Bible Story Time 1: Lot, Sodom and Gomorrah, Incest
Every once in a while, I try to remember the strangest Bible verses. So here’s part 1 of a series, as if I haven’t started and abandoned a dozen other series on KingChill.
0. Bible Story Time 1: Sodomy vs. Sex With Parents
Many people have confidently explained to me the etymology of “sodomy.” Few have actually looked it up. While “Sodomy Etymology” could be a decent metal band name, the whole story of Lot (Lut) is one that makes you really wonder why people treat the Bible like a fantastic book with great morals.
For me, the Bible often reads like a vindictive and hypocritical G-d, and leaves me asking, “Why????” Just really focused on some details we don’t need, and no mention of details I really want to know.
I’m not going to copy-paste the whole story here, as a low-key reminder that your version of a Biblical story depends on which version you’re reading. I’ll just cover the weird. Go read it in full if you care to, or use this as your “well actually, it’s even weirder than that” cheat sheet for the next time someone brings it up.
Note: Before writing this, I always said “Lod,” like the city, not “Lot,” so this was a real learning experience.
1. What were Sodom and Gomorrah guilty of?
In the Book of Genesis, the setup is simple: G-d decides these cities are wicked and it’s time to wipe them off the map. Apparently G-d learned nothing from Noah and the whole flood situation thousands of years prior, so G-d gets vengeful and decides to delete more code rather than fix it. [The aminals aren’t mentioned this time.]
Two divine messengers show up and tell Lot to evacuate with his family, which includes two daughters and their fiancés. Then things escalate quickly. The local men surround the house and demand to “know” the visitors.
“Knowing” someone is the whole crux of the story. Because if “know” meant just getting acquainted, then it’s weird, but congratulations, G-d is more isolationist than Bhutan. That’s not how most inrepret know.
No no, we don’t know “know” like they knew “know.”
This “know” is usually understood as a threat of sexual assault. A mob surrounds the house and demands to gang rape the visitors. I wish I were exaggerating, but this is what we’ve been casually summarizing for children for centuries.
If you went to Jewish, Christian, or Muslim school, you were taught this story, and there’s a good chance you don’t really remember it. That’s the trauma of an adult calmly explaining to a room full of children that there weren’t just one, but two cities where mobs tried to gang rape strangers.
Maybe the divine messengers were just incredibly attractive. You should have seen their ankles!
I think we can all agree that forming a mob to gang rape two visitors is irredeemable. Old-school Bible has a very different baseline for violence. It’s closer to A Clockwork Orange than ‘stone the gays’ Sunday school. Christians can jump to Book of Ezekiel 16:49, where suddenly Sodom’s sins are described as:
arrogance
excess wealth
ignoring the poor
That’s that version of Christianity where they’re really all about income inequality and treating poor with respect. Naturally, that’s the forgotton version of religion such that modern cities are doing mostly the opposite.
Whether Sodom was defined by violent sexual abuse or by social corruption and inequality depends heavily on which text, tradition, or interpretation you’re leaning on. Choose your adventure. Personally, it’s a lot easier to digest this as a story about violence and power than as one about non-consensual relationships. I’d argue we’d all be better off if we treated corruption like a smite-worthy offense.
Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me
2. “Well actually” on sodomy etymology
Yes, “sodomy” comes from Sodom. That part is true.
But there is no clear mention of anal or oral sex in Genesis. As far as I know, not in the Bible verses, nor in the prog-rock band Genesis catalog either. The word “know” is the linchpin, doing the actual lifting.
Centuries after the OG Bible, when religious authorities became very focused on procreation, the term evolved through legal and theological interpretation to mean “non-procreative sex,” including anal and oral sex, maybe even masturbation depending on how not-fun your church is.
The original text does not sit there and say, “Here is a clean definition of this specific consensual act.” It gives you a chaotic scene of a mob threatening violence... or cat calling some ordinary-looking male travelers. Let’s just use modern morals and assume “sodomy” should have been a lesson in consent, not a lesson in ‘back door sexy time.’
Shockingly difficult to get Chat GPT to depict a Bible scene
3. But wait… there’s more
Lot escapes with his two daughters. Their fiancés don’t take the warning seriously and stay behind for… reasons. Maybe they don’t trust two random messengers insisting their town is wicked and will be destroyed. Maybe they don’t mind getting to “know” their neighbors. Maybe they needed a break from their hysterical wives [‘Fellas, am I right???’]
Then there’s the one detail you remember: Lot's wife looks back and turns into salt. Congrats on remembering.
You probably don’t remember Lot’s wife’s name, because she tends to not have one. She’s like “the waitress.” Some Jews retroactively gave her the name Ado or Edith (I was taught Edith).
Lot and his daughters end up hiding in a cave. The daughters decide that the entire male population of Earth has been wiped out. Maybe the messengers should have clarified: two cities, not Noah’s Arc round 2. Maybe the messengers didn’t get the fine print. It’s all a bizarre blunder.
So the daughters get their father drunk and sleep with him. And while you want more details on literally every other part of this story, this is where the Bible suddenly becomes very clear: twice, one per night.
The older daughter goes first. The younger repeats the process the next night. Dad then presumably says “fool me a third time and shame on me.”
It’s a plotline where even low budget porn producers would go, “Tone it down.”
The two daughters produce incestious sons: Moab and Ben-Ammi. Those sons go on to become the ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites. Those are two groups that, in later texts, mostly exist to be people we don’t like (because they fight Israelites, and Israel/Jews/Israelites/Israelis are the good guys).
Yes, Lod escaped two wicked cities, only to lose his wife, get raped by his daughters, and produce two new wicked dynasties. I’m really not sure that losing your home, your neighbors, your wife, and then getting raped by your daughters twice in a cave to produce two future rival nations counts as a win. It’s certainly a story worth telling.
“Lot's Wife” pillar of salt, Mount Sodom, Israel. Def not just a hunk of
4. What even is the moral?
Again, this whole story gets stranger as society gets really, really obsessed with procreation, and spiteful towards gay men living their best lives. Culture adopts the “every sperm is sacred” mentality, rejecting lots of sexy time as wicked, but, let me be clear: not all of it. They just don’t like anal sex, like the kind that wrestlers were having between matches. CEOs getting it under a desk goes on. And, as I’ve pointed out in the past, lesbians got a pass in the Talmud as an occasional treat (Read: “To Those Obsessed With Talmud”). Then there’s the Catholic priest tradition that went on til very recent times and practices in the Middle East that you don’t want to ask your army veteran friends who served in Afghan about.
Since the “non-procreative sex” interpretation comes much later, what even is the takeaway here?
Don’t look back in anger? Like the Oasis song?
Don’t form violent, gang rape mobs? Or if you do, make sure the tourists aren’t secretly divine messengers?
Don’t ignore the poor?
Don’t jump to the conclusion that all men are extinct, then plot with your sister to get your dad drunk and reproduce with him, even though you strangely didn’t do it with your fiancés prior?
I don’t know. And I really don’t know, if you know what I mean. Don’t expect a clean moral from a story that ends with drunk incest in a cave. [If I’m being honest, all Judeo/Christian/Islamic stories are about blind faith. I don’t care to argue with Redditors about their interpretations, since I’m taught to question text and others are taught never to question.]
If I had to extract something usable, it would be: extreme violence and social collapse don’t produce better people. They produce more trauma and worse decisions. The cycle of violence is inescapable! Or, maybe, education works better than smiting, but our hero, G-d, strangely never tries to directly educate our villains, all of humanity.
5. Thoughts?
So what do you think? Is the actual story weirder than the fake etymologies people confidently repeat?
Comment below your interpretations of the story, corrections to my article, your takeaway, or your favorite wild Bible stories. Or comment if you’re inspired to make a movie out of this, knowing it’s going to be R Rated at a minimum.
