Sodom and Gomorrah

And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous;
I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know.

-- Genesis 18: 20-21 (KJV)

Sometimes men just push the Lord too far. This time the evildoers are the denizens of Sodom, a city on the plains of Jordan near the Dead Sea. We arrive in the neighborhood with Abraham, who, after being chosen by God to beget a "great nation," leaves his home in Mesopotamia for a new land to the west (Genesis 12 and 17). Abraham settles in the hills of Canaan, but his nephew Lot prefers the urban culture of the plains. So he pitches his tent in Sodom -- a poor choice, as it turns out, since "the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly" (Genesis 13: 13).

Exactly what manner of sinners they were we must infer from J's hints, which are pretty much limited to one verse (Genesis 19: 5). There, as two visitors (angels in disguise) dine with Lot, the men of Sodom circle the house. "Where are the men which came in to thee this night?" they want to know; "bring them out to us, that we may know them."

Now, we all know what they mean by "know," and so did Lot. Rather than allow guests to suffer such indignities, he offers his two virgin daughters in the angels' stead. The mob isn't having any of this, however; they begin breaking down Lot's door, until the angels reveal their identity by striking the perpetrators blind. But Lot's manners do confirm the angels' opinion of his "righteousness."

From this one incident derives the English usage of "sodomy," "sodomite," etc., although the Bible suggests that the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah goes well beyond homosexual acts. (Inhospitality appears to be a graver sin.) "Sodomy," meaning "unnatural sexual intercourse" dates back to the late thirteenth century, before Genesis had been fully translated into English, and "sodomite" in the sense of "sexual pervert" even predates "Sodomite" in the more primitive sense, "inhabitant of Sodom."

The fascination and disgust embodied through the ages in these words is awesome, as this selection of quotes from the OED demonstrates: "Devil, damned dog, sodomite insatiable"; "that Sodomitical swarm or brood of Antichrist"; "an open Sodomite; a horrible blasphemer"; "Wicked Sodomy, a sin so hateful to Nature itself that she abhors it"; "a filthy Sodomitical schoolmaster"; and so on and so forth.

While it's true that in Genesis we see the wickedness only of Sodom -- Gomorrah's is merely reported -- it's still strange that the one city should spawn so many terms of opprobrium and the other escape all but direct biblical allusion. Then again, "gomorrhean" and "gomorrhia" don't have the ring that "sodomite" and "sodomy" do, though "gomoria" is in fact one obsolete form of the word "gonorrhea." Whether the biblical city suggested the obsolete spelling, or vice versa, is unknown, but the more etymologically correct form "gonorrhea" derives from Greek, not from the Bible. So you can heave a sigh of relief.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!