Love Means Love by David Runcorn

Author:David Runcorn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2020-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

9

The sin of Sodom:

when names become labels

Situated on the fertile plains of the Jordan Valley, Sodom was surely once a city of wealth and beauty, but it enters the ancient Bible texts as a place of malign reputation, under the imminent judgement of God (Genesis 13.10–13).

The drama of Sodom’s destruction is told in Genesis 19, but the key to understanding these notorious events are found in the previous chapter, where the story properly begins. There ‘the Lord appeared to Abraham [with two strangers] by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day’ (Genesis 18.1). Note that Abraham offers the strangers every hospitality, for what happens in Sodom will stand in precise contrast to what is happening here in Abraham’s tent. There is much else to say about the fuller context of this story, but the issue that concerns us here is Sodom’s iconic identification with the supposed presence of homosexuality and God’s presumed judgement on it: ‘The destruction of Sodom in Genesis 19 has been used to justify the systematic persecution of people in homoerotic relationships. No other biblical text has had such sinister repercussions for so-called sexual minorities.’1

After resting with Abraham, the two men (now revealed as angels) travel on to Sodom, where they meet Lot ‘sitting in the gateway of Sodom’ (Genesis 19.1). He offers them generous hospitality and refuge. It is now night and the town is not a safe place for strangers. The parallels between Abraham and Lot sitting at entrances and offering hospitality to strangers are clearly deliberate.

News quickly spreads of Lot’s guests and the men of the city (Genesis 19.4) converge on Lot’s house and demand access to them. They make their intentions frighteningly clear: they want to rape them. Lot refuses, insisting that he must honour the hospitality he has offered. He must have been in a very vulner­able pos­ition as an outsider himself, but his offer of his under­age daughters to the men instead of his guests is one of the most horrific and neglected aspects of this story. How are we to under­stand a society in which the obligation to honour male guests is so paramount that a father will offer his own ­daughters to rapists rather than breach this code? Just as the mob are on the point of breaking down the door the angels strike them blind and insist that Lot and his family flee immediately. The town is beyond saving.

The assumption has long been that the sin of the town was unrestrained homosexual lust and desire. That the town is destroyed by God for its behaviour has simply served to confirm the extreme seriousness with which homosexuality is judged by God. In fact the context is clearly more one of gang violence and subjugation than of sexual desire. Used in this way, rape is an expression of power, not of sexual desire. It is a means of humiliating and disgracing the victims and remains a common feature of war and ethnic violence in modern times.

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