What was Sodom's Sin?
I have previously commented on the story of Sodom in relation to the broader issue of homosexuality in the (Written) Torah. However I wish here to discuss the specifics of the sin of Sodom in so far as they are contested as there are several accounts of what the cause of Yahweh’s extreme displeasure actually was. Our focus however has to be in relation to the account in Genesis, which deals with Lot and the crime of Sodom.
We are told thus:
‘The two angels came to Sodom in the evening; and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them, and bowed himself with his face to the earth, and said “My Lords, turn aside, I pray you, to your servant’s house and spend the night, and wash your feet; then you may rise up early and go on your way.” They said, “No; we will spend the night in the street.” But he urged them strongly; so they turned aside to him and entered his house; and he made them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate. But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.” Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him, and said, “I beg you my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Behold, I have two daughters who have not known man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them what you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.”’ (1)
In the story of the visit of the two angels to Lot: we need to notice the action of the men of Sodom toward of the presence of foreign men (who are in fact angels) in the house of Lot and Lot’s response to satisfy them. The men of Sodom demand that Lot bring out the angels to them (i.e., who they believe to foreign men) so that they ‘may know them’.
The phrasing is interesting here since ‘knowing’ someone in the Biblical text is a common euphemism for sexual intercourse. This is also exemplified in the above text when Lot tells the men of Sodom that he has two daughters who have ‘not known man’: in other words his daughters are virgins. This suggests that the men of Sodom are incorrigible homosexuals who want to have sex with everything and anything male that moves. If you want to put it in somewhat vulgar terms: the Bible is suggesting that the men of Sodom wanted to gang-rape - or have a homosexual gang-bang with - the two angels in the street.
This is further suggested by the reaction of Lot to the angels: since he believes them to be foreign men and they are obviously either beautiful to look upon (hence the connection of angels with physical beauty often related in the Biblical text as well as popular culture) or richly attired due to the fact that he refers to them as ‘My Lords’ (i.e., they are obviously not common men because of something related to their appearance). This in turn necessitates that the men of Sodom had noticed the two angels when they had come to the gate of the city (as otherwise how did they know they were in Lot’s house?) and believed that Lot had taken them into his house to have homosexual intercourse with them.
Not wanting to be left out of the opportunity to have their ‘fun’ with attractive foreign men (or perhaps being a bit bored of each other): the men of Sodom decided to turn up at Lot’s house and demand he bring out the men so that he couldn't monopolize the ‘fun’ himself.
This is then further evidenced by Lot trying to bribe the men of Sodom with his two virgin daughters instead.
After all: if the men of Sodom just wanted to know who the angels were. Then why did Lot refer to what they wanted to do as ‘being wicked’ and offer them his two daughters to have sex with?
We can thus see that the men of Sodom (who are held to be non-jewish) were rampant and predatory homosexuals. This is not itself the reason that Yahweh destroyed Sodom however since the abomination of homosexuality is set to specific criteria outlined by Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the men of Sodom were not of Israel. It means that according to Yahweh’s declarations: they were not guilty of any crime against him, because they were not of Israel.
The presence of an Israelite - Lot - among them is due to his being captured by the King of Sodom (or his previously living in Sodom for undisclosed reasons) (2) and as such Lot as the only Israelite among the men of Sodom is going to be highly vulnerable to being forced to have sexual intercourse with other men. Indeed Lot hints that he may well have already been involved in homosexual affairs considering that he knows precisely what the men of Sodom want when they turn up at his house and demand to see the two angels (i.e., ‘I beg you my brothers, do not act so wickedly’). To know this so implicitly Lot must have had experience in such a situation before himself and his pleading with the men of Sodom suggests that it is more desperation born of experience rather than a belief that pleading is actually going to do something. Lot’s desperation is suggested by his sacrificing his two virgin daughters (who were viewed as an important commodity [of which their virginity was an integral part] in the ancient world) to the mob if they would but leave the two angels alone and unmolested.
This then means that Lot was under constant threat of being either seduced or raped by the men of Sodom (and he probably had been already if we note the behaviour of the men of Sodom in relation to the two angels). This would have been regarded - in the light of the strict but specific prohibitions related to the Israelites alone in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy - as a direct infringement of the prohibition of homosexuality in relation to the Israelites and thus Yahweh considers that Sodom has committed a truly terrible crime against him and thus ordains its destruction.
When we notice that: earlier in the book of Genesis (3) that Abraham is attempting to intercede with Yahweh in order to placate the genocidal rage of the latter and in so doing argues that there may be righteous in the city of Sodom. Abraham convinces Yahweh that if there are ten righteous men in Sodom then he will not rain fire and brimstone upon the city: however as Yahweh murders everyone in Sodom (except for Lot and his family) anyway it must be supposed that whatever the crime of Sodom was then it had to be fairly universal among the (male) inhabitants.
The reaction of the men of Sodom to the presence of the angels and the demand that the angels be shared as lovers by all the men of the city: much like Lot had presumably been. Would have then been a suitable trigger to cause the calamity to befall Sodom since Yahweh had given them the opportunity to change their ways, but yet they had spectacularly failed to do so by first seducing Lot and now wanting to seduce Yahweh’s angelic servants.
Of course we do not have a prohibition in relation to angels being seduced by men, but we do have a prohibition against the intercourse of divine beings (i.e., angels) with women in the book of Genesis. (4)
It would be sensible to extend this prohibition - which is directly referred to as ‘wicked’ behaviour (and thus probably an abomination unto Yahweh) - to homosexual intercourse and to further extend it to be a double abomination with the men of Sodom seeking homosexual intercourse with angels while believing those angels are in fact men (and probably - although we cannot say so with absolute certainty - Israelites).
We can see then that the text of Genesis strongly supports the proposition that the crime of Sodom was a specific form homosexuality (rather than a blanket prohibition) relating to the homosexual interaction between Israelite and non-Israelite.
This can also be read into the text itself if we approach it critically since if we don’t believe that Yahweh exists, but rather view him as a simple invention of jews looking to go into business as holy men. Then since Lot couldn’t have possibly been visited by angels or directed by Yahweh: then Lot leaving Sodom was either part of a conspiracy to destroy Sodom by a massive act of arson (hence the visit of the foreign men, which Genesis claims were angels) for some perceived ‘abomination unto Yahweh’ or Lot wished to leave to get away from the abominations of the men of Sodom with the destruction simply being unrelated.
Now what reading the text this way means is that the sin of Sodom would have had to have impacted Lot personally as there was no Israelite nation at this point according to Genesis as Abraham was still alive. Thus it leaves two real options: the first is homosexuality (which was causing the men of Sodom to proposition and/or seduce/rape Lot) and the second is religion (which could - if Lot was a monotheist and the Sodomites polytheists - have caused much spiritual anguish for Lot as well as probable socio-economic exclusion for him).
Of the two: homosexuality is far the more likely given that spiritual considerations tend to go on the back burner in everyday affairs. More importantly however: there is nothing in the text to suggest that Lot was being persecuted/generally picked on by the Sodomites (as well as good evidence he was just another citizen: hence the attitude of the men of Sodom when they turned up at Lot’s house when the angels were staying) as well as nothing in the text to suggest that Lot lacked for anything that would suggest he had been socially excluded by those individuals and families resident in Sodom.
Thus we can more or less disregard religion as the cause and we are left with homosexuality as being the one thing that makes logical sense from what evidence we have in relation to the crime of Sodom.
The mentions in the Tanakh of the actual sin of the Sodomites are also contradictory in and of themselves as we are told by the book of Isaiah that:
‘Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom!
Give ear to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomor’rah!
“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?” says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beats;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of he-goats.
“When you come to appear before me, who requires of you this trampling of my courts?
Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and Sabbath and the calling of assemblies – I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.
Your new moons and your appointed feats my soul hates;
They have come a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.
When you spread forth your hands, I will hide my eyes from you;
Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen;
Your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
Remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
Cease to do evil, learn to do good;
Seek justice, correct oppression;
Defend the fatherless, please for the widow.’ (5)
As well as later in the book of Isaiah that:
‘Their partiality witnesses against them;
They proclaim their sin like Sodom, they do not hide it.
Woe to them!
For they have brought evil upon themselves.’ (6)
While the book of Jeremiah states that:
‘But in the Prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing: they commit adultery and walk in lies; they strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one turns from his wickedness; all of them have become like Sodom to me, and its inhabitants like Gomor’rah.’ (7)
And the book of Ezekiel opines:
‘Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them, when I saw it.’ (8)
While the ‘Wisdom of Solomon’ informs us (in a generally agreed reference to the fate of Sodom) that:
‘The punishments did not come upon the sinners without prior signs in the violence of thunders, for they justly suffered because of their wicked acts; for they practised a bitter hatred of strangers.’ (9)
Now in the first instance all these mentions can be reasonably dated centuries later than the actual event. While we have no guarantee that the Genesis account itself actually happened (we can only surmise that something like it did happen to a place called Sodom in the general area of Palestine at some time before the text was written): if we are to assume that the account actually describes historical events then we have to focus our understanding on what was said as close to the time as possible (i.e. the account in Genesis). The later accounts of the sin of Sodom are thus interesting in how the latter Israelites interpreted the story told in Genesis, but cannot really shed any actual light upon the story unless any of the propositions they contain can be securely dated to around the time that Genesis would have been written (probably 6th or 7th century B.C.).
In the second we can clearly see that these assertions of what the sin of Sodom was - godlessness, pride, being prosperous, boasting about their son and so forth - are confused at best and are - in that they are significantly later than the Genesis account - likely to be attempts to link the fate of Sodom to the perceived wrongs and wicked activities of the moment by the authors of the other books: rather than being traditions handed down about the sin of Sodom.
Thus we can see that these later mentions are not themselves evidence of anything other than how later jewish religious leaders and writers understood the sin of Sodom as well as evidence for the fact that they themselves were not actually sure what the sin of Sodom was. This implies that among the jews there was a confused folk memory - as Carlo Ginzburg terms it - where well-known events in the past are the subject of continual reinterpretation due to their being an oral tradition and thus recounted and recounted causing them to change with each generation.
This also suggests that the Genesis account itself could have been reinterpreted many times before it was written down in its present form, but notably it is our major and oldest source. Thus unless we are to disregard the destruction of Sodom as being a historical: then we must look to Genesis as our principal guide as to what the sin of Sodom was.
As I have demonstrated above the only interpretation that really fits is if the crime of Sodom was not homosexuality per se, but rather homosexuality of non-jews towards jews. We can see in this the double standard that runs throughout the (Written) Torah when non-jews are generally considered to be inherently evil and prone to seeking to injure the interests, spiritual health and/or bodily health of the chosen and otherwise good Israelites.
In other words the Sodomites were extirpated by Yahweh because their menfolk desired (and probably seduced) Lot: an Israelite. Thus causing Lot to commit an abomination and then compounding their sin by seeking sexual congress with two angels in male human form: when they came to visit Lot to tell him to leave Sodom post haste.
References
(1) Gen. 19:1-9 (RSV)
(2) Ibid., 14:12 (RSV)
(3) Specifically Ibid., 18:16-33 (RSV)
(4) Ibid., 6:1-8 (RSV)
(5) Is. 1:10-17 (RSV)
(6) Ibid., 3:9 (RSV)
(7) Jer. 23:14 (RSV); that this refers to ungodliness see Ibid. 23:15 (RSV)
(8) Ezek. 16:49-50 (RSV)
(9) Wis. 19:13 (RSV)