On the Eve of Destruction

The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah symbolize wickedness throughout the Bible. But I would bet if you asked most people what sin the Sodomites were guilty of, they would say “homosexuality”. After all, the tale of Sodom in Gen 19 is the origin for the term “sodomy”. However the Bible rarely spells out the great sin that made Sodom and Gomorrah so deserving of their destruction.

Prophets from Moses to Ezekiel used Sodom and Gomorrah as a cautionary tale for the fate that awaits their contemporaries if they continue their sinful ways. The prophets weren’t always very specific as to what kinds of sin though. Ezekiel (16:49-50) is one of the few to identify the sins of arrogance and lack of charity. The gospels (Matt 10:9-15; Lk 10:8-12) suggest lack of hospitality was the primary sin.

Chapter 19 of Genesis breaks down into three parts: (1) the reception of the two messengers by Lot and the people of Sodom (vv. 1-11), (2) the rescue of Lot’s family and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (vv. 12-29), and (3) Lot and his daughters (vv. 30-38).

A Tale of Two Cities

Only the first unit provides an example of why the citizens of Sodom were considered the epitome of wickedness. Two messengers (usually translated as “angels”) arrive and are greeted with hospitality by Lot. After sunset the locals surround the house and demand Lot release the strangers so they can be gang-raped. Lot offers the mob his virgin daughters as a substitute and is rejected. Before Lot’s house is stormed, the messengers strike the crowd blind and thus ends the unit.

A modern reader must wonder if the Bible truly considered Lot the only righteous man in Sodom. Knowing that the law of hospitality requires a host to put his guests before his own self-interest explains things somewhat but the thought that a father could treat his daughters as pieces of property offends our conscience.

The narrative sounds suspiciously similar to that found in Judges 19 (especially vv. 16-26). A certain Levite from the hill country of Ephraim had an argument with his concubine, who then ran away to her father in Bethlehem. After sweet-talking his wife into returning with him, the Levite and concubine are on their way home when they stop at Gibeah and plan to spend the night in the town square.

An old man returning from his work in the fields chats them up and, like the Levite, he is originally from Ephraim. He won’t hear of the visitors spending the night in the town square and invites them to his home. The men of the city surround the house, asking for the Levite in order to gang-rape him. The old man offers both his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine and the townsfolk reject the offer.

So far, this is almost exactly like Lot’s story. But there are no angels here. The Levite grabs his concubine and tosses her outside where the men of Gibeah proceed to rape and abuse her all night long. She collapses at the threshold to the old man’s house.

In the morning, the Levite leaves the house and almost trips on his concubine lying on the threshold. He puts her on his donkey and sets out for home. Upon his arrival he chops up her body into twelve pieces and sends them out via servants to the twelve tribes of Israel as a call to battle. (Saul later does the same with a yoke of oxen in 1 Sam 11:7.)

Scripture scholars believe the Gibeah story was patterned on the Sodom narrative. References to Bethlehem (home of David) and Gibeah (home of Saul) and logical inconsistencies in the narrative strongly suggest the incident was created or exaggerated as anti-Saul polemic.

Comparing the tales of Sodom and Gibeah, the great sin in both cases is an unbelievable violation of the law of hospitality. The purpose of hospitality as practiced in the ANE is to take a potential threat posed by a stranger and at least temporarily neutralize that threat. In neither case did a citizen of the town offer hospitality, but it fell to a resident alien (Lot and the old man from Ephraim) even if it wasn’t his place to do so. Outraged that a resident alien is harboring other aliens, the town’s citizens demand the newcomer in order to assert their dominance.

The sexual orientation of its citizens was no more the great sin of Sodom than it was the great sin of Gibeah. No one would argue that what the mob did to the Levite’s concubine was consensual. It was rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, not sex.

Rescue and Destruction

The story moves along quite briskly now. The messengers inform Lot that the city will be destroyed and tell him to leave with his family. Lot’s virgin daughters were apparently betrothed, meaning they were married but had not yet come to live with their husbands. Lot goes to the houses of his sons-in-law but is unable to convince them of the danger.

As daybreak approaches, the messengers tell Lot to leave with his wife and daughters but Lot dawdles. The messengers grab Lot and his family by the hand and lead them outside the city. They are told, “Head for the hills!” but Lot doesn’t think he’ll make it in time. He asks the messengers if he can take refuge in a small town nearby and is informed the town will be spared.

Once Lot and his family arrive at the little town of Zoar (= “little” in Hebrew), fire and brimstone rain down on Sodom and Gomorrah and the rest of the plain of Jordan. Unfortunately, Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. Both the Zoar diversion and the fate of Mrs. Lot appear to be etiological tales, one explaining how the town of Zoar got its name the other providing a folkloric origin story to the weird salt formations that appear in the area around the Dead Sea.

The Last Man on Earth

Lot was afraid to stay in Zoar (maybe the locals considered him a jinx?) so he and his daughters finally head for the hills and settle in a cave. His daughters despair of finding a man, so they take turns getting their father drunk so he can impregnate them. Their sons will become the ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites.

Lot and his Daughters (Pieter Jozef Verhaghen, before 1811). The tableau of Lot seduced by his two nubile daughters has inspired artists for centuries, if for nothing else than it gave them an excuse to paint nudes. This is one of the tamer selections.

The purpose of the tale is apparently to provide a disreputable origin story for rival nations to the Israelites. As it currently stands, though, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Even if Zoar wasn’t an option, Lot certainly could have found a better dwelling than a cave. Maybe Abraham would have helped him out. And why would Lot’s daughters have given up on the idea of finding new husbands?

But if the Zoar origin story was interpolated into the Sodom destruction narrative, it makes more sense. Recall the messengers had told Lot to take his family and flee to the hills. Maybe they did so in the original version of the tale and sought shelter in a cave. That would explain why, seeing the wholesale destruction of the entire plain before them, Lot’s daughters thought their father might be the last man on earth. The story of a patriarch getting drunk and naked after a major disaster resonates with that of Noah after the flood.

The necessity to get Lot drunk on consecutive nights implies that Lot would not have otherwise consented to his daughters’ plan. Therefore, the sex was not consensual for Lot. In other words, his daughters raped him. Perhaps his daughters were getting revenge on their father for offering to hand them over to be raped by the mob outside his door in Sodom.

Lot would have done well to follow the Jewish version of the Golden Rule: “Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man.”

Split Decision

Originally I wasn’t planning on discussing chapter 13 of Genesis because it didn’t seem that significant. To briefly recount the passage, disagreements arise between herdsmen for Abram and those for his nephew Lot. Abram proposes that they separate from one another and offers Lot first choice. Lot chooses the well-watered Jordan valley and they part amicably.

My initial impression was that the episode merely serves to explain how Abram’s nephew found himself in the city of Sodom; this point is key to Abram’s rescue of Lot in the following chapter. The passage has been sermonized as contrasting the generosity of Abram vs. the selfishness of Lot or as an example in conflict resolution. But a closer reading of the text indicates that this is a critical moment in Abram’s life.

A Little About Lot

We first encounter Lot in the genealogy of Terah in Gen 11:27-32 where Lot is mentioned as the son of Haran, who then dies. When Terah leaves Ur, he takes his son Abram and his orphaned grandson Lot with him and they settle in Haran. Abram later leaves Haran for Canaan and brings his nephew Lot along (12:4-5). We don’t hear of Lot again until he is mentioned going up from Egypt with Abram to the Negeb (desert region in southern Canaan) in 13:1.

The implication from all this is that Abram has adopted Lot as his heir. After all, we were told early on in 11:30 that Abram’s wife, Sarai, is barren. YHWH also told Abram in 12:2 that he would become a blessing and that the land of Canaan would be given to his descendants (12:7). Not having any children of his own, Abram must have assumed that his descendants would be through Lot, unless by some chance Sarai was to conceive or Abram took another wife.

This has two important implications. First, Abram’s welfare was key to fulfilling the promise. As long as he was alive, he could still father a child (through Sarai or someone else). Second, Lot was his backup plan. If something were to happen to Abram or he could not father a child of his own, as his heir Lot would inherit the land of Canaan and fulfil the promise of being a great nation.

From this perspective, Sarai’s welfare was secondary. Knowing this helps us understand Abram’s motivations in Egypt in passing off Sarai as his sister in 12:10-20. In order to fulfill the promise, Abram needed to preserve his own life at all costs. If that meant selling off Sarai to Pharaoh, then so be it. Little did Abram realize at the time that Sarai was absolutely necessary to the promise. His mistaken actions actually put the promise at risk and YHWH had to bail him out by causing a plague in Egypt that led to Pharaoh expelling Abram and his people.

Choice of Lot

Gen 13 literally returns Abram to where he was before his excursion into Egypt. In 12:8 he pitched his tent in the hill country between Bethel and Ai and then travelled by stages – presumably following the flocks as they grazed – down to the Negeb. When famine hit the region, Abram continue moving on to Egypt. In 13:1-3 this migration is reversed. Abram went up from Egypt to the Negeb and then travelled by stages back to “the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had formerly stood.”

Lot makes his choice (artist unknown)

By this point, the flocks and herds owned by Abram and Lot were too numerous for the land to support and quarrels developed. Instead of remaining together and over-grazing the land, Abram proposes they go their separate ways and thereby utilize the resources of the entire land. As the elder, Abram could have selected the best portion for himself, but instead he allows Lot to choose and Abram will take what remains. Lot chooses the well-watered plain of Jordan and sets out eastward, leaving Abram to settle in the land of Canaan.

As mentioned above, I never saw this passage as all that significant. But biblical scholar Larry Helyer has studied the passage in detail and sees implications in Lot’s choice for his status as Abram’s heir.

Helyer [1] points out that Bethel sits atop the ridge of hills that runs through central Canaan. It also sat between the northern pasturage centered around Shechem and the southern pasturage centered around Hebron and Beesheba. The stories in the Jacob cycle are located on the northern pasturage and those in the Abraham cycle are mostly associated with places set in the southern pasturage.

According to Helyer, Abram is presenting Lot with a choice of northern or southern pasturage. You can visualize the two of them standing on the ridge overlooking the land with Abram saying, “If you prefer the left, I’ll go to the right; if you prefer the right, I’ll go to the left.” If they are facing west, the “left” is the southern pasturage and the “right” is the northern pasturage.

Abram provides a binary choice that would keep the land “in the family”, but Lot thinks outside the box. Lot looks behind them and sees how well-watered is the whole “kikkar of the Jordan”. Usually translated as “plain of the Jordan,” kikkar means something round and flat. It could be referring to a circular oasis, a flat plain, or an area bounded by a loop of the Jordan. Whatever the “Jordan Disk” was, it must have been a sight to behold. The narrator compares it favorably to both YHWH’s garden in Eden and Egypt.

Legal Separation

Lot leaves Abram and heads east, finally pitching his tents near Sodom, one of the cities of the Jordan Disk. The narrator does some foreshadowing here of events in Gen 19, informing us that YHWH has yet to destroy Sodom and the other cities of the Disk because of their great wickedness. The reader would be left to wonder what will befall Lot when his new home is destroyed, but Abram would be unsettled for a completely different reason.

From Abram’s perspective, Lot’s choice meant his heir would be leaving the promised land of Canaan. The Jordan River marks the eastern boundary of Canaan. By choosing to live among the cities of the Disk, on the eastern bank of the Jordan (the Transjordan), Lot has removed himself outside the boundaries of Canaan; he will no longer have a share in the promised land. He won't be inheriting the family business.

YHWH tries to cheer up Abram by confirming (13:14-17) that all the land he can see will indeed be given to his descendants. But the problem still remains that Abram has no descendants of his own. That particular plotline is still unresolved and will continue to work its way through the rest of Abraham’s story.

[1] “Abraham’s Eight Crises,” Bible Review, Vol. 11, No. 5 (October 1995), pp. 20-27, 44.