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Keywords:: Christianity, Judaism, Sodom and Gomorrah, Sodomy, Bible | ||||||||
The Bible, in its entirety, can certainly not be viewed as a 100% gay-frendly text, nevertheless, there are areas of this text that have been massaged over the centuries away from their original meaning to better justify anti-gay behavior. One of the more interesting aspects in the religious debate regarding gays and lesbians has to be found in the changing understanding of the Sodom and Gomorrah tale (1).
Briefly, following the Old Testament story (Gen 18-19), Sodom and Gomorrah (which suspiciously means “ruined heap”) were two cities about which God had heard horrible rumors, in need of confirmation (This God of the "J" text of the Old Testament is not yet described as omniscient). It is important to note that the Bible records no linkage of these cities to homosexual acts earlier in the texts, only mentioning their generic wickedness. God presumably is set to destroy the city of Sodom if what He heard is true, but Abraham then talks Him into sparring it if some righteous people live there.
Lot and his Daughters by Lucas van Leyden (1509) In the next chapter, two angels enter Sodom, and are shown hospitality by Lot, one of the few righteous locals. Hearing of these strange supernatural beings in their city, the townsfolk come to Lot’s house with the primary intent of raping the angels. Instead, Lot offers them his virgin daughters, whom they reject. At that, the angels then blind the men who consequently disperse, as they became “weary trying to find the door” (Gen 19:11). Finally the cities are destroyed while Lot’s family escapes. Though his wife is turned into salt for looking back on the work. In the end, a disgraceful, drunken, and incestuous genesis for the genealogy of the Moabite and the Ammonite peoples is posed with Lot as their progenitor.
The strange thing is that a person unfamiliar with our culture's use of this story would have next to no reason to find it to be an anti-homosexuality fable, and certainly not near the degree many religions portray it today. The story tells about a group of menacing men (and women and children by Gen 19:4), from a horribly wicked town who want to rape God’s angels and all most see today is homosexuality? Even if homosexuality were a sin, it is as though a person ran down another in their car, and all anybody cares about is whether or not they first used their turn signal. So how did this happen?
The Old Testament own text actually details the sins of Sodom:
Ezekiel 16:49-50: Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.
One may pick out "abomination” as a reference to homosexuality, but remember, at the time, eating crab (Lev 11:10), graven images (Deut 7:25), remarrying a person you divorced (Deut 24:4), and sacrificing a not-quite-perfect animal to that same Hebrew God were “abominations” (Deut 17:1).
To back up Ezekiel, we may look at the haggadoth of the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of Jewish folktales that follow, in parts, the Old Testament stories. There the sins of Sodom and that generic wickedness are described in detail:
The men of Sodom became haughty only on account of the good which God, blessed be He, had lavished upon them...They said: Since there cometh forth bread out of (our) earth, and it hath the dust of gold [on it], why should we suffer wayfarers, who come to us only to deplete our wealth. Come, let us abolish the practice of travelers in our land.
...they had beds upon which travelers slept. If the guest was too long they shortened him by lopping off his feet; if too short, they stretched him out..
Clearly, from the accounts closest to the time the story of Sodom was written, the sin of Sodom was meant to be inhospitality, a serious threat to civilizations back when they relied heavily on trade but had little in the way of a intra-city police force. It is simply wrong to assume homosexuality was intended to be the issue in the Sodom story. "Sodomy" could more actually be the verb applicable to rich pagans who rob and rape destitute angels while boasting and worshiping some half-donkey demigod with their mouths full of bread, but one would doubt that could find a home in any vernacular.
This story morphed, though, from an anti-inhospitality tale into an anti-gay tract, but
gradually.
In the Apocrypha, Sodom’s sin is still primarily about pride and inhospitality (“inhospitality” is putting it lightly…). In the Pseudepigrapha (A likely source of Jude’s, as discussed below), Sodom’s sins become more about sexual misconduct, only loosely including homosexuality.
One of the first works in which Sodom becomes significantly about homosexuality is in Philo’s On Abraham (20 BC-40 AD). Here the sin is not much about pride and inhospitality anymore, but about indulgence in food, drink, and sex, which was proposed to be a result of their wealth.
The inhabitants owed their extreme licence to their wealth, for deep-soiled and well-watered as it was, the land every year a prolific harvest of all manners of fruits, and the chief beginning of evils, as one has aptly said, is good in excess.
Nevertheless, these Sodom men became sex fiends, not what most call homosexuals; men, women, it did not matter (as gays and lesbians know, if you are truly gay, it matters).
In the Antiquities of the Jews (94 AD), Josephus repeats the story of Sodom, seemingly influenced a bit by Philo's opinion (with whom Josephus was clearly familiar), but goes partially back to the pride/inhospitality angle of the Old Testament:
"About this time the Sodomites grew proud, on account of their riches and great wealth; they became unjust towards men, and impious towards God, insomuch that they did not call to mind the advantages they received from him: they hated strangers, and abused themselves with Sodomitical practices. God was therefore much displeased at them, and determined to punish them for their pride, and to overthrow their city, and to lay waste their country, until there should neither plant nor fruit grow out of it."
Josephus then goes on to make clear the final straw was the attempted rape of the angels.
About this same time, we have Matthew’s account of the words of Jesus:
Matthew 10:14-15: If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town. I tell you the truth, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.
Jesus is remarkably quiet on the subject of homosexuality, but what he does say regarding this particular story, of course, echoes the inhospitality angle of Ezekiel in the Old Testament, connecting inhospitality with the Sodom story.
The closest to a biblical homosexuality-Sodom connection is found late in the New Testament, in Jude 7 (~65-120 AD), where there is talk about “strange flesh” and fornication, but it comes after the evolutions made by Philo, and the apocryphal literature (which Jude actually cites). Besides, Jude has a good deal of baggage which should cause readers to doubt its origins. It should also be noted that those sex crimes could reasonably mean anything from bestiality, to incest, to, as the actual story reports, attempted rape of angels. Still, Jude does show a part of the sin of Sodom’s cultural evolution away from inhospitality and towards sexuality.
Over the years, and beyond Jude, early Christianity picked up on the homosexuality angel, and the sins Ezekiel bemoans drop into the background, and if they were mentioned they were mentioned as symptoms of homosexuality in a community. It seems, Paul already saw the orientation as a curse from God for competing pagan religions (Rom 1:23-25), and those smoldering cities would be and did become a great tool for leaders. Sodom became the example city, as it always was, but it became the example city with gays in it. And what city does not? The political worth in this angle was realized.
In the 3rd century, Clement of Alexandria took a small step back to the original description and characterized Sodom’s sin as gluttony, in food and sex, gay and straight. Nevertheless St. John Chrysostom, in the 4th century, made homosexual pedophilia now Sodom’s only sin.
It [the sin of Sodom] was one sin, a grievous one, yet but one. The men of that time had a passion for boys, and on that account they suffered this punishment.
While child rape of any sort is certainly an evil to all reasonable minds, Saint John was absolutely vehemently opposed to homosexuality in general, calling even the defenders of gay men and women "even worse than murderers".
St. Augustine, in The City of God (412 AD) followed suite:
...a fiery rain from heaven turned into ashes that whole region of the impious city [because] custom had made lewdness between men as prevalent as laws have elsewhere made other kinds of wickedness.
Now, the primary sin of Sodom was not anything most reasonable people call immoral today, like rape, or mistreatment of strangers. It was not about crimes people do to each other as described in Ezekiel or what people do at all, as much as it was about having a certain type of person in the city’s midst, people who “God gave up unto vile affections”, as Paul supposedly put it (Rom 1:26).
REFERENCES ::
1. Crompton, L.. Homosexuality and Civilization. The Belknap Press, Cambridge. (2003).
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isocrat > fait > bible > sodom
Created: 2008-08-08; Last Edited: 2008-08-08; (ID383)