Last week we looked at the story of Sodom, and how the story in Genesis 18 and 19 is actually much more about hospitality than it is about same-sex attraction. Indeed, it may not be about same-sex attraction at all; that was just a detail of the overall story, and not certainly the main point, as many Western Christians see it today.
The way to know for sure what the sin of Sodom was is to look at what other Bible writers believed about the sin of Sodom. Last week we looked at what the story itself, and we noticed Ezekiel spells it out quite clearly what the sin of Sodom was:
Sodom’s sins were pride, gluttony, and laziness, while the poor and needy suffered outside her door. She was proud and committed detestable sins, so I wiped her out, as you have seen. —Ezekiel 16:49–50, NLT
This post will not be an exhaustive review of all the verses that speak of Sodom, because many of them only refer to its destruction (example: Deuteronomy 29:23). God uses the destruction of Sodom as an example of how He will respond to the sins of His own people if they do not repent (see 2 Peter 2:6). But that is not where I want to focus today. Anyone with search engine can find these texts and read them.
Instead, we will look at three passages that hint at the cause of their destruction.
- Isaiah 1
- Mark 6:10–11 (also Matthew 10:11–15 and Luke 10:10–12)
- Jude 7
Isaiah 1 begins with God lamenting the state of His people, who have apparently forgotten Him. They have not just ignored Him, but have provoked Him to anger with their behavior. God complains in excruciating detail about how He is tired of watching His people offering meaningless sacrifices and celebrating meaningless feasts. Instead, He would rather that they focused on what is important:
Wash yourselves and be clean! Get your sins out of my sight. Give up your evil ways. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Help the oppressed. Defend the cause of orphans. Fight for the rights of widows. —Isaiah 1:16–17, NLT
The fact that God asks them to do these things instead of offering sacrifices strongly implies that they were not doing these things. They were not seeking justice or helping the oppressed or the orphans or the widows. Instead, they were doing what Sodom did, and actively not helping the poor and needy who were suffering right outside their doors.
Jesus talks about Sodom several times. At one point, He laments the cities that have seen most of His miracles, saying that Sodom will be better off than they are, because Sodom never had the opportunity to see the Messiah in action—and that if it had, its citizens would have repented.
However, it is what He says when He commissions His disciples and sends them out two by two that is really interesting:
Also He said to them, “In whatever place you enter a house, stay there till you depart from that place. And whoever will not receive you nor hear you, when you depart from there, shake off the dust under your feet as a testimony against them. Assuredly, I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city!” —Mark 6:10–11, NKJV
Here Jesus is instructing His disciples on what they should do on their missionary journey. When they entered a town, they were supposed to find a place to stay until it was time to leave. But if the town rejected them and threw them out, they were to leave, knowing that the town would fair worse than Sodom. Notice the parallel that Jesus draws between the towns’ hospitality or lack thereof and the story of Sodom. Sodom was inhospitable and was destroyed; the towns that were inhospitable to Jesus’ disciples would be worse off than Sodom. Again, we see hospitality is the crucial issue.
Jude verse 7 is the clearest verse on the cause of Sodom’s destruction in the New Testament. Jude gives two reasons for its destruction:
As Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities around them in a similar manner to these, having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. —Jude 7, NKJV
Here we have two causes: sexual immorality and going after strange flesh. There seems to be a lot of variation on how to translate these sins, as you can see from the following examples:1
- “gross immoral freedom and unnatural vice and sensual perversity” —Amplified Version
- “practiced immoral sexual relations and pursued other sexual urges” —Common English Bible
- “immoral and committed all sorts of sexual sins” —Contemporary English Version
- “committing greedily fornication . . . and going after other flesh” —Darby Translation
- “full of sexual sin and involved themselves in sexual relations that are wrong” —Easy-to-Read Version
- “extreme sexual immorality and pursued homosexual perversion” —Evangelical Heritage Version
- “sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire” —English Standard Version
- “sexual sin and men having physical relations with men” —International Children’s Bible
- “giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh” —King James Version
- “full of lust of every kind, including lust of men for other men” —The Living Bible
- “full of sexual sin and people who desired sexual relations that God does not allow” —New Century Version
- “sexual immorality and perversion” —New International Version
- “full of sex sins and strong desires for sinful acts of the body” —New Life Version
- “indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust” —New Revised Standard Version
- “having given themselves to whoredom, and gone after other flesh” —Young’s Literal Translation
Whenever there is a wide variation in translations, it can be helpful to look at the Greek. Now, I’ll admit that I’m no Greek scholar (although I’ve been learning to read and understand modern Greek, thanks to Duolingo, which means I can pronounce the words with their modern pronunciation), but I know my way around an interlinear Bible (my favorite is blueletterbible.com). In Greek we find the words, “ἐκπορνεύσασαι καὶ ἀπελθοῦσαι ὀπίσω σαρκὸς ἑτέρας.” The word “καὶ” means “and,” which tells us where the two phrases are separated, so let us look at these two separate phrases.
The first, transliterated, comes from the root ekporneuō, which translates to “giving themselves over to fornication” in the King James. If you look closely, you might see the word “porn” in that word. According to Google Translate, the modern Greek word for “fornication” is “porneía,” and if you translate “porneía” back from Greek to English, it means prostitution. The prefix “ek-“ means from or out of. So “indulging in sexual immorality” is actually a good translation. We will discuss sexual immorality in Sodom later in the article.
The second phrase is four words, but we are most interested in the last two: sarkos heteros. Sarkos means flesh, and is used to refer to the physical flesh or body. The second word is very interesting, because transliterated, you probably recognize it as the first half of the word “heterosexual.” Heteros refers to “another who is different.” Put these two words together, and we see that the translation of “other flesh” is just about as accurate as one can get.
So why do so many translations interpret this phrase as “perversion,” “other sexual urges,” and “sexual relations that are wrong,” to name a few? Historical context at the time of translation seems to be the key. Bible translations contain the biases of the translators. For example, the New Testament Evangelical Heritage Version, published in 2017, translates these two words as “homosexual perversion.” But homo- and hetero- are opposites. The translators had a definite bias against homosexuality, and it came through in their choice of words. Even translations like “unnatural desire” in the English Standard Version is not a faithful translation of the Greek, and it hints strongly at the bias of the translators. “Desire” isn’t a terrible translation of the Greek word for flesh, because the body has desires; but “unnatural” is quite different from “other.”
Sexual immorality was rampant in ancient pagan cultures, especially in their idol worship rites. The word translated “sodomite” in the King James Old Testament comes from the Hebrew word “qedesh,” the masculine form of “quedesha,” which is translated as prostitute (See Deuteronomy 23:17). This implies that God was prohibiting both female and male prostitutes, which is how some Bibles translate these words. Odds are the male prostitutes didn’t just serve women, which is probably why some scholars began using the word sodomite, which was coined a couple centuries before the King James Version was translated, and referred to anal sex, usually between males. These prostitutes, both male and female, were essential in the pagan worship rituals, but God wanted His people to have nothing to do with them. Although it overly simplifies the Hebrew by combining the male and female, I think this translation best captures the intent of God’s command:
People of Israel, don’t any of you ever be temple prostitutes. —Deuteronomy 23:17, CEV
God did not want His people selling their bodies in the service of a pagan deity, or even in His own service. This is almost certainly something that was happening in Sodom and the surrounding cities before they were destroyed, and was one of the causes of their destruction. In fact, God quite explicitly spells out the fact that temple prostitution was one of the reasons that God destroyed the Canaanites:
There were even male and female shrine prostitutes throughout the land. The people imitated the detestable practices of the pagan nations the Lord had driven from the land ahead of the Israelites. —1 Kings 14:24, NLT
(Please note that “and female” in the above verse is supplied by the translators.)
But back to “other flesh” in Jude 7. What does this refer to? Those who want to prove that homosexuality is a sin believe it refers to the way the men of Sodom pursued homosexual relations with the visitors to their town, with the emphasis on the homosexuality of the men of Sodom. However, it is more likely that the words “strange flesh” refer to flesh other than human flesh—that is, of the angels. God had already decided to destroy the cities, and their choice to try to gang rape the angels He sent to see the wickedness of the city for themselves, instead of showing them hospitality, was the nail in the coffin of their fate.
In summary, we can see that while sexual immorality was one of the factors in the destruction of Sodom, the one that is emphasized by the Old Testament Prophets and Jesus Himself is that of inhospitality. How we treat others who are different from us is important, whether they be the poor, the widow, the orphan, or the visitor. How we treat them matters.
Indeed, this sentiment is echoed is the positive in the book of James:
Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you. —James 1:27, NLT
Concern for others is part of what it means to be a Christian. Lack of concern for others makes us like Sodom.
In summary, the sin of Sodom is exactly what Ezekiel said it was. Abominable, idolatrous practices were part of it, but the primary concern in the Bible is about their lack of hospitality and their mistreatment of the poor (again, see Ezekiel 16:49–50). Homosexuality was never the issue. Whatever other passages may say about homosexuality, the story of Sodom is about gross inhospitality, not about homosexuality. It should not be used to teach against homosexuality.
- See https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Jude%207 for more examples ↩︎