Undoing Biblical Homophobia - Part 1 (Draft)

Preface/Introduction

Homosexuality has long problematic within Christian cultures. The reasons for this are complex and are tied up in sociological and religious reasoning having to do with competing cultural norms and understandings of “God’s plan.” The belief systems that have arisen have been self-perpetuating and are accepted because “God said so” or rejected because they just don’t seem right and while the root causes of the “homosexuality problem” are discussed in scholarly tracts, rarely are they considered in the vernacular. This reading guide is an attempt to overcome this shortcoming.

Colby Martin provided an excellent overview of the issue of Biblical support for homophobia in his book, “Unclobber: Rethinking Our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality.” David P. Gushee does similar work in, “Changing Our Mind.” Both of these works are anecdotal and told from an evangelical practitioner’s viewpoint. Martin’s recent edition includes a Bible Study but it is a Bible Study for his book, not for the relevant Biblical text. This present work differs as it is meant to function as a Bible study reader’s guide. It is based on scholarly research but delivered in an easily accessible style and is meant for the general reader.

The focus of this present guide is Genesis Chapters 18 and 19, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. This text, along with Leviticus 18 and 20, which will be covered in a subsequent volume, provide the first and most easily understood underpinnings of Biblically based homophobia. After a brief description of the problem as found in Genesis 19, the text will be read from story’s actual beginning of the story in Genesis 18 and read the story thorough to its end in Chapter 19. The guide will conclude with support for the reasoning expressed in this guide found in other parts of the Bible - both the Old and New Testaments.

Finding the Problem - Chapter 19

Before unraveling the problem of homophobia based on the Story of Sodom and Gomorrah, it is first necessary to identify the problem. To do this, one must begin by reading Genesis 19, the Story of the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, as if it is the whole story, as if the story begins in Chapter 19. What follows is a brief description of that chapter highlighting a few key points that will be revisited later. The problem is laid out so it can be better explained in the later sections of this chapter.

In verse one, Lot is sitting at Sodom’s city gate during the evening when two angels arrive. Lot greets them, invites them to his house for the night saying they can leave in the morning. At first the angels refuse but Lot insists and they finally agree. They all go to Lot’s house for a meal. By verse four, everyone in town knows of the angel’s visit and “before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom – both young and old – surrounded the house. They called to Lot, ‘where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so we can have sex with them.” (Gen19:4-5)

Lot goes to the door to reason with the townsmen offering his two daughters instead of the visitors to satisfy their apparent lust. But he insists that the angels, who have “come under the protection of my roof,” not be harmed. (Gen 19:8). The townsmen become enraged, saying Lot is a foreigner and has no right to “play judge” (Gen 19:9) at which point the angels pull Lot back into the house and strike the townsmen with blindness so they can not find the door.

The angels tell Lot to gather up all of his family members and leave because God is going to destroy it the city. “Flee for your lives,” they tell Lot. “Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!” (Gen 19:17) Lot prefers to escape to the nearby Town of Zoar. The angels agree but tell him to hurry and by the time Lot reaches Zoar, “the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah … Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities – and also the vegetation in the land.” (Gen 19:24-25)

The story ends with an understanding of Abraham’s view of the disaster and one line which serves as the moral of the story. “Early the next morning Abraham got up … He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke for a furnace. So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.” (Gen 19:27-29).

The Misreading Problem

The homophobia problem is rooted in a fundamental misread of Genesis 19. The misread gets stuck on verse five, “Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them” as if that is the only signal that the Chapter has given as to how the story should be read. But there are several signs that Lot has violated a number of rules of hospitality that the original readers of the text would have readily recognized but are lost to the modern reader. Without understanding these rules of hospitality, the meaning of verse five can not be correctly understood. To understand this misread fully, it is necessary to read the story from the beginning – Chapter 18 – because the authors of these stories meant for Chapter 18 to be an example of the correct way to behave, to behave like Abraham, and Chapter 19 is an example of what can happen when the rules are violated.

Towards a Solution - Chapter 18

Chapter 18 begins with Abraham sitting at the entrance to his tent near the great trees of Mamre near Hebron. The Lord appears along with three men who are standing nearby. Abraham hurries over, greets them, and offers them food, water, and rest in his tent. The three men agree so Abraham leads them into his tent and tells his wife, Sarah to bring out some bread. He prepares his finest calf and provides milk and cheese. The visitors predict that Sarah, who is beyond childbearing age, will have a son by the time they return in a year. She doesn’t believe them but they insist.

After they eat, the men depart for Sodom and Gomorrah and the Lord says to Abraham that he has been hearing terrible stories about Sodom and Gomorrah and he is going to discover if things are really that bad. Abraham asks, “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city. Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it?” (Gen 18:23-24). The Lord agrees. “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” (Gen 18:26) Abraham keeps quizzing. What if there were forty righteous people? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? Each time, the Lord agrees to spare Sodom for the sake of the righteous. “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

This is where the Chapter ends. “When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home. (Gen 18:33). What follows immediately is the beginning of Chapter 19 with the men (this time two angels) arriving in Sodom in the evening where they meet Lot.

A Comparative Read

It is now possible to compare these two Chapters to understand the story that the authors were trying to tell. Key elements are summarized below:

Genesis 18

Ø Abraham bows deeply

Ø He offers food, drink, rest, and safe passage

Ø Abraham is a resident alien

Ø He is at the opening of his tent

Genesis 19

Ø Lot bows deeply

Ø He offers food, drink, rest, and safe passage

Ø Lot is a resident alien

Ø He is at the City Gate

To the modern eye the positions of these men is the same. Their behavior is the same

and both are resident aliens. Both are posted near an entryways. What the original readers of this story would have recognized is that their status as resident aliens impacts who they greet and how they greet them. Abraham is sitting at the opening of his tent. As a resident alien, he can invite whomever he likes into his tent. In Abraham’s case the visitor were already inside the city when he invited them into his tent. Lot, however, is at the City Gate and invited strangers into the City.

The fact that Lot has a place in the gate suggests he has won a measure of acceptance from the citizens of Sodom since this is a place reserved for business and legal transactions. It is a place of honor for the elders of the city (Prov 31:23), marking them and the citizens as free men, able to pass without question in and out of the city … As a resident alien, Lot had apparently obtained some of these rights, but no the ability to act on behalf of the city. (Matthews, 4)

Inviting the visitors into the city and, further, to spend the night at his house was a major breach of protocol which may explain why the visitors initially refused the invitation and went to Lot’s house only when he insisted.

Abraham, who has followed the rules, is able to host his visitors without incident. They eat, rest, converse, and leave. Lot, on the other hand, has set the stage for a night of mishap. When the villagers find out about the unapproved entry of the strangers, “all the men from every part of the city of Sodom – both young and old – surrounded the house.” Gen 19:4. When Lot insists that the visitors are protected within his house the townspeople remind him that he is a “foreigner” and is not in a position to judge – that is, judge who can and cannot be inside the city walls and “the audience certainly realizes that this narrative can only end in tragedy for the town and its inhabitants.” (Matthews, 3) Lot has improperly invited strangers into the city and the visitors eventually improperly accepted. This may at another level simply show Sodom’s lack of hospitality for not inviting the strangers into the town which would further the lesson on hospitality.

This brings us to the key passage. “Bring then out to us so that we can have sex with them.” (Gen 19:5). Today this passage is taken to be proof that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because the people of the towns were homosexuals. Therefore, the reasoning goes, homosexuality angers God and is forbidden. But this, too, is a misread of the passage. Would “all the men from every part of the city of Sodom – both young and old …” have been gay? That seems highly unlikely. The men were not interested in sexual gratification as shown by the fact that when Lot offers his daughters to satisfy the men’s lust, they flatly refuse. They are not interested in satisfying a sexual need. This is also an indication that God is not going to find ten righteous men as debated with Abraham. In fact, there is not even one man with the exception of Lot who shows hospitality to the strangers.

What this is, instead, is a demand to ravage and demean the unauthorized visitors. The visitors were being considered enemies of the city and rules of war were at play. The intention of the townsmen was “to sexually degrade the ‘hostile’ strangers.” (Matthews, 5) They meant to rape the visitors to demonstrate their inferior status as non-citizens.

Lot only makes the situation worse when he comes to the door of his house. By insisting that he had rights equal to those of the townsmen in terms of making decisions about who can enter his house, he further alienates the townsmen by making his own banishment inevitable.

Lot has failed to obey hospitality customs as they apply to their city. He has usurped privileges which no sojourner could ever claim, has style himself as a citizen without official sanction, and has stood in judgement of the action s of men over whom he has no jurisdiction. In doing so Lot had forfeited his rights a sojourner, and accepted transient member of the city population, and like the angels, has become a hostile stranger who must be summarily dealt with by the citizens of Solom. (Matthews, 6)

Lot must escape with his family before the entire city is destroyed.

Further Evidence that the Issue is Hospitality

If it is true, then, that Sodom was not destroyed because the men were homosexual, what was Sodom’s sin? What did God see that was so terrible that He felt it necessary to destroy the city? There are clues in other parts of the Bible that lead us not only to the answer to these question but that further strengthen the notion that the sin was not homosexuality.

The question is dealt with directly in Ezekiel. In chapter 16 the Prophet tells the people of Jerusalem that they are worse than other cities in history. He tells them that as each generation passes, each is worse than the last.

⁴⁶Your older sister was Samaria, who lived to the north of you with her daughters; and your younger sister, who lived to the south of you with her daughters, was Sodom. ⁴⁷ You not only followed their ways and copied their detestable practices, but in all your ways you soon became more depraved than they. ⁴⁸ As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, your sister Sodom and her daughters never did what you and your daughters have done.

⁴⁹ “‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. ⁵⁰ They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen. (Ezekiel 16:46-50)

Sodom’s sin was that the residents were uncaring and did not feed the hungry or help the poor and needy. They were, in a word, inhospitable. This may explain why Lot felt compelled to invite the strangers into the city although it wasn’t his place. It may be that the people of Sodom had neglected these visitors and Lot felt the right thing to do was to take care of them regardless of the city’s elders. Ezekiel does not say the sin of Sodom had to do with sexual relations. It had to do with lack of charity.

INSERT PARAGRQPH ON THE RICH AGRICULTURAL AREA OF SODOM AND GOMMORAH.

The sin of Sodom and Gomorrah can be found described in the New Testament as well. Matthew tells us that as Jesus sends out the Twelve, he councils them to avoid Gentiles and Samaritans and focus on “the lost sheep of Israel.” As they enter a town, they are to seek out a worthy home and give them a greeting. They should stay in that home for as long as they are in the town. But if they are not welcomed, they are simply to leave the town. It is, like Sodom and Gomorrah, inhospitable and will be dealt with on the day of judgement.

¹⁴ If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. ¹⁵ Truly I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.

Jesus understood the lesson of Genesis 18 and 19 to be one of hospitality – how to greet the stranger. It had nothing to do with sexual satisfaction.

Sources

Genesis 18-19. New International Version.

Martin, Colby. Unclobber: Rethinking Our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality. Westminster John Knox Press. Louisville, KY. 2022.

Matthews, Victor H. Hospitality and Hostility in Genesis 19 and Judges 19. Biblical Theology Bulletin v. 22:1 pp 3-11