Jim West and Joe Cathey have both commented on an Ethics Daily essay on “the sin of Sodom.” De La Torre argues that the “sin of Sodom” is primarily inhospitableness and abuse of strangers. Although Jim gives De La Torre props for recognizing the role of inhospitality in the Sodom traditions, Jim and Joe both scold De La Torre for de-emphasizing biblical condemnations of homosexuality in, for example, Leviticus and Romans.

De La Torre correctly notes that when Ezekiel 16, Amos 4, and Isaiah 1 compare Israel and/or Judah to Sodom and Gomorrah, they stress social injustices and oppression of the poor. What neither De La Torre, nor Jim, nor Joe does is to actually go to the text of Genesis 19 (in their blog posts, that is; they might do it in their studies) to examine just what’s going on there. I would like to turn my attention there now, and I ask you to realize that by doing so I am also turning my attention away from Ezekiel, Amos, Isaiah, and other elements of the Sodom and Gomorrah tradition. Here I focus only on Genesis 19. I’m much better with individual texts than with whole traditions.

De La Torre does briefly summarize the situation as follows:

According to the story in Genesis 19, Lot, Abraham’s nephew, received unknown visitors. Upon hearing of the strangers, the men of Sodom surrounded Lot’s house and banged on the door, crying out, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Send them out to us that we may abuse and rape them!”

But De La Torre then leaves Genesis 19 and goes to the other passages to try to establish what the “sin of Sodom” really is. Let’s stay with Genesis 19 a bit longer, though, and see what we can learn about the “sin of Sodom” in this particular passage.

Here is the actual biblical text from Genesis 19, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version:

⁴But 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; ⁵and they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.” ⁶Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him, ⁷and said, “I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. ⁸Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.” ⁹But they replied, “Stand back!” And they said, “This fellow came here as an alien, and he would play the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.” Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and came near the door to break it down.

Most commentators agree that “know” in v. 5 is a euphemism for sexual intercourse, in this case forced. A few interpreters disagree and argue against this understanding, but since “know” is clearly a sexual euphemism in v. 8, I do not find such arguments convincing. The mob wants to rape the newcomers.

Now there are a couple of very important things to notice about this plan. First, the mob, while utterly cruel, is entirely rational. This is about premeditated violence, not sexual gratification. In v. 9, where the NRSV quotes the mob as saying “we will deal worse with you than with them,” the Hebrew phrase נרע לך מהם is perhaps better translated “we will do you more harm than [we would have done to] them.” The mob’s verb of choice, רעע, can in some contexts be properly translated “to do evil” in a moral sense, but here, where it takes an indirect object (“you”), it has the sense “to inflict harm.” The mob explicitly states that its intention is to do harm. The mob wants to put the visitors “in their place,” and they have chosen a particularly violent and demeaning method by which to do so.

The mob’s intention to inflict male-on-male rape on Lot’s visitors has nothing to do with sexual desire or sexual gratification. There is no hint here of homosexuality in the modern sense of “sexual orientation.” The crime has nothing to do with preferring sex with males over sex with females. Claims that the “sin of Sodom” per Genesis 19 related to homosexual orientation run aground on two ridiculous presuppositions.

First, such claims require us to accept the idea that 100% of Sodom’s adult male population was homosexual by orientation. In modern studies, figures of anywhere from 3% to 10% are proposed for the fraction of adult US males who are homosexual by orientation, and when figures closer to 10% have been proposed, evangelical Christians have gone into a tizzy of objections that it can’t possibly be that high. Yet some of those very same people who object that the fraction of modern US adult males who are homosexual by orientation can’t possibly be as high as 10% are willing to believe a 100% figure for biblical Sodom. It is just too improbable to believe that 100% of Sodom’s male population preferred sex with males to sex with females. Even if the story is entirely fictional and the people of Sodom just literary characters, the story loses all verisimilitude if we push it to that extreme.

Second, claims that the “sin of Sodom” per Genesis 19 was male homosexuality require us to believe that either (a) the entire male population—every single male in Sodom—had seen the visitors and felt so irresistably attracted to both of them that they felt compelled to rape them in order to gratify their lust, or (b) all homosexual men are indiscriminately attracted to all other men. Supposition (b) is simply false, although it seems to be a common fear among straight men; common sense and your own experience should tell you that (unless you are very strange) you are not indiscriminately attracted to all members of whatever gender you find sexually attractive. This leaves us with supposition (a), which actually has a serious history within biblical studies. The influential German scholar Gerhard von Rad proposed precisely that the visitors’ angelic beauty inflamed the Sodomites’ homosexual lust. But supposition (a) falters in a couple of ways. First, it is unreasonable to assume that all the men of Sodom had even seen Lot’s visitors before assembling outside Lot’s door. How then could their lust have been inflamed? Second, it seems to me rather unlikely that all the men of Sodom would respond to their individual inflammations of sexual lust by banding together for a massive gang rape. I think it rather likely that they might instead fight amongst themselves to see who would “get” the object(s) of their desire.

There are just too many problems, both of logistics within the story world and verisimilitude with the world outside the text, to long sustain any supposition that the men of Sodom, gathered in a mob outside Lot’s door, were motivated by sexual desire. They chose sexual violence as the means of their cruelty, to be sure, but their motive was to assert social dominance over the newcomers. If you want to explore this further, I make these same arguments in more detail in my book Dynamics of Diselection (SBL, 2001).

The “sin of Sodom” per Genesis 19 has to do with using sexual cruelty and violence to oppress and demean outsiders. It has nothing to do with homosexuality in the modern sense of sexual desire oriented toward members of one’s own biological sex, and certainly has nothing to say about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of loving, committed, sexual relationships between members of the same biological sex. This does not, of course, mean that the Bible as a whole is necessarily silent on that topic. Both Jim and Joe pointed to relevant texts in Leviticus 18 and Romans 1, and those deserve discussion in any comprehensive attempt to form a “biblical perspective on homosexuality.” Genesis 19, though, depicts and condemns something rather different.

De La Torre concludes his Ethics Daily essay as follows:

The same xenophobia demonstrated by the Sodomites, who sought to physically rape the foreigners within their midst, is present today by those who economically rape the poor and the undocumented alien. Both in ancient Sodom and in the modern U.S., the residents in power desire to subordinate the stranger, the undocumented and the alien within their midst.

Rather than using this passage to condemn homosexuality, today’s conservative preachers would be more biblically sound if they used Genesis 19 to show how so-called First Nations economically treat the peoples of so-called Third Nations, which is not so different from what the Sodomites hoped to do with the aliens within their own midst.

While I agree that Genesis 19 is better suited to the uses De La Torre suggests than to discussions of homosexuality in the modern sense, I am not so sure that it’s the most effective text to set in opposition to economic exploitation, nor am I so sure that this is the most natural way to use this text for moral or ethical formation. There are plenty of prophetic texts in the Hebrew Bible that directly address issues of economic exploitation in such powerful and unequivocal terms that one doesn’t need to make hermeneutical leaps like drawing analogies between the Sodomites’ intended physical rape of Lot’s houseguests and modern “economic rape”—indeed, I don’t much like such metaphorical uses of “rape” at all both because of the “sexualization” of oppressions that are not inherently sexual and because of the potential trivialization of actual rape. If we are going to tap Genesis 19 as a negative moral or ethical example, there are plenty of ways in which people in our contemporary world use physical violence, including sexual violence, as a means of social dominance and control; moralizing preaching from Genesis 19 would be much more convincing directed toward these sorts of abuses than toward economic abuses metaphorized as “rape.”