Found in translation! (Pt III); how the lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah was twisted in more ways than one

There is nothing in the Torah, Old Testament, Talmud or New Testament that says the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because the men were all homosexual.

Remember the medical definition of homosexuality we are sticking to is extra-biblical, 19th Century, medical terminology for sexual orientation. It would be as alien a concept to a Bronze Age Northern Palestinian Jew as the endocrine system, string theory, the Theory of Gravity and/or a spherical, solar-orbiting Earth.

There is no ancient Hebrew word that translates as “homosexual” and, if you see the word “homosexual” anywhere in the Old Testament, you are using a translation done after 1945 that is over-reaching and has been tampered with by a translator adding his own spin and retro-fitted assumptions.

While it is very clear that, like many others, this Canaanite city had as part of their religion ritual sex acts by female and male prostitutes dedicated to Baal, Molech and Ashtoreth, it is highly unlikely that a Bronze Age city like Sodom had a majority homosexual population. In Bronze Age times, reproduction was key to any civilization surviving, which is why there was such an emphasis on making as many children as possible, even having multiple wives, even oppressing women in order to do so.

These were times when man lived entirely at the mercy of Nature and exposed to the risks of rampant human barbarism so there was safety in numbers.

(Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica)

The main source of industry was agriculture and most of it involved manual labour. You needed lots of people to do this. Many women died in childbirth and many children died in infancy. Something as simple as a broken bone could kill you. This was the age before antibiotics.

In addition, there was constant tribal strife and fighting. Entire cities used to get wiped out in those days. So any city would need a constant replenishment of the military force defending it, especially one in Canaan, with prized fertile green land that everyone wanted. The people in Sodom had to be breeding like rabbits to keep up with those attrition rates and manage to erect a populous, walled city. We also know from Genesis that Lot’s daughters were engaged to men of Sodom.

The Book of Jasher (referred to in the book of Samuel) was edited out of the Old Testament by the early Roman Church leaders, who picked which books would comprise the bible. However, Jasher remains in the Talmud and, if you were to get your hands on it, it goes into much more detail about Sodom. The people of Sodom and Gommorah could put the GOP to shame with their xenophobic hatred of strangers entering their city. They would use wayfarers for brutal sport!

Want to see just how bad?

8 And when a poor man came to their land they would give him silver and gold, and cause a proclamation in the whole city not to give him a morsel of bread to eat, and if the stranger should remain there some days, and die from hunger, not having been able to obtain a morsel of bread, then at his death all the people of the city would come and take their silver and gold which they had given to him.

9 And those that could recognize the silver or gold which they had given him took it back, and at his death they also stripped him of his garments, and they would fight about them, and he that prevailed over his neighbour took them.

10 They would after that carry him and bury him under some of the shrubs in the deserts; so they did all the days to any one that came to them and died in their land. (The Book of Jasher 19:8-10)

“Wicked – with their money, as it is written, and thine eye be wicked against thy poor brother…”

“What is written concerning them [the men of Sodom]… They said: Since there cometh forth bread out of [our] earth, and it hath the dust of gold, why should we suffer wayfarers, who come to us only to deplete our wealth? Come, let us abolish the practice of travelling in our land…”

“Now, they had beds upon which travellers slept. If he [the traveller] was too long, they shortened him [by lopping off his feet]; if too short, they stretched him out…”

“A certain maiden gave some bread to a poor man, [hiding it] in a pitcher. On the matter becoming known, they (the men of Sodom) daubed her with honey and placed her on the parapet of the wall, and the bees came and consumed her. Thus it is written, And the Lord said, the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah, because it is great.” (The Babylonian Talmud)

Ezekiel 16: 49, says that the sin of Sodom was greed, pride, fullness of bread and a wicked refusal to help the poor. According to the gospels, when neighbouring villages were rude and inhospitable to Jesus and his disciples and refused to welcome them with the hospitality expected, he compared them to Sodom in Matthew 10:11-15. Even the biblical passages that focus specifically on the attempted rape were more focused on the fact that the men were attempting to violate two celestial beings.

In the book of Jude, Verse 5 speaks about angels who forsook their natural realm, a reference to the story in Genesis about the “Sons of God” who had interspecies sex (angel with human) with the daughters of men. Right after, it mentions Sodom, “In like manner…” being guilty of the same for going after “strange flesh.”

The word translated “strange” is from (Greek: heteras, same root of heterosexual but in this case it means “other/different”) and flesh (Greek: sarkos). What is other worldly or different flesh to that of a human male, certainly not another human male!

The atrocity of Sodom was that they were so depraved that they would attempt to brutalize even an angelic/celestial being. Anyone presenting the story as if they were infatuated and were seeking to make consensual love to Lot’s visitors is ignoring the verse where they threatened to do worse to Lot than they planned to do to his visitors. That violent mob wanted to teach Lot a lesson and emasculate him! Remember, he was an immigrant in their city. And now he was letting strangers in! For the xenophobic, inhospitable people of Sodom, that was the last straw.

The doublet story in Judges 19 is basically the same thing with a twist, the Gibean rape mob got a substitute (a female concubine) to violate and they raped her to death.

Again, this is not some new-fangled, politically correct, millennial SJW exegesis. Dr Brownlee, (1917-1983), an internationally renowned expert on the Hebrew language and the Dead Sea Scrolls said it best: “The oppression of the stranger is the basic element of Genesis 19:1-9 [and] ‘sodomy’ in Genesis is basically oppression of the weak and helpless.”

Even the most conservative, anti-LGBT biblical scholars with academic cred would agree. Dr Mark Allan Powell, of the Trinity Lutheran Seminary, believes homosexual relations are a sin. However, he does not take the view that Genesis 19 is about homosexuality.

On page 23 of his book, Faithful Conversation—Christian Perspectives On Homosexuality,” he says, “…but with regard to current questions concerning homosexuality, these texts [Genesis 19 and Judges 19] have little to offer. The stories speak only of the sin of homosexual rape and say nothing at all about consensual relations between persons of the same sex.”

When anti-LGBT bible cherry-pickers misapply an account about gang rape to all gay people, it dehumanizes an entire group, thus making it easier to justify treating them as less deserving of their human rights. More importantly, the true meaning of the scripture is lost.

In 2018, the true lesson about Sodom’s crime has more spiritual/universal ethical relevance than ever! When visitors to our shores are raped, robbed and killed, that is the crime of Sodom. We are living in times when in the blink of an eye, our home, neighbourhood or entire country can be devastated by a natural disaster or civil unrest and war, leaving us in need of kindness from strangers.

Remember how some responded to opening up the country to a handful of Dominicans in need of shelter? That is the crime of Sodom.

Should climate change trigger an ocean current shift resulting in an ice age, many living in wealthy First World countries could be homeless wayfarers in desperate need of shelter and charity too. Would they want to be treated the way they currently treat the visitor, the refugee and the immigrant?

Up next, the Mosaic Law!

Editor’s Note: The fourth and final edition of this four-part series will be published on Saturday 24 February. Click HERE to read Part One of “Found In Translation!”

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