Sodom and Gomorrah

• 1. Introduction

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  Sodom and Gomorrah are two cities that the Book of Genesis says God destroyed with fire from the sky. Before the destruction, a man named Abraham tried to bargain for them. He asked, "Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?" Starting at fifty people, he pressed the number down. God finally agreed to spare Sodom if ten righteous people could be found. The two cities appear in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Quran. In all of them, their names stand for wickedness and divine punishment. Yet the exact crime of the people who lived there has never been settled. Did the cities exist at all? Who has told their story, and why do the tellings differ so sharply? And why does the name of one of them still sit inside the English language today?

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• 2. Captives on the Plain

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  In Hebrew, the cities are called Səḏôm and ʿĂmôrā. The Septuagint, the Greek translation, renders them Sódoma and Gómorrha. Scholars disagree about where the names come from. Burton MacDonald links Gomorrah to a Semitic root, ʿ-m-r, which means "be deep, copious (water)". Beyond that, the origins of both names remain uncertain.

  Lot, the nephew of Abraham, first meets the cities when the two men resolve a quarrel over land. Lot chooses to settle in the Jordan Valley and "moved his tent as far as Sodom". At this stage the cities are separate places with their own rulers. Genesis 14:2 names Bera as king of Sodom and Birsha as king of Gomorrah. Both kings answered to Chedorlaomer of Elam, and both rebelled against him. At the Battle of Siddim, Chedorlaomer beat them and carried off many captives. Lot was among the prisoners. Abraham gathered his men, rescued his nephew and freed the cities. Rescued once, Lot was back in Sodom when God next turned his attention to the city.

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• 3. Fire and Brimstone

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  Abraham was chosen as God's confidant because God expected him to "keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice". Sodom, by contrast, had acquired a reputation for wickedness. Two messengers, called angels in many tellings, arrived in the city in the evening. They meant to spend the night in the town square. Lot persuaded them to stay in his own house instead.

  Late that evening, every man of the town surrounded the house. They demanded that Lot hand over his guests so that they could "know" them. Lot offered the crowd his virgin daughters, to "do to them as you please". The mob refused and threatened to treat Lot even worse. The angels struck the crowd blind.

  The messengers then told Lot that the outcry against the city had grown so great that they had been sent to destroy it. At dawn Lot was still lingering, so they took him, his wife and his two daughters by the hand and led them out. The family was told to flee to the hills and not look back. Lot protested that the hills were too far and asked to go to Zoara in the Transjordan. He travelled there overnight. God then rained sulfur, or brimstone, and fire on Sodom, Gomorrah and the whole plain. The inhabitants died, along with "what grew on the ground". Lot's wife ignored the warning, looked back and became a pillar of salt. Genesis 19:29 shows the cities staying in the family's story afterward, through Lot's daughters.

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• 4. A Byword in Scripture

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  Deuteronomy 29:21-23 pictures a later generation looking at a land of "brimstone, and salt, and a burning" where nothing is sown and no grass grows. The passage compares it to the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim. From there the pair became a standard comparison for destruction and desolation. Isaiah 1:9-10 addresses the people of his own day as if they came from Sodom and Gomorrah. Isaiah 13:19-22 tells Babylon it will end like them. Jeremiah 23:14 ties Sodom to adultery and lies, and Jeremiah 49:17-18 prophesies the same fate for Edom, south of the Dead Sea. In Amos 4:1-11, God says he treated the Israelites like Sodom and Gomorrah, yet they still did not repent. Zephaniah 2:9 gives Moab and Ammon the same warning.

  The deuterocanonical books keep the image alive. Wisdom 10:6-8 speaks of the Five Cities and a smoking wasteland where plants bear fruit that does not ripen. Wisdom 19:17 compares the blindness that struck the Egyptians who enslaved the Israelites to the blindness of the men who came to Lot's door. Sirach 16:8 says God "did not spare the neighbors of Lot". In 2 Esdras 5:1-13, one sign of the end times is that "the sea of Sodom shall cast up fish".

  In the New Testament, Jesus uses the cities as a measuring stick for judgment. In Matthew 10:14-15, he tells his followers to shake the dust from their feet when a town rejects them. He says it will be "more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgement". In Matthew 11:20-24, he tells Capernaum that Sodom would have remained to this day had it seen his works. In Luke 17:28-30, he says ordinary life carried on in the days of Lot right up to the day the fire fell. Second Peter 2:4-10 says God saved Lot and will likewise rescue the godly. Revelation 11:7-8 gives the name Sodom to a great city, prophetically, where the Lord was crucified.

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• 5. Retold in Other Traditions

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  Rabbinic tradition adds a darker layer of stories that the Genesis text never tells. In these accounts the judges of the cities carried names such as Shakrai, meaning "Liar", and Shakurai, meaning "Awful Liar". Two others were Zayyafi, "Forger", and Mazle Dina, "Perverter of Justice". The people were said to commit economic crimes, blasphemy and bloodshed. They allegedly demanded tolls for crossing a river, and made a victim pay for the perpetrator's "bloodletting".

  Eliezer was reportedly a victim of this injustice after Sarah sent him to Sodom to check on Lot. Travellers fared worse. The citizens gave foreigners a standard-sized bed. If a guest was too short, they stretched his limbs, and if he was too tall, they cut off his legs. The Greek myth of Procrustes tells a similar story. Many people therefore avoided the cities.

  Beggars were handed marked coins, yet a proclamation forbade anyone to give them food. When the beggar starved, the givers took their coins back. Offering bread and water to the poor was a capital offense. In one tale, two girls went to a well, and the poor one gave the rich one water in return for bread. When this came out, both were burned alive. The Book of Jasher says Paltith, one of Lot's daughters, was burned alive for giving a poor man bread. Another woman, in Admah, gave water to a traveller who planned to leave the next day. She was stripped, covered with honey and stung to death by bees. Her cries rose to heaven, and the tale names this as what provoked God in Genesis 18:20.

  Even Lot's wife gets a motive. Because she came from Sodom, she disapproved of the guests, and her request for salt from the neighbors alerted the mob. The Mishnah, according to Jon D. Levenson, sums up the city's stinginess in the saying "What is mine is mine; what is yours is yours".

  A very different reading comes from Gnosticism. In the Paraphrase of Shem, a text from the Nag Hammadi library, Shem is guided by a spiritual savior named Derdekeas. He brings secret knowledge, called gnosis, to the citizens of Sodom. The city is then unjustly destroyed by the base nature of a demon in human form. Here the disaster comes from spiritual ignorance rather than from the citizens' own sins.

  The Quran mentions "the people of Lut" twelve times. Lut is the Quran's name for Lot. Their destruction is linked mainly to idolatrous practices, and they are said to have transgressed knowingly against God's limits. Lot prayed only to be saved from doing as they did. The angel Gabriel told him to leave quickly. His wife stayed behind because she had transgressed. Chapter 15 says "the (mighty) Blast overtook them before morning" and that stones of baked clay rained down. The Quran leaves the place unnamed, but it adds that the ruins still lie along a known route.

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• 6. The Meaning of Know

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  Genesis never says what the sin of Sodom was. Since 1955, scholars have increasingly read it as the cruel treatment of guests. Other books of the Hebrew Bible first blamed a range of nonsexual sins. Later lists added "unnatural" sex, and eventually homosexuality came to be read as the primary offense. Most of the modern argument turns on the moment the mob confronts Lot about his guests.

  The weight rests on a single Hebrew verb, yada, which the King James Version renders "know" in the demand that Lot bring the men out. Yada can mean sexual intercourse. Genesis 4:1 uses it when Adam "knew" Eve and she conceived Cain. Some Hebrew scholars say it requires a personal and intimate relationship. Many popular 20th-century translations therefore render Genesis 19:5 as "have sex with" or "know... carnally". Among them are the New International Version, the New King James Version and the New Living Translation.

  Others point out that the Hebrew word for "know" appears over 900 times in the Hebrew Bible. Only about 1 percent of those uses, 13 or 14, are clearly a sexual euphemism. On this reading, the crowd demanded the right to interrogate the strangers. Their opponents answer that Lot's reply, three verses later, uses the same verb sexually. He says his daughters "have not known man" and offers them instead.

  The Epistle of Jude keeps the quarrel going. It says the cities gave themselves over to fornication and went after "strange flesh". Nonsexual readers note that "strange" is akin to "other". They suggest the sin was sexual desire for beings who were not human, perhaps echoing Genesis 6:1-4 or the Book of Enoch. Critics reply that Genesis 6 has angels seeking women, not men seeking angels. They add that the sin was already underway before the visitors arrived. They also doubt the Sodomites knew the visitors were angels.

  Ezekiel 16:49-50 is the passage the hospitality reading leans on. It names the sin of Sodom as pride, "fulness of bread", and careless ease, with no strengthening of the hand of the poor and needy. Jay Michaelson cites Ezekiel alongside Jeremiah and Amos to argue that these texts mention Sodom without any comment on homosexuality. He writes that "Homosexual rape is the way in which they violate hospitality", and that it is not the essence of their transgression. Reading the story as about homosexuality, he says, is like reading the story of an ax murderer as being about an ax.

  James L. Kugel of Harvard suggests the story holds both threads. The Sodomites were stingy, inhospitable and sexually licentious, in contrast to the generosity of Abraham. Some ancient commentators, he notes, thought Lot himself was "scarcely better than his neighbors", since he offered his daughters to protect his guests. The Anglican Communion argues that the story is "not even vaguely about homosexual love or relationships" and is instead "about dominance and rape". It compares the story to the Battle of Gibeah, in which a mob settled for raping and murdering a concubine.

  On the other side stands Rabbi Basil Herring, who led the Rabbinical Council of America from 2003 to 2012. He writes that rabbinic literature and the modern Orthodox position see the Torah condemning homosexuality as an abomination. In his view, Sodom is a "paradigmatic" instance.

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• 7. The Making of Sodomy

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  Lisa McClain, a scholar of history and gender studies, says the link between Sodom and homosexuality first appears with Philo, a Jewish philosopher of the 1st century. She says no earlier reading made it. Another account credits Philo of Alexandria with inventing the sexual interpretation. The Christian reading of the story as a condemnation of homosexuality began in the 6th century AD. It became church dogma in the 12th century AD.

  From the name of one city came the English words sodomite and sodomy, and the British slang "sod". Sodomite became a pejorative for male homosexuals. Sodomy entered law under the label crimes against nature, covering anal or oral sex, particularly between men, and bestiality. Byrne Fone, in Homophobia: A History, traces the argument to a contested reading of one word in the story. Church authorities then called sodomy the worst of sexual sins and one of the worst crimes of all.

  For many centuries the church used the story to justify criminalizing sex between men. People labeled sodomites were often executed. Western nations followed with similar laws, and thousands of people have been executed under them since 1292. Later the word became an insult aimed at enemies of the church, whatever their sexuality. It was applied on the basis of geography, ethnicity and religion. Some laws allowed property to be seized once someone was convicted of sodomy, so the trials also served as a weapon against opponents.

  Change began in the Age of Enlightenment. Writers such as Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade argued for tolerance and for dropping the death penalty. By the 1900s the word was leaving legal discourse. New terms such as homosexual and heterosexual took over the debate. Even so, some Islamic societies still incorporate punishments associated with Sodom and Gomorrah into sharia.

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• 8. Hunting for the Ruins

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  If the story has a historical basis, one proposed cause is an earthquake. The Dead Sea area could have been devastated between 2100 and 1900 BC, perhaps releasing showers of steaming tar. The biblical location lies along a major fault, the Jordan Rift Valley. But no known contemporary account of seismic activity supports this. A volcano has been judged unlikely, and a meteor airburst like the Tunguska incident has been dismissed. Some argue instead that the story blends real places and events rather than recording one incident.

  Ancient writers pointed to the Dead Sea. Archibald Sayce translated an Akkadian poem about cities destroyed by a rain of fire, told by a survivor. It names no cities, and Sayce later said it more closely resembles the doom of Sennacherib's host. The Greek geographer Strabo reported local belief near Moasada that thirteen inhabited cities once stood there, with Sodom as the metropolis. He placed Sodom at a limestone and salt hill at the southwestern tip of the Dead Sea. Ruins nearby sit on Mount Sodom, called Har Sedom in Hebrew. The Jewish historian Josephus places Sodom near the lake, which he calls by its Greek name, Asphaltites. Some scholars suspect the cities lie flooded under the southern basin of the Dead Sea.

  In 1973, Walter E. Rast and R. Thomas Schaub visited or found several candidate sites. One was Bab edh-Dhra, first excavated in 1965 by Paul Lapp, with Rast and Schaub finishing the work after his death. Others were Numeira, al-Safi, Feifa and Khirbet al-Khanazir. Schaub dated the destruction of Numeira to 2600 BC and Bab edh-Dhra to 2350-2067 BC. Kris J. Udd proposed lowering those dates to 2100-2050 BC and 2000-1950 BC.

  Later work cut the list down. In 1993, Nancy Lapp of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary reported that Feifa had no Bronze Age occupation. It was an Early Bronze Age cemetery with walls from the Iron Age or Roman period. At Khirbet al-Khanazir, what Rast and Schaub had read as houses were rectangular charnel houses marking shaft tombs.

  In 1976, Giovanni Pettinato made a bolder claim. A cuneiform tablet from the newly discovered library at Ebla, he said, listed all five cities of the plain. They were Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim and Bela, in the same order as Genesis. The names si-da-mu and ì-ma-ar were read as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the claim gained some acceptance. Alfonso Archi answered that the neighboring city names place si-da-mu in northern Syria. He said ì-ma-ar is a variant of ì-mar, which stands for the city of Emar. The scholarly consensus today is that "Ebla has no bearing on... Sodom and Gomorra."

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