ViaCrucis
Confessional Lutheran
- Oct 2, 2011
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lol you guys are making no sense.
What I don't get is, I know what Sodom was famed for, but nobody really talks about Gommorah. Maybe it was its lesbian counterpart, or it could have been gonnorea.
Yeah...see in the biblical story the cities aren't destroyed because there were dudes who liked other dudes. The cities were destroyed because they were utterly and completely corrupt--how were they corrupt? Fortunately the Bible actually tells us:
"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. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it." - Ezekiel 16:49-50
According to the ancient rabbis they told a story about the corruption of Sodom, that when a hungry person came into the city and asked for food, they would be given a specially marked coin. When trying to use this coin to purchase food, the merchants would refuse to sell it, inevitably the person would end up starving to death in the streets, and the person could go and retrieve their coin. Because the rabbis understood the point of the story, they understood that the story of Sodom exists as the antithetical counterpart to the story of Abraham's generosity.
You see in the story that immediately precedes that of Sodom three angelic visitors come and pay Abraham a visit, and he welcomes them in and prepares a luxurious feast for them, they are honored guests and treated well. In the story of Sodom, however, angelic visitors come to Sodom, and how are they treated there?
For ancient people the focus of the story wasn't that the mob consisted of males who wanted to do naughty things with other males, the focus of the story was the mistreatment of strangers. The sexual proclivities of the mob really doesn't come up in ancient commentaries on the story, that's simply not how ancient people, Jews or Christians, read it.
And yet in modern times our particular cultural hangups and peculiarities has led us to think that this was the focus of the story, when it's really quite peripheral to the story. I would also point out that, in Hebrew, the word used for men is a more generic word speaking of human beings more generally, אַנְשֵׁ ('enowsh) rather than males specifically (זָכָר, zakar); and indeed speaks of the whole people acting in concert here by the word עַם ('am). This was a mob, most likely (at least) predominantly male, but the point of the text isn't to say these were males seeking males, but that a mob formed of the people of Sodom to act violently and violate the visitors. The point seems to be made, this wasn't a few bad eggs in Sodom, the entire city and its population was rotten to the core; whereas Abraham represents the hospitality of the people of God, the mob represents the inhospitality--even extremely violent and in a massively graphic way--of the people of Sodom.
Don't miss the forest for the trees, and don't imagine trees where none exist.
This episode has been read so wrongly for a long time, and that is wrong because there actually is a valuable lesson to be learned when the episode is read within the proper literary and cultural context in which it was written. The lesson isn't "gay people will be destroyed" or "gay people are super bad", the lesson is that a fundamental part of the identity of the people of God, the people who God would call and make a covenant with at Sinai, was that they were to be a people who were a light among the nations, where the foreigner would be welcome, the poor would be taken care of, and the hungry would be fed. As Christians we understand that these values are intrinsic to ourselves as the Church, even as we--in Jesus--have been called the children of Abraham, and that the promises made to ancient Israel point toward the realities of God's promises for His Church in Jesus, and what the Church is supposed to be for and in the world.
-CryptoLutheran
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