#Genesis 19:1-11
The sin of Sodom.
It’s lack of hospitality. Not homosexuality - lack of hospitality. The story isn’t about sexual preference. It’s not a prooftext for the Bible or God being anti-gay. It’s lack of hospitality. Not homosexuality. It’s not about that. Okay?
The sin of Sodom.
It’s lack of hospitality. Not homosexuality - lack of hospitality. The story isn’t about sexual preference. It’s not a prooftext for the Bible or God being anti-gay. It’s lack of hospitality. Not homosexuality. It’s not about that. Okay?
Why will Lot be spared the fate of the rest of Sodom? Not because he’s related to Abraham - that doesn’t come up in this chapter at all. It’s because he, alone of everyone in the city - literally everyone, according to 19:4 - was hospitable to the passing visitors.
There’s no indication that the messengers even know who’s taken them in. They spare him because he was kind to them, because he tried to protect them, even at risk to his own life. The story doesn’t require Abraham to justify Lot’s rescue. It’s his hospitality that does it.
He does just what Abraham does: urges the travelers to stay with him, to bathe their feet, to eat the food he prepares especially for them. He absolutely refuses to allow them to spend the night in a public space. He is, like Abraham, the epitome of hospitality.
And of course he offers his own daughters to be raped in their place when the men of Sodom come knocking. Which isn’t a comment on the value of the female body. Quite the opposite: it’s clear that the protection of a daughter’s body was of extraordinarily high cultural value.
It’s that very fact that reveals the even higher value the text places on the social requirement of hospitality. Lot is willing to go to the most outrageous, painful, shameful, defiling lengths to ensure that the strangers who have come to stay with him are protected.
Lot doesn’t say “don’t do this thing, because homosexuality is wrong, here’s two women for you.” He says “don’t do this, because these men have come under the shelter of my roof.” It’s not even some hidden message: this is the surface reading of the text. It’s about hospitality.
It’s also a counter-lesson in how to treat the stranger, of course: don’t act like the Sodomites. Not only with the visitors, but with Lot also, whom they are willing to abuse precisely because he “came to sojourn” with them (19:9).
Remember that YHWH is destroying Sodom because a cry has reached him about it. Cries come to YHWH (especially in J) from the wronged: the enslaved Israelites, Abel’s blood, and here. In a city full of sinners, who cries out, wronged? It can only be strangers who pass through.
Exactly zero of the many biblical references to Sodom, all of which are clear that it was destroyed by YHWH, mention homosexuality as the reason. Ezekiel even comes out and says that their sin was not supporting the vulnerable.
(Which could be a broader way of understanding the sin of Sodom: they failed to care for the vulnerable, which is to say, by standard biblical categories, the poor, the widow, the orphan, and, as here, the stranger. Though we need not read Ezekiel into Genesis.)
I don’t actually know for sure when Sodom became a byword for homosexuality, or when this story began to be interpreted that way. I’m tempted to blame Augustine, but that’s just my usual knee-jerk guess. What’s clear to me is that that’s not what this story is about.
This story is about the men of Sodom violating the principles of hospitality in the worst possible way. If the visitors had been women, and the story were exactly the same, the moral would be exactly the same. The persons of strangers and guests are to be protected. Hospitality.
(I talked about this on an episode of Radiolab once, though I’ll be damned if I know how to find it.)
