ESSAYS

A pair of messengers (mal’akhim in Hebrew) come to the city of Sodom in the evening. Lot, Abram’s nephew, a stranger in town, is sitting at the gate. He invites the two men home for the night.

A crowd gathers. Bring the strangers out, they shout, so that we may “know them.” Lot offers the mob his two daughters who have “known no man.” No, this will not do. How dare this man, a stranger in town, set himself over us, say the men of Sodom.

The messengers warn Lot of the imminent destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot escapes with his two daughters and his wife. But his wife, turning around to witness the destruction, becomes a pillar of salt. Scholars suggest that this may be an etiological story, that is, a story to account for a rock formation that resembles a human figure. At the same time, it recalls an ancient taboo against looking back when fleeing from a place of doom (see Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses, 1996).

The annihilation of the two cities echoes Noah’s flood, except here it rains celestial fire. Thinking their world has ended, Lot’s two daughters get their father drunk and commit incest to continue their people’s existence. The narrator does comment on the act, only saying that this is the origin of the Moabites and Ammonites of “our day.” Those two peoples will become enemies (see Matthew Ballou’s The Rape of Lot by his Daughters in the Kasper Collection of Contemporary Biblical Art).

Questions arise.

Does the Lord (adonai in the Hebrew) condemn homosexuality (sodomy) as many today would like to think? Until Leviticus, the Bible does not say. It may be more fruitful to ask what ancient people heard in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah?

In the previous chapter of the Bible, Abram encounters three men at Mamre. They are strangers. He offers them hospitality. One happens to be the Lord himself. The other two are mal’akhim (messengers). They are strangers, yet Abram welcomes and feeds them.

You never knew if the stranger was a god.

Besides violating the ancient rule of hospitality, the men of Sodom ignored this ancient lesson. Strangers are not to be abused is the ethic. That a stranger may be a god in disguise is common sense. Much later, in the New Testament Book of Acts, Paul and Barnabus are mistaken for Hermes and Zeus by the people of Lystra.

The purity code in Leviticus labels homosexuality an abomination (to ‘evah), a moral pollution. In ancient Israel, the moral pollution of the sinner also included Israel itself. In a similar way, in the story of Onan, Onan fails in his duty to his family and Israel by refusing to be a sexual proxy for his dead brother, which is a legal obligation. The act of “spilling his seed” (incorrectly identified as masturbation) is not condemned in-and-of-itself. Rather, Onan has failed in his moral duty to family and Israel (see Matthew Ballou’s A Spilling of the Seed in the Kasper Collection).