The Bible: The Sins of Sodom

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For many centuries, interpreters of the Old Testament have thought that the "wickedness" for which God destroyed Sodom with fire and brimstone was homosexuality. That interpretation is mistaken, says Anglican Historian Hugh Ross Williamson in the current issue of Britain's Clergy Review.

The evidence for the old assumption is Genesis 19, which relates how inhabitants of Sodom surrounded Lot's house after he had been secretly visited by two angels. "Where are the men which came in to thee this night?" they asked. "Bring them out unto us, that we may know them." Beginning with rabbinical interpreters in the 2nd century B.C., scholars have assumed that "know" here implied carnal knowledge. Apart from what it may mean in the story of Lot, Williamson argues, the Hebrew word for "know" (yadoa) clearly has a sexual connotation in only ten out of 943 instances in the Old Testament, and then it refers to heterosexual relations. "Plain logic," he says, "demands the ordinary sense of the citizens wishing 'to know' who are the strangers who come into the city under the cover of darkness." Moreover, Williamson points out, Sodom is never referred to in the Biblical passages in which homosexuality is condemned.

According to Williamson, the Bible points out other sins that led to Sodom's destruction, such as idolatry and refusal to "strengthen the hand of the poor and needy" (Ezekiel 16:49). "The correct understanding of Sodom," he says, "is of a proud, self-satisfied, materialist society, acting with callous inhospitality to man and at the same time rejecting the true worship of God."