Finally! After all these stories in Genesis that seem odd to call queer, we have gotten to the familiar story of Lot and Sodom. If you have spent more than a year or two in the church, you know this story. It has all the things we love in an Old Testament narrative: a messed up main character who should have done better, angels, sex, mobs, fire, and death.
If you are not familiar with the story, let me summarize the long story a bit. When Abram and Sarah were called to go to the promised land, they brought Abram’s relative Lot along with them. After a disagreement they thought it best to part ways peacefully. Both men struggled to follow God perfectly. We catch up to the story as Lot is living in the “wicked” city of Sodom, near Abram. Two male presenting angels have finished a scene with Abram and have come through Sodom. Lot is sitting at the town gate and begs them not spend the night in town square, but in his house, insisting that he was their servant. It’s clear that Lot was their only offer for safe housing that night.
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, so 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. Look, 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.” But 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. But the men inside reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them, and shut the door. And they struck with blindness the men who were at the door of the house, both small and great, so that they were unable to find the door.
There’s a short section about Lot convincing his family to leave town, then we see God destroy both Sodom and Gomorrah with fire, and even turn Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for looking back on the carnage.
What are we to make of this story?
Well good question. This blog is dedicated to queer issues, but before we get to those, let’s acknowledge the existence of a bigger issue in the text. Lot willingly offers his two virgin daughters to a crowd of angry men ready to rape. That’s not okay. The man of God we are supposed to respect in this story treats his daughters like property and shows no remorse when his wife dies. This is wrong regardless of the time period.
Out of everything going on here, many modern conservative Christians pull one point from this story: someone in the story wanted to have gay sex, so God destroyed two cities out of pure anger for that, despite not touching any of the cities with gay relations later in the Bible. If you can phrase the conservative view better, please be my guest in the comment section. I think theres much more going on in this story though. Let’s look at how the Bible itself interprets the story.
Why the Bible says this happened:
The passage tells us that God sent the angels “to destroy this place, because the outcry against its people has become great before the, Lord”. The angels were clear on their mission before they even got into town. Do you think word might have gotten around? Do you think that the ancient patriarchal systems obsessed with control might have caused the men of the city to respond to the destruction of their home with violent, domineering sex? Seems likely to me.
If you would rather hear an answer directly from what the Jews believed to be God’s mouth, God is quoted in Ezekiel 16 to say “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not help the poor and needy.” God doesn’t mention homosexuality anywhere in here. God mentions that the city of much treated the foreign visitors as rape-able slaves and property. They had “absolute control” over these angels in their minds, and needed to show them who was the boss physically. On top of that, their most glaring offense, more so than not housing angels, was neglecting the poor and needy. God destroyed the city, in God’s own words, because they did not take care of the poor, needy, and outsider.
Even Jesus catches this same thread as he tells his disciples that cities who kick them out will be dealt with like Sodom. It’s the same thread of an anti hospitality, “Sodom first” mind set Jesus was talking about. The sin of Sodom is not that God might have created two men to be sexually attracted to each other, the sin of Sodom is clearly explained multiple times in the text to be a domineering, power hungry selfishness.
In fact, in the 23 references to the Sodom event in the text, only one even mentions sex. Thousands of years after the event, and after 20 other biblical references to it, Jude references sexual immorality as the reason for Sodom’s destruction. Literal translations say that they were destroyed for pursuing “other flesh.” Flesh that wasn’t their own…. Jude thinks Sodom was destroyed for the men of the town wanting sex with angels, not with men. Men would have been “same” flesh, would it not?
At the end of the day, it’s clear that the Bible (and the words of Jesus and the words attributed to God), don’t view Sodom and Gomorrah as a “gay” event. And neither does Lot. Had the gang at his door been homosexual, he wouldn’t have offered two women to them. We have much to learn about queer sexuality in the Bible, but quite frankly all this story can teach us about it, is that Biblical authors don’t take kindly to rape of angels. Perhaps we shouldn’t take kindly to the rape of our holy Scripture with the projection of conservative ideals onto ancient stories.
In My Bible 