Sodomy - Sodomites just wanted to shake hands with strangers? Don't think so

Homosexuality and Sodom - and people who want to reinterpret the Bible and fail!

In regard to Genesis 19, revisionist interpreters adopt the view that the destruction of Sodom was due to the city’s in-hospitality, the violence of the people toward the two visitors sent from God. 

The cause of destruction was not general wickedness, homosexual rape, or homosexual lust. Homosexual relations became the interpretation as a result of myths popularized in the early Christian church, Boswell claims. 

Rather, Genesis  condemns in-hospitality to strangers or general violence or is an allegory “only tangentially related to sexuality.” He argues that his view is that which modern scholarship increasingly favors, mainly as a result of the influence of Bailey’s work. The men of Sodom merely wanted to “know” the strangers received by Lot, to inspect their passports, as it were.


The Terms of the Text
At issue is the translation of the Hebrew word yādaʿ, commonly meaning “to know.” In the New International Version text for Genesis 19:5 and 8, the words of verse 5, “can have sex with,” and those of verse 8, “never slept with,” are in each case the translation of yādaʿ:

  They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.” … [Lot said to the men] “Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”

Others take the view that the text condemns violence of some sort. Countryman says it is violence, not impurity, for impurity would be irrelevant prior to the giving of the Law in Exodus and Leviticus. There is no basis for finding a “universal condemnation of homosexuality or even of homosexual acts.” 

Countryman appeals to other writers of the Old Testament who, he claims, do not specify Sodom’s sin. Even the use of the term abominations is so unspecific that one cannot be sure what it means when used by such writers as Ezekiel.
Edwards, with his grid of liberation theology, says that Sodom represents disregard for the rights of the powerless in “Canaanite statism.” Sodom stands for “violent, aggressive abuse of power and injustice” in the form of “phallic aggression” against subordinates.

To link Sodom with homosexuality in general is “essentially heretical.” Similarly, Nissinen adds that Sodom does not help us to know God’s attitude toward same-gender sexual behavior.

So the revisionist approach to Genesis 19 (and Judges 19, discussed below) is twofold. With Boswell and Bailey, some deny that homosexuality was involved at Sodom. Rather, the issue was inhospitality. Others, with Countryman and Edwards, affirm that homosexual rape or violence was involved at Sodom, but they do not regard this as evidence for universal condemnation of homosexual acts.

To prove his position that only in-hospitality was the fault, Boswell first appeals to word frequency. Only ten of 943 occurrences of “to know” (yādaʿ) in the Old Testament unequivocally have the sense of sexual knowledge. 

What Boswell and others neglect to discern is that each of those ten instances is identified as sexual knowledge by context. When a word can have more than one meaning, context, not frequency, is the crucial factor. 

Word frequency only enables one to weigh the likelihood of a meaning or to consider the range of possible meanings when context is unclear.
In addition, another tool to find meaning is proximity to uses of the same word elsewhere in the text or usage by the same writer. Use of yādaʿ in an obvious sexual sense occurs in Genesis 4:1, 17, 25. 

The meaning of sexual relations establishes a meaning precedent for the book and argues for the legitimacy of this meaning in Genesis 19:5: “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know [have sexual relations with] them.” Since Moses uses the term with this meaning the most frequently, it is at least plausible that such a meaning occurs in 19:5.

The use of know in the context just three verses later (19:8) settles the issue. It is difficult to see how yādaʿ can have anything but the sense of “to have sexual relations with.” Lot says, “I have two daughters who have not had relations with [have not known] man.” In this context a sexual sense in 19:5 is virtually certain. The use of equivalents to yādaʿ in other Near Eastern languages (such as Egyptian, Ugaritic, and Akkadian) shows that a euphemistic sexual meaning was common.

Boswell argues that the term never occurs in reference to homosexual rape. Boswell’s argument has two faults. One is that nowhere else does yādaʿ mean “to inspect passports” (“to act inhospitably”). He also is wrong in asserting that yādaʿ never refers to homosexual assault or rape. We shall see that this is clearly the meaning in Judges 19:22, 25. Both the Hebrew and the LXX Greek say that the men of Gibeah came to “know” the concubine, in the sense of sexually assaulting her: “The men … raped her” (v. 25). Unmistakably, verse 22 relates that the men of Gibeah sexually desired the Levite, not his concubine (cf. Judg. 19:22–24; 20:5–6).

The issue of inhospitality does occur in 19:15, 18, but that evil is something distinct from what happens when the mob of men arrives. Further, it is fair to ask how it was hospitable for the owner of the house to turn over the concubine, who also was a stranger in the city. If the homeowner was defending hospitality and resisting inhospitality, he certainly did not do so with the Levite’s concubine. He gave her over to sexual abuse, even though she was the property of someone else!

The only explanation of his action that makes any sense is that he was trying to prevent a greater crime and evil than inhospitality.


De Young, J. B. (2000). Homosexuality: Contemporary Claims Examined in Light of the Bible and Other Ancient Literature and Law (pp. 32–34). Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications.