I’ve blogged here before that I always thought it puzzling that people take the biblical story of Sodom to be a condemnation of homosexuality when, after all, the people of that fair city were threatening to gang rape a couple of (male) angelic visitors sent by Jehovah to suss out their reputed wickedness. (Why an omniscient being needs to send angels to check stuff out for him I’ve never quite figured out.) Most people would assume that the relevant wickedness had more to do with the whole “gang rape” aspect than with the relative genders of the rapists and prospective rape-ees.
Anyway, I’m interested to find confirmation of that view in Louis Crompton’s excellent Homosexuality and Civilization. (I had an opportunity to interview Crompton just under a year ago, but didn’t then have time to read the book as closely as I would’ve liked.) As it turns out, there are several stories concerning Sodom found in haggadoth, and sexual immorality is barely a blip on the radar screen. Instead, the Talmudic portrait is of an extraordinarily greedy city obsessed with the idea that its wealth should not be shared with visitors or immigrants—a metropolis of crazed Lou Dobbses, if you will. One description runs thus:
They said: since there cometh forth bread out of our earth and it hath the dust of gold, why should we suffer wayfarers, who come to us only to deplete our wealth. Come, let us abolish the practice of traveling in our land.
Another tale reports that when poor beggars came calling in Sodom, the residents would all be quite generous with their gold… but refuse to give up any food. When the visitor starved to death, they reclaimed their gold. Assuming contemporary readers of the biblical Sodom story would be familiar with these other tales, it makes perfect sense that they’d have read it as another illustration of the city’s infamous lack of hospitality and the tendency of its xenophobic denizens to deter visitors by, well, extreme means.
In light of this, I wonder: Will conservatives who profess to loathe “sodomy” feel themselves compelled to adopt a more pro-immigrant stance?
