In the preceding article, I showed that the Genesis text was not explicit about the what sin(s) the cities were judged for, but it contains a story of an inhospitable mob threatening to abuse and rape the angelic visitors Lot had so kindly taken under his roof. The violation of the right of guests to protection is itself a grievous crime; the "shadow of his roof" (Gen. 19:8) was the place of security for guests, the violation of which constituted a moral crime. Lot's warning, and his offer of his daughters, appeals to their moral responsibility and gives them an opportunity at repentence, which they roundly reject. This story is evidently the kernal from which later writers expanded into what they refer as "the fornication of Sodom and Gomorrah" (Jude 7). But nowhere are acts of fornication mentioned in the Genesis narrative. And 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.
Some of the earliest allusions of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain make no reference to what constituted their sin (Hosea 11:8; Deuteronomy 29:22; Isaiah 1:9). Ezekiel knows 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 may represent a stream of tradition independent of the Genesis narrative.
The emphasis on non-sexual sins 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 or desiring to have sex with divine flesh. It is THIS stage in the tradition that Jude and 2 Peter draw their allusions from. As most scholars recognize, 2 Peter is literarily dependent on Jude. Jude 6-8 likens the sin of Sodom, the "unnatural fornication" of Sodom, with the situation of the fallen angels of Gen. 6:1-4:
Jude 6-8
"Next let me remind you of the angels who had supreme authority but did not keep it and left their appointed sphere; he has kept them down in the dark, in spiritual chains, to be judged on the great day. The fornication of Sodom and Gomorrah and other nearby towns is equally unnatural, and it is a warning to us that they are paying for their crimes in eternal fire. Nevertheless, these people are doing the same: in their delusions they not only defile their bodies and disregard authority, but abuse the glorious angels as well."
The key to understanding this text are the words "equally unnatural" in Jude 7: what did the situation of Sodom and Gomorrah have in common with the situation of the incarnation of angels before the Flood that was "equally unnatural"? It was having sex with angels. Note also how v. 8 applies both situations to heretics who figuratively "defile their bodies" and "abuse the glorious angels", both descriptions of the same thing situation. The parallel text in 2 Peter 2:6-11 is derivative of the Jude text and its secondary features arise from the author's use of the more original Jude text. It is unclear whether Jude believes that intercourse actually occurred between angels and humans at Sodom and Gomorrah, what constituted the porneia "fornication" for him was the lust for angels -- shared by the human females in Gen 6.
Further light on what Jude meant is found in the Enochian literature. Jude is heavily steeped in the pseudepigraphal literature of the time (such as the allusion to The Assumption of Moses in Jude 9), especially the Books of Enoch which tell the story of the fallen angels who had intercourse with human women. Jude 14 is a verbatim quotation from 1 Enoch 1:9. Jude 14 also matches 1 Enoch 60:8 which refers to Enoch as "the seventh as Adam". Compare Jude 6 with 1 Enoch 10:4-6 ("Bind Azazel hand and foot and throw him into the darkness....He covered his face in order that he may not see light; and in order that he may be sent into the fire on the great day of judgment") and 10:11-12: "Bind Semjaza and the others who are with him, who fornicated with the women, that they will die together with them in all their defilement...Bind them for seventy generations underneath the rocks of the ground until the day of their judgment and of their consummation, until the eternal judgment is concluded." What is more, the connection between the sin of the fallen angels and the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah also derives from the Enochian literature. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs quote and refer to a lost Enoch book that is related to 2 Enoch (cf. 2 Enoch 34:2 which relates sodomy to the sin of the angels), and this book clearly relates the two situations:
Testament of Naphtali 3:4-4:1
"Do not become like Sodom, which departed from the order of nature. Likewise the Watchers departed from nature's order; the Lord pronounced a curse on them at the Flood. On their account he ordered that the earth be without dweller or produce. I say these things, my children, because I have read in the writing of holy Enoch that you will also stray from the Lord."
In another reference to the fallen angels, the Testament of Reuben 5:5 says: "Flee from fornication....For it was thus they [women] had charmed the Watchers, who were before the Flood." The Testament of Benjamin 9:1 also states: "Now I suppose, from the words of the righteous Enoch, that there will be also evil-doings among you: for ye will commit fornication with the fornication of Sodom, and shall perish all save a few, and will multiply inordinate lusts with women." Here the sin of Sodom is again discussed by a work concerned with the sin of the angels, and its likening with "lusts with women" does not suggest homosexuality per se but rather fornication. Similarly Testment of Asher 7:1 says that Sodom "did not recognize the Lord's angels and perished forever," the sin thus being related to a failure to respect the divine angelic order in their fornication and not homosexuality per se. Jude, indebted as he was by the Enochian literature, is probably making a similar point.
The two separate strands of tradition, one emphasizing the arrogance of the Sodomites and the other stressing fornication, were occasionally combined in the intertestamental period and beyond. 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. 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
