Ken Collins convincingly demonstrates in his article “The Rescue of Lot: Gay People and the Bible”, Ken Collins’ Web Site, that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is incorrectly interpreted as being evidence of God’s wrath against homosexuality, and is instead a story of God showing a merciful attitude towards the righteous (Lot and his people) when executing divine justice.
In this post I will paraphrase Collins’ arguments and represent his key points.
Summary of the story of the Rescue of Lot:
Lot is Abraham’s (the sole favored person above all people of the one true God) nephew and he took up residence in Sodom after traveling from abroad. Abraham, with his wife Sarah, is living in a tent outside the town when three men approach him. These turn out to be God and two angels. God tells Abraham about His plan to destroy Sodom and sends the angels to execute the order. Abraham pleads with God to spare the town, making the argument,
“Perhaps there be fifty righteous within the city; wilt Thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? That be far from Thee to do in this manner — to slay the righteous with the wicked.” Genesis 18:24-25, King James Bible.
There then follows a cascade of bargaining (what about if there were 45 righteous? 30? etc) ending with God agreeing that if 10 people can be found to be righteous in the town he will levy mercy for their sake. Next, the angels find Lot at the gate of the city, whereupon Lot offers them lodging and food, they decline, Lot insists, and he takes them into his home. An angry male mob of the townspeople then appear before Lot’s house demanding to “know” the two strangers. Here is where most anti-gay Christians interpret that the mob are true to form sodomites and not just Sodomites (people of Sodom), since in Hebrew, Greek, and subsequently, in English, to know means both to have sex with and to be acquainted with. Lot responds with a counter-offer of giving his two daughters to the crowd that they may leave his guests alone and respect the Jewish responsibility towards hospitality. This reaffirms the anti-gay theme to those who ascribe to it, since they see that Lot is so desperate to save himself from these gay gang-rapists that he will sacrifice his virgin daughters.
The angels then create an opportunity for Lot to escape by blinding the crowd and urge him to pack up and leave because they were sent there to destroy the city. Lot hesitates at first and the angles have to basically force him to leave, and Lot then takes up in the town of Zoar before ultimately hiding in the mountains. The angels then destroy the town, which is now populated only by the wicked and so God’s justice may be beyond doubt righteous.
Ignoring some other perplexing details of this story, like the fact that Lot’s daughters date-rape their father with wine due to lack of any other men in their mountain stead, Genesis 19:31-36, let’s focus on ascertaining whether God punished the Sodomites for being gay or whether there is another interpretation to this tale.
One main point that Collins emphasizes is that God had already decided that the town was sinful and deserving of being dealt with via mass destruction before the angels ever get there, “And the Lord said, ‘Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous…” Genesis 18:20. Again in Genesis 19:13, after the angles urge Lot to take his people and escape, we see that it is not the crowd’s demonstration of rapacious homosexual lust that exacts God’s judgement but rather an already foretold “cry”, a vague testimony of the Sodomites sin by an undisclosed source: “For we will destroy this place, because the cry of them has waxed great before the face of the Lord, and the Lord hath sent us to destroy it.”
Collins cites another Bible-contradiction of the homosexual-sin theory via James 1:13-14, which states that no temptation to do evil comes from God. And seeing as how the angels first insist on spending the night in the street out in the open, and seeing as how they are acting in accordance with God’s justice, it doesn’t follow that provoking the supposed homosexual sinfulness of these men by staying out in public would be in God’s plan. Though I don’t see this point as being as strong as Collins’ other arguments, it is definitely interesting to note. What is more important is focusing on the fact that the angels want to stay in the street, which for Collins supports the view that the angels understand that the citizens of Sodom are concerned with outsider intrigue rather than sexual crimes.
Next Collins cites the contradiction that God seems to be judging the Sodomites for a crime they have yet to commit (raping Lot and his guests) while saying nothing of Lot’s crime of offering his two daughters to appease the mob’s sexual appetite. This contradiction is solved if we simply come to realize that there is no direct evidence that this story is about homosexual sin and also that Lot doesn’t necessarily offer his daughters up as sexual victims. Let’s look at 19:9 “Let me, I pray you, bring [the daughters] out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes.” Combined with the fact that Lot calls the men outside his door his “brethren” we can reasonably conclude that Lot does not feel threatened here by homosexual rape.
Collins brings to light the fact that during this time in the Bible it was common for towns to be engaged in tense, often violent, conflict with each other in local warfare and so it was natural that an angry crowd rose up in response to an outsider, Lot, bringing in two complete strange men into his home after dark, which is when this scene takes place. Thus, Lot’s offering of this daughters is not a contradictory prostitution but rather a hostage bargaining chip move in the negotiation of this tense situation. Again, Lot says, “do ye to them as is good in your eyes” and not something like, “have your way with them” which we might expect him to say in the case of sexual violence being the concern.
Finally, Collins illuminates the most likely source of Sodom’s and Gomorrah’s sinful status: pagan cult (heterosexual) prostitution. It was well known that most of the Canaanites were pagan worshipers of fertility and nature deities. From the website That the World May Know we can see that these pagans worshiped an all powerful Baal, who commanded storms, and along with his mistress/mother, Asherah, of the Asherah devotion poles noted in places like 2 Kings 21:7, were thought to be responsible for the land’s great fertility. Part of this worship was cult temple prostitution whereby the head priest engaged in ritualistic (heterosexual) orgies with his female priestesses in an act of magical union with the perceived fertility of the land. Thus these devotees of Baal and Asherah are prostituting themselves for the gain of bountiful harvests for their cities.
In conclusion, we see that the Genesis story of the Rescue of Lot is a) a testimony of God’s mercy towards the righteous and b) evidence of His wrath against pagan (again, HETEROSEXUAL) sex-cult practices and not, as commonly believed, proof of his stance on homosexual sin.
Also, I think Evil knew all along that his pager was her demise. And that, even these pagans were sinful in their turn.
elquetienelaspatas 