A few months ago I posted on the confusion surrounding fundamentalist misinterpretations of the story of Sodom. Shortly thereafter there was a lively discussion on the same topic in a Yahoo group I subscribe to. The following essay is reprinted with the permission of the author, Peg McMahon:
Understanding Ezekiel 16:49-50 is central to understanding Sodom
The important thing to take away is the idea of what God looks at when judging a nation: societal attitudes of pride (hubris) and complete indifference to the plight of the poor. This is a very different criteria than that of promoted by the religious right. They concentrate almost exclusively on personal behavior — a misreading of scripture, in my opinion.
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.
They were haughty and did detestable things (toevah) before me.
Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.
I also agree with Mary-Ann Tolbert completely (I encourage reading her entire article).
As a woman, I can attest that the connection between sex and aggression and between penetration and power is alive and well. Think about what people really mean when they say "F*@k you!".
I often think that this attitude lies at the heart of both society's institutionalized hatred of women and its extreme reaction to male homosexuality — a reaction far more emotional and negative than that toward female homosexuality.
If the penetrated partner is debased, well, women are born for it. In a sense, they are born debased. But it's unthinkable that a man would give up his privileged position (on top, if you will) to willingly become degraded in this manner. Macho men find it frightening and repulsive.
Reading Tolbert's exegesis of the Sodom story, I would take it one step further. Part of the function of many of the stories in Genesis is to explain why things are the way they are.
So what was the Sodom story trying to explain?
If you continue to read the Sodom story you see that, because Sodom was destroyed, Lot's daughters felt they had no potential mates. In order to reproduce, one by one they got Lot drunk, had sex with him and bore his children. The children of this incest were Ammon and Moab, the ancestors of the Ammonites and Moabites who caused Israel and Judah so much trouble throughout its history. (See the story of Jehoshaphat in 2 Chronicles 20 and the related Psalm 83, especially verse 8.)
The Sodom story, at least in part, was propaganda set up to teach that the Moabites and Ammonites, as children of incest, were despicable from the very beginning.
This use of the Sodom story as propaganda is repeated in Judges 19 through 21. Here you encounter almost the same story line as that of Lot and the angels. This time it involves a traveling Levite and his concubine. When confronted by the raging crowd, he tried the same tactic that Lot tried — give the crowd a woman. In this version, it worked. The crowd accepted the woman and raped her to death.
What is the point of the story here? Well, the raging animalistic mob was from the tribe of Benjamin. So we learn that Benjamites are just like the terrible people of Sodom.
And who belonged to the tribe of Benjamin? King Saul.
In my opinion, one of the primary purposes of this story in Judges is to turn people against Saul — and presumably toward David whose ancestors are so winningly portrayed in the book of Ruth.
So the story of Sodom has little to do with homosexuality and far less to do with the joys of heterosexuality. Lot was perfectly willing to give his daughters to the crowd and the Levite succeeded in giving his concubine to the mob. These are hardly advertisements for heterosexual family values.
The stories, in fact, have everything to do with sex as degradation and with why we hate the people we hate.
Unfortunately, they are still being used that way three thousand years later.
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