Lent Day 7: The Sin of Sodom

Scripture (2 Peter 2:4-21) can be found here.

"The Fall of Rebellious Angels"
Fran Floris (1544)
Cathedral of Antwerp.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Here's how it goes;

God sent the sinful angels to hell.

God saved Noah & family, but drowned the world.

God turned Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, because of.....

Here's where we have a problem. It's a big one. The writer of this (most scholars don't think it's Peter) has a thoroughly un-Jewish interpretation of the Sodom and Gomorrah story. This writer believes the cities were destroyed by God because of illicit sex. Looking at the Greek original, this passage uses words such as "dissolute ones," "wantonness," "flesh-following," "lust," and "defiling."

The words I don't see, and which I would expect to see, are more like "violent," "brutal," "marauding."

The writer of this passage apparently believes that the sin of Sodom is same-sex sexual activity. This is an incorrect interpretation: the sin of Sodom is inhospitality.

Hospitality is a primary moral and cultural absolute in the Biblical world. Hospitality is to be offered to all, including enemies. To violate the laws of hospitality is to upend a tradition so powerful, it rocks the foundations of society.

In the passage in question (Genesis 19), two messengers/ angels are traveling from a meeting with Sarah and Abraham to Sodom. In Sodom, Lot offers them hospitality, but the men of the city come to the door, demanding that Lot serve up the strangers so that they may "know" them. (Lot offers his two unmarried daughters to the mob. The story offers this as an example of hospitality to the strangers, an extraordinary attempt to protect his quests. Obviously, to you and me, it's abhorrent and shocking.) Ezekiel attributes the attempted rape by the mob to serious local character flaws, including the refusal of Sodom to help those in need. Travelers/ strangers/ aliens fall into this category of the needy.

This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. ~ Ezekiel 16:49

In the ancient world, rape was a tool of warfare, and it was an act of violence; if men raped other men, it was a particular form of humiliation (due to cultural judgements of active,"male" versus passive "female" roles in sexual intercourse). In other words, it was much as it is today. Rape--whether of a man or a woman-- is not a sexual crime. Rape is not an expression of sexuality. It's an expression of brutality. God condemned Sodom because of an attempted gang rape of God's messengers/ angels.

On its way to make a point about God's execution of justice, the writer of 2 Peter goes in the same direction as other New Testament writers, using Sodom as an example of aberrant sexual behavior.  Rape is aberrant behavior, alright-- but to make it about sexuality is to fully misunderstand the crime. In this case, it is to misunderstand exactly what God's judgement means. God judges those who do not help those in need, and travelers/ aliens/ refugees are mentioned over and over again in the bible, in exactly this context.