The Real Sodomites

By Scott Horton

Monday, I spoke at a conference at Chapman University in Orange County, California, and stayed around through the afternoon for a discussion of religion and human rights that featured a Catholic bishop, a rabbi, and a Muslim scholar. The rabbi, Marc Dworkin, really stole the show – providing a tour de force review of human rights issues in the Pentateuch, from a Reform perspective. The key of his presentation focused on the story of Sodom – the cataclysmic tale of destruction, in which the Lord destroys the offending city after ascertaining that there were not ten righteous humans in it (Abraham had famously bargained Him down from fifty). The idea of the “chosen” and the notion of a genocidal act – the destruction of a whole people – being divinely justified are among the elements of the Old Testament that have historically given trouble to ethicists. Reform Judaism has, said the rabbi, tended to push these accounts to the margins. Conversely, the curious theology of some in the American Religious Right affords them center stage.

For English speakers, of course, the word “sodomite” has long passed as a somewhat archaic expression for “homosexual.” But this rests on the mistranslation of two words (yadha and anashim) from the biblical texts made by the early seventeenth century scholars appointed by King James. (As another rabbi friend recently told me, he has a standard practice for avoiding conflict with the followers of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and it usually starts this way: “Let’s consult the original Hebrew, shall we?”) This Reform interpretation is slowly emerging as the view of the mainstream Protestants, who by and large now accept that the two offending words in the King James Bible are the result of a mistranslation, or at least a highly suspect translation. What the rabbi offered in parsing the text was the same analysis I heard last year from a group Presbyterian theologians – namely, the Lord’s decision to smite the Sodomites had little to do with sexual orientation and much to do with mistreatment of visitors and injustice. Rather the accent in these texts falls on the quality of hospitality that the Sodomites offered to the Israelites, which was to say, nothing we would recognize as hospitality, and even more fundamentally, their corrupted sense of justice. Recall the account of a man who entered the town with money seeking to buy food, but who was denied food by all whom he approached. When at length he succumbed to starvation, the Sodomites took his money. And when one among them complained of the injustice of what was done, they slew the complainer as well. Abraham reminds us that we are simple stuff – dust and ashes. But in each of the Abrahamic faiths the divine potential of man is recognized, the potential of a man who does justice and lives righteously. And in the end, righteousness is inextricably connected to justice – to the command to treat our fellow man with dignity and respect.    

The Religious Right has a habit of corrupting these texts into a sense of a God who picks and chooses among the races and peoples of the earth, whose violent acts reflect a preference for one people over another and an indifference to the virtue of the individual. Their tendency to degrade the account of Sodom and Gomorrah into a condemnation of homosexuality is a good demonstration of just that.

But the rabbi made a powerful point. And we should all ask ourselves, who are the Sodomites in our own society today? The Sodomites exist in all times and in all societies. They are not those who have a different sexual orientation. They are those among us who  have a corrupted sense of justice, who demonize and abuse the outsider, who pronounce righteous pieties but whose conduct reflects a thorough contempt for one of  the most fundamental lessons of scripture: of the sanctity of human life and our responsibility to treat all our fellow humans with dignity and respect. They are all about us and unless we remain ever conscious, they are within us as well.