Let me add one more thing. The interesting thing is that nowhere does the Genesis text actually say that the mob succeeded in raping the angels. In fact, it indicates that the rioters were smitten with blindness before they could do any harm. Ezekiel also seems to know of no explicit sexual crime of Sodom; the sins he lists are all of a non-sexual nature: "Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, gluttony of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty." (Ezekiel 16:49-50) According to this list, it was primarily the Sodomites' pride and their failure to aid the poor amidst their own prosperity that caused God to smite them.
This tradition is probably the original or older one. And it remained salient in Jewish tradition for centuries afterward, as it is attested in various intertestimental books. Sirach 16:8 states: "He did not spare the neighbors of Lot, whose arrogance made them hateful." Wisdom 19:14 says: "Others [the Sodomites] had refused to receive strangers when they came to them." 3 Maccabees 2:5 similarly states: "You [God] burned with fire and brimestone the arrogant Sodomites." Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1:194-195 wrote:
"Now, about this time the Sodomites, overwhelmingly proud of their numbers and the extent of their wealth, showed themselves insolent to men and impious to Divinity, insomuch that they no more remembered the benefits that they had received from Him, hated foreigners and avoided any contact with others. Indignant at this conduct, God accordingly resolved to chastise them for their arrogance, and not only to uproot their city, but to blast their land so completely that it should yield neither plant nor fruit whatsoever from that time forward."
Note that the historian makes absolutely no reference to a sexual crime! This traditional understanding of the Sodomites' sin was also shared by Jesus. He hurled his curses on the Galilean cities as he was being arrogantly rejected by them and he told his disciples: "And if anyone does not receive you ... truly I say to you it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town" (Matt. 10:14-15). This understanding continued into the rabbinical period. In Pirqei de R. Eliezer 25, we read:
R. Yehudah said: They announced in Sodom that anyone who gave bread to the poor, the sojourner or the destitute would be burned. Now, Pelotit was Lot's daughter and she was married to one of the leaders in Sodom. She saw a poor man afflicted in the public square and she was sorely grieved for him. What did she do? Every day, when she went to draw water, she would take some food from her house and put it in her pitcher, and so would feed the poor man. The people of Sodom wondered: how is this poor man managing to live? When they found out, they took the woman to be burned.
So where the hell did the idea that fornication was the sin of Sodom come from? The text of Gen. 19 indicated that the men of Sodom wanted intercourse with Lot's guests, and though no such act is explicitly described, later writers assumed that the sin of Sodom must have included sexual crimes. The earliest hint of this is in Jeremiah 23:14: "They [Jerusalem prophets] commit adultery and deal falsely and encourage evildoers, so that no one repents -- they are all like Sodom to me." The earliest known work to outright identify the sin of Sodom with fornication is the Book of Jubilees 16:5-6 which described the Sodomites as "wicked and exceedingly sinful, and they defile themselves and commit fornication in the flesh, and work uncleaness on the earth." This idea was advanced further in the same work, which likened the sin of Sodom with the sin of the giants born of the fallen angels: "Later on, Abraham told them about the punishment of the giants and the punishment of Sodom -- how they were condemned because of their wickedness, because of the sexual impurity, uncleanness, and corruption among themselves they died in sexual impurity." This idea would later be developed in the Enochian literature into a sin of having sex with divine flesh, a stage in the tradition that Jude and 2 Peter draw from.
Some writers comprised between the two separate strands of tradition and incorporated both. Philo, Abraham 134-135 wrote in the first century BC: "The region of the Sodomites ... was laden with innumerable injustices, especially those arising from gluttony and lust....The cause of this excess in licentiousness among the inhabitants was the unfailing abundance of their wealth....They threw off from their necks the law of nature by indulging in strong drink, rich food, and forbidden forms of intercourse." The Targum Onkelos Gen. 13:13 states: "Now the men of Sodom were wicked with their wealth, and they were sinful with their bodies before the Lord," and the Targum Neophyti Gen. 13:13 said: "And the people of Sodom were wicked toward one another and sinful with sexual sins and bloodshed and idolatry before the Lord."
So what we, then, see is that in the intertestimental period between the Old and New Testaments, there was a shift in tradition about Sodom and original story in popular storytelling became one of fornication with angels, and by extension, fornication in general -- tho nowhere is fornication indicated in the original text. The traditions in Jude and 2 Peter derive not from the biblical text, but the stream of extrabiblical traditions attested in apocryphal and pseudepigraphal literature.
Leolaia