25.8.07
Three Men...
One afternoon, we are told that three men come to Abraham, who's dozing under an oak tree at Mamre, near Hebron. Called angels, that is to say: messengers of God, the text in Genesis 18 claims that it was God himself that appeared there.
Was it God with other members of the Council of Heaven? Was it the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost? Was other messengers from above? No-one knows.
The narrative however fosters differences between Abraham and these "men". Indeed, Abraham is sleeping when the men are approaching. Then Abraham runs around to be a good host and offer a good meal to these travellers who are now still and silent.
The meal gets served. The men eat under the oak tree, Abraham waiting on them. Then one of the three men asks about Sarah. "She's in the tent". The man then reveals that he will be back and find Sarah with a son. Sarah overhears that and laughs to herself in her tent. An old woman with a baby? The messenger asks Abraham how come his wife laughed. Why is she doubting? Sarah comes out of the tent. A bit afraid, she pretends she did not laugh.
The Lord has all these people laughing, but he reiterates his promise: She will have a son.
Was it God with other members of the Council of Heaven? Was it the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost? Was other messengers from above? No-one knows.
The narrative however fosters differences between Abraham and these "men". Indeed, Abraham is sleeping when the men are approaching. Then Abraham runs around to be a good host and offer a good meal to these travellers who are now still and silent.
The meal gets served. The men eat under the oak tree, Abraham waiting on them. Then one of the three men asks about Sarah. "She's in the tent". The man then reveals that he will be back and find Sarah with a son. Sarah overhears that and laughs to herself in her tent. An old woman with a baby? The messenger asks Abraham how come his wife laughed. Why is she doubting? Sarah comes out of the tent. A bit afraid, she pretends she did not laugh.
The Lord has all these people laughing, but he reiterates his promise: She will have a son.
...Heading For Sodom
Abraham accompanies the celestial men from Mamre, near Hebron, to a place where all look down over the South end of the Dead Sea - presumed to be the site of Sodom, Gomorrah and Zoah.
Lot, Abraham's impetuous nephew who had parted from his uncle, lives there. That place has a reputation for being corrupt, so corrupt in fact that God has decided to investigate and punish it.
God remains at that place overlooking the South end of the Dead Sea with Abraham, while the two messengers proceed to Sodom to investigate the situation there.
Lot had chosen the lush Jordan area when he had parted from his uncle Abraham. He was young too. Abraham had agreed to settle in the barren land of Canaan. He was old. But God had chosen Abraham to be his blessed servant.
While the two messengers walk through the arid desert that afternoon, God soliloquizes: Should he tell Abraham about his plan to strike Sodom? In the ancient Near East, a servant of the god or king was also a friend, privy to his master's plan.
Besides, Abraham will be the father of a multitude of nations, so God decides to show him he's a righteous god, so that Abraham's descendants will remember this trait of his character.
- What about the innocent in Sodom? If 50 innocent people live in the city, will you destroy it? Surely you wouldn't do such a thing, destroying the innocent with the guilty, asks Abraham.
Some commentators believe Abraham is there interceding to save Sodom. I believe, as I have read in some books, that Abraham just wants to know if the Lord, which he calls: "the judge of the whole world" is a just god.
And Abraham's god replies: "If I find 50 innocent people in Sodom, I will spare the entire city for their sake."
Abraham, though conscious of the distance between himself and the Lord, dares to bargain with him.
- What if there are only 40 innocent there?
The Lord will spare the city if 40 innocent souls are found there.
Abraham bargains again, to the point that he knows only 10 innocent people will suffice to avert the destruction of the city. Obviously, Abraham realizes that if there was less than 10 innocent people in Sodom, the Lord would find ways to save them from the city before destroying it.
God has been revealed as just in the dialogue and he then leaves Abraham there. Sodom is going to be judged...
Lot, Abraham's impetuous nephew who had parted from his uncle, lives there. That place has a reputation for being corrupt, so corrupt in fact that God has decided to investigate and punish it.
God remains at that place overlooking the South end of the Dead Sea with Abraham, while the two messengers proceed to Sodom to investigate the situation there.
Lot had chosen the lush Jordan area when he had parted from his uncle Abraham. He was young too. Abraham had agreed to settle in the barren land of Canaan. He was old. But God had chosen Abraham to be his blessed servant.
While the two messengers walk through the arid desert that afternoon, God soliloquizes: Should he tell Abraham about his plan to strike Sodom? In the ancient Near East, a servant of the god or king was also a friend, privy to his master's plan.Besides, Abraham will be the father of a multitude of nations, so God decides to show him he's a righteous god, so that Abraham's descendants will remember this trait of his character.
- What about the innocent in Sodom? If 50 innocent people live in the city, will you destroy it? Surely you wouldn't do such a thing, destroying the innocent with the guilty, asks Abraham.
Some commentators believe Abraham is there interceding to save Sodom. I believe, as I have read in some books, that Abraham just wants to know if the Lord, which he calls: "the judge of the whole world" is a just god.
And Abraham's god replies: "If I find 50 innocent people in Sodom, I will spare the entire city for their sake."
Abraham, though conscious of the distance between himself and the Lord, dares to bargain with him.
- What if there are only 40 innocent there?
The Lord will spare the city if 40 innocent souls are found there.
Abraham bargains again, to the point that he knows only 10 innocent people will suffice to avert the destruction of the city. Obviously, Abraham realizes that if there was less than 10 innocent people in Sodom, the Lord would find ways to save them from the city before destroying it.
God has been revealed as just in the dialogue and he then leaves Abraham there. Sodom is going to be judged...
Brimstone and Fire
Two messengers from God get to Sodom. Lot, Abraham's nephew who resides there, is not granted with a promise of a son and is not granted the visit of God like Abraham was... He's told to flee the destruction of Sodom...
This well-known passage has been used to condemn homosexuals for centuries, with disastrous and hateful effects. But what does the text tell us? Was the place that gave the term "sodomites" was a hotbed of the so-called "crime against nature"?
On one side Christian publications claim that Sodom was wiped off because men had sex with other men there. So, God sent brimstone and fire and homosexuals will burn in hell like Sodom. On the other hand, progressive authors insist that there is no mention of sex acts in the text, that the usual interpretation is erroneous.
The Biblical account is that the messengers were sitting at the entrance of Sodom. Lot came to them and asked them to spend the night at his house. Being hospitable was much more than an act of kindness, it was assistance to people in danger. Traveling between cities was dangerous at night and so was not being under a roof at nighttime.
At Lot's house, the messengers washed their feet, ate their fill but then things got bad...
A mob surrounded the house. The menacing men - the whole town it seems - shouted out that the messengers had to come out of the house! The men wanted "to know" them...
Whatever the mob had in mind, their threats became serious enough for Lot to offer his two daughters to the men. It is hard for our modern minds to understand such a decision. Guests came first in those times and in order to protect his guests, a righteous man would sacrifice what belonged to him and daughters belonged to a father. Lot's offer got rejected. Now the men in the mob were not going to be told what do by a man who's not even a native of Sodom! They threatened Lot, telling him that his fate would be much worse than the messengers'.
Things had gone too far! The messengers "reached out, pulled Lot into the house, and bolted the door". Lot had failed to calm the mob down, the messengers took matters into their hands and somehow blinded the mob that became unable to find the door.
The messengers had to act now to remove Lot from the destruction that was coming... "For we are about to destroy this city completely. The outcry against this place is so great it has reached the Lord, and he has sent us to destroy it". Lot is told to get his relatives out the Sodom. His two sons-in-law wouldn't leave: Lot must be joking. He was not that keen on leaving either...
The morning breaks and Lot is still there, hesitating. The messengers become insistent and take Lot's hand, his wife's and two daughters' hands to lead them out of Sodom. When commanded to flee to the mountains, Lot's still reluctant and asks the messengers if he can go to some village instead. The messengers agree but he needs to leave now or he and his wife and daughters will disappear with the whole place. Sodom must be wiped off now and nothing will remain.
Lot is leaving. It is dawn. The sun is rising when he reaches Zoar. And then it all starts coming down. As the sun is rising over the horizon, sufurous fire rains over Sodom, the neighbouring town Gomorrah and the entire plain... Lot's wife, following behind him, turns around to see the utter destruction of the plain under fire and raining sulfur. The text claims she turned into a pillar of salt, with no explanation to this...
Abraham got up early and went back to the place where he had looked over the plain with God. "He looked out across the plain toward Sodom and Gomorrah and watched as columns of smoke rose from the cities like smoke from a furnace. But God had listened to Abraham's request and kept Lot safe..."
Just what happened is unknown to us. The lunar landscape of the place still inspires people to believe a terrible act of God occured there. The pillars of salt sometime slook like humans. Some have said an earthquake may have caused gases to erupt from the ground and they became ablaze, raining sulfur on the cities and the plain.
Did Abraham reflect of the plain's fate? What did these cities do that caused God's wrath? Yes, it has been said over the centuries that homosexuals were the cause of God's anger and of his destruction of the place. Yet the Law that forbade homosexual sex had not been given yet. It is true that homosexual sex would have been a degrading thing for these men who believed in owning women and procreating, notthing to do with our modern notions of romantic love between a man and a woman. Anal sex was also a pagan ritual, not to mention that it was -and still is in some parts of the world- an act perpetrated on enemies one wishes to humiliate.
So, perhaps homosexual sex was the issue in this passage. The men wanted "to know" the messengers and the verb "to know" is often a biblical euphemism for sex. Yet, it has been pointed out that the verb "to know" that connotes sex was not the verb used in this passage. I think it was not about sex but about violence. There is a world between a mob surrounding a house and looking to gang rape people and consensual adults, especially adults in committed and loving relationships.
At last, Sodom gets mentioned several times in the Bible, over 40 times in fact, all the way down to the New Testament. Yet, it never is question of "sex". The sin of Sodom is always "wickedness" and "inhospitality".
Those Christians who oppose gay rights and gay marriages should maybe pause and reflect on that...
This well-known passage has been used to condemn homosexuals for centuries, with disastrous and hateful effects. But what does the text tell us? Was the place that gave the term "sodomites" was a hotbed of the so-called "crime against nature"?
On one side Christian publications claim that Sodom was wiped off because men had sex with other men there. So, God sent brimstone and fire and homosexuals will burn in hell like Sodom. On the other hand, progressive authors insist that there is no mention of sex acts in the text, that the usual interpretation is erroneous.
The Biblical account is that the messengers were sitting at the entrance of Sodom. Lot came to them and asked them to spend the night at his house. Being hospitable was much more than an act of kindness, it was assistance to people in danger. Traveling between cities was dangerous at night and so was not being under a roof at nighttime.At Lot's house, the messengers washed their feet, ate their fill but then things got bad...
A mob surrounded the house. The menacing men - the whole town it seems - shouted out that the messengers had to come out of the house! The men wanted "to know" them...
Whatever the mob had in mind, their threats became serious enough for Lot to offer his two daughters to the men. It is hard for our modern minds to understand such a decision. Guests came first in those times and in order to protect his guests, a righteous man would sacrifice what belonged to him and daughters belonged to a father. Lot's offer got rejected. Now the men in the mob were not going to be told what do by a man who's not even a native of Sodom! They threatened Lot, telling him that his fate would be much worse than the messengers'.
Things had gone too far! The messengers "reached out, pulled Lot into the house, and bolted the door". Lot had failed to calm the mob down, the messengers took matters into their hands and somehow blinded the mob that became unable to find the door.
The messengers had to act now to remove Lot from the destruction that was coming... "For we are about to destroy this city completely. The outcry against this place is so great it has reached the Lord, and he has sent us to destroy it". Lot is told to get his relatives out the Sodom. His two sons-in-law wouldn't leave: Lot must be joking. He was not that keen on leaving either...
The morning breaks and Lot is still there, hesitating. The messengers become insistent and take Lot's hand, his wife's and two daughters' hands to lead them out of Sodom. When commanded to flee to the mountains, Lot's still reluctant and asks the messengers if he can go to some village instead. The messengers agree but he needs to leave now or he and his wife and daughters will disappear with the whole place. Sodom must be wiped off now and nothing will remain.
Lot is leaving. It is dawn. The sun is rising when he reaches Zoar. And then it all starts coming down. As the sun is rising over the horizon, sufurous fire rains over Sodom, the neighbouring town Gomorrah and the entire plain... Lot's wife, following behind him, turns around to see the utter destruction of the plain under fire and raining sulfur. The text claims she turned into a pillar of salt, with no explanation to this...Abraham got up early and went back to the place where he had looked over the plain with God. "He looked out across the plain toward Sodom and Gomorrah and watched as columns of smoke rose from the cities like smoke from a furnace. But God had listened to Abraham's request and kept Lot safe..."
Just what happened is unknown to us. The lunar landscape of the place still inspires people to believe a terrible act of God occured there. The pillars of salt sometime slook like humans. Some have said an earthquake may have caused gases to erupt from the ground and they became ablaze, raining sulfur on the cities and the plain.
Did Abraham reflect of the plain's fate? What did these cities do that caused God's wrath? Yes, it has been said over the centuries that homosexuals were the cause of God's anger and of his destruction of the place. Yet the Law that forbade homosexual sex had not been given yet. It is true that homosexual sex would have been a degrading thing for these men who believed in owning women and procreating, notthing to do with our modern notions of romantic love between a man and a woman. Anal sex was also a pagan ritual, not to mention that it was -and still is in some parts of the world- an act perpetrated on enemies one wishes to humiliate.
So, perhaps homosexual sex was the issue in this passage. The men wanted "to know" the messengers and the verb "to know" is often a biblical euphemism for sex. Yet, it has been pointed out that the verb "to know" that connotes sex was not the verb used in this passage. I think it was not about sex but about violence. There is a world between a mob surrounding a house and looking to gang rape people and consensual adults, especially adults in committed and loving relationships.
At last, Sodom gets mentioned several times in the Bible, over 40 times in fact, all the way down to the New Testament. Yet, it never is question of "sex". The sin of Sodom is always "wickedness" and "inhospitality".
Those Christians who oppose gay rights and gay marriages should maybe pause and reflect on that...
