, he mistakes them for human strangers and rushes out to to welcome them. Bowing, he offers to bathe and feed them (Genesis 18). Abraham virtuously enacts xenia. 

          Other Biblical instances of God or angels taking the form of men include the announcement of Samson's birth (Judges 13) and Jacob's wrestling with God (Genesis 32:22-32). Jesus taught that anyone who receives a stranger (xenos) receives the Son of Man (Matthew 25:35), God's human form in the Book of Daniel (7:13-14). Hebrews 13:2 enjoins, "Do not neglect to show hospitality [philoxenias, 'love of strangers'], for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."  Morally, if not literally, needy strangers are God himself, and the prophet Ezekiel says that neglecting the needy was the reason Sodom was destroyed (16:49).

Another story, in Judges 19, echoes the story of Sodom. This time the guest is a Levite traveling with his concubine, and the crimes of a town justify a military attack. The Levite and his party sit down in the square of Gibeah on the first evening of their journey, expecting locals to offer hospitality. Nobody local does, but an "old man," a resident alien in the town like Lot, invites the Levite's party into his house and fulfills all the requirements of xenia: "they bathed their feet and ate and drank" (19:21). Again, the men of the town gather outside and demand sex with the Levite (who is not an angel, but a priest), and again the householder invokes a formula of xenia ("Since this man entered my house, do not perpetuate this outrage" [19:23]) and offers women--his virgin daughter and the Levite's concubine. 

         After this, the stories differ: the men of Gibeah rape the concubine so brutally that she dies, and this outrage provokes the tribes of Israel to put nearly all the tribe of Benjamin to the sword. There's no fire and brimstone, but the effect is the same. Both stories describe smoke rising from burning cities (Genesis 19:28; Judges 20:40). This analogous tale, also describing a gross violation of hospitality to justify the wholesale destruction of a people, makes it clear that--contrary to the medieval Latin--the hallmark sin of Sodom is not gay sex. Sexual abuse simply caps a story of radical inhospitality.

This isn't to say that the ancient Hebrews approved of homosexual practice. In another set of Biblical doublets, the book of Leviticus twice condemns lying "with a male as one lies with a woman," assigning the death penalty in the second case (Leviticus 18:22; 20:13). But this should be put into context. Death is also the penalty for blasphemy and insulting parents, and the rule follows a list of heterosexual offenses connected with impurity, such as touching a woman during her period. Christian moralists have traditionally affirmed the rule against homosexual practice but felt free to eat pork and shellfish, wear mixed weaves of clothing, and violate scores of other Levitical laws. Paul writes in Romans 14:12, "I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean."

          The false assumption that everybody is by "nature" heterosexual and thus anything else is contrary to nature seems to have led conservative Christians to regard sodomy as an absolute crime like rape rather than as a violation of ritual purity. Evaluating this position in the context of same-sex marriage, however, is a topic for another day.