xenophobia – Lee Allen Howard

The Sodom Series, #12

What’s the moral of the story in Judges 19?

Boswell points out that “Jews and Christians have overwhelmingly failed to interpret [the Gibeah story] as one of homosexuality, correctly assessing it as a moral about inhospitality” (Boswell 95–96).

Why is this account not treated the same as the Sodom story in the eyes of believers today?

The Judges 19 passage isn’t considered an indictment of homosexuality because it focuses on the fate of the concubine, a woman.

Her fate shows that the men of Gibeah were not animated by overwhelming homosexual desire. … The men of Gibeah did not turn up to invite the Levite to an orgy, and the concubine had no power over what befell her. There can be no doubt that this story is one about attempted pack rape of a man, which is diverted into the successful pack rape of a woman.

Pack rape of a defenceless stranger is a particularly apt symbol of injustice and abuse of the helpless, which I would argue are the real sins of Sodom and Gibeah—not same-sex desire…. It is not the gender of the victims that is crucial, but their status, that of defenceless aliens. (Carden 25–26, emphasis mine).

The wicked Gibeahites accept only the Levite’s concubine and not the host’s virgin daughter. “To the mob, the Levite is clearly outsider, and the concubine is his woman and shares his outsider status. She is therefore a suitable substitute while the old man’s daughter is not” (Carden 37).

Comparing Genesis 19 with Judges 19

In comparison, the Judges 19 narrative is quite similar to the Genesis 19 account, but includes two serious crimes, one of which is brutal murder.

Both accounts:

Begin with a description of sojourners, two outsiders who dwell in the midst of immoral cultures
Two sets of visitors
Two hospitable households
Two confrontations by the local people
Two threats of violence
Two devastating conclusions

In both accounts, the violent demands of the local people are a way to denigrate the strangers in their midst, outsiders they did not like.

Neither Lot nor the old man of Gibeah defends his visitors to safeguard them from same-sex relations. “Instead,” says Matthew Vines, “they both expressed the concern that their visitors had come under the protection of their homes” (Vines 66–67). Both shielded their guests because of the sacred code of hospitality.

Those who are righteous make it their duty to establish rights for those who don’t have them, especially strangers and aliens.

Why protect guests?

Both accounts include hospitable hosts who believe it is more important to protect their guests over their own flesh and blood (daughters). But why?

Some have argued that Lot’s action revealed his belief that opposite-sex behavior was preferable to same-sex behavior. [It is true] that the gender of Lot’s guests played a role—not because of Lot’s concerns about the bodily “sameness” involved in same-sex behavior, but because of the greater honor men held in ancient times. …[M]en in the ancient world were considered to be of greater value than women, which made raping a man a more serious violation. … The issue in both instances is patriarchy, not the anatomical complementarity of men and women (Vines 67, emphasis mine).

What was their sin?

The sexual sin in Judges, although heterosexual in nature, isn’t fornication. It’s violent abuse and rape. They abuse and rape a woman until she eventually dies.

The accounts differ, however, in their result. Both hosts offer women, in their day considered to be of lesser honor and value than men. The people of Sodom refuse; the people of Gibeah accept, resulting in the sexual abuse and death of the concubine.

Another important difference is how present-day Bible believers interpret the stories and continue to use them to make moral arguments today.

Why are the stories interpreted differently?

In both accounts the locals demand the handing-over of male visitors and threaten violence.

Although actual violence to the visiting men happens in neither story, only the Sodom account is remembered and rehearsed as representing the evils of homosexuality. The Gibeah account, if mentioned at all, is never interpreted this way.

The word Sodomites refers to the inhabitants of the city Sodom. But their crimes, inaccurately interpreted as an indictment against homosexuality, have taken on such proportion that Sodomites is now used to refer to those who practice homosexual acts—sodomy.

Why hasn’t the same process of abstraction happened for the word Benjamites or Gibeahites?

Christian theology did not become preoccupied with a “sin of the Benjamites” (as the inhabitants of Gibeah were called), nor did European countries adopt penal statutes against “Benjamy.”

This is more striking because the incidents at Gibeah are more horrible than the events surrounding Lot’s hospitality to the angelic messengers in Sodom.

The citizens of Sodom do nothing in the end. They are blinded by the angels, who then instruct Lot to hurry his family out of the city in view of its impending destruction.

At Gibeah, there are no angels to rescue the sacrificed woman during the dark night of her torture. Nor does God punish Gibeah with a fiery storm. The Israelite armies must do it themselves, after sustaining heavy casualties.

Why is Sodom so infamous yet so misunderstood?

Why is it then that the story of Sodom had such a long afterlife? How does it come to be misread so systematically and for so many centuries?

The beginning of an answer lies precisely in the dramatic and total divine judgment executed on the city and its neighbors.

The sin of Sodom wasn’t men having sex with other men.

Their sin was xenophobia: the abuse, degradation, and violation of others, STRANGERS—the same sin as the men of Gibeah committed—although the Gibeahites raped a woman.

The Sodom story has taken on a life of its own because of the fiery judgment it ends with. This makes it imperative that it be interpreted correctly and not misread as it has been and continues to be to this day.

So we must get back to Sodom, where we left Lot in the lurch with wicked citizens banging on the door.

What happens when the angels pronounce judgment? We’ll find out next time.

More information:

To read the full story, get my book, The Sin of Sodom: What the Bible Really Says About Why God Destroyed the Cities of the Plain, for Kindle and in trade paperback.

The Sodom Series, #8

Why did American soldiers—both men and women—abuse, torture, molest, and rape Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2003?

As you ponder this question, follow these links with discretion:

Perhaps the people of Sodom had the same attitude and objectives as the U.S. soldiers at Baghdad Central Prison:

Primary: Interrogation—knowledge
Secondary: Sexual abuse—degradation

The kind of sex the inhabitants of Sodom wanted was not for sensual pleasure, but for domination, control, cruelty, humiliation, debasement, and abuse.

This kind of treatment isn’t about sex; it’s about racial and imperialistic arrogance that revels in the degradation of foreigners, outsiders, and strangers. It’s xenophobia. It’s the attitude fueling Trump’s Mexico border wall.

Sex as a weapon

In ancient cultures, forcing sex on other men was a way of besting them, of humiliating them and showing them who’s boss.

For instance, during war, besides raping the women and sometimes slaughtering children, victors cut off the garments of the defeated men, exposing their buttocks, and then chained them and paraded them through the streets to debase and humiliate them.

See:

In Ancient Athens, “male rape was employed to signify the victory over foreign enemies in war” (Michael Carden, Sodomy, 35).

Rather than representing sexual desire and erotic expression, rape is best understood as sexual violence intended to assert power or express anger…. [M]ale rapists are primarily heterosexual men…. … In Western society, then, male rape reinforces the heterosexuality of the rapist while casting that of the victim in doubt (Carden 33, emphasis mine).

Sometimes conquerors would rape the men—not because the perpetrators were gay or took passionate pleasure in homosexual acts—but because it was the ultimate humiliation to treat the enemy as women, who in that day were considered little more than property. In essence, it was a way of treating the abused men like slaves.

Among some macho heterosexual men today (as well as school children), the ultimate putdown is to call another guy a “fag.” In ancient times, it was to call a man a “woman” and to treat him like one sexually.

Rape, a tactic of degradation

Did the abusive soldiers at Abu Ghraib do what they did because they all had a homosexual orientation?

Did they strip and molest prisoners of both sexes because they were otherwise incapable of healthy sexual relations with a person they cared about?

abu_ghraib_thumbs_up — Lynndie England and fiance Charles Graner posing behind a pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners, giving the “thumbs up” sign.

In both Sodom and Baghdad, the horrible acts that took place were not expressions of a gay orientation.

In ancient Babylonian sex-divination texts, anal sex is regarded as a power relationship by which the penetrator is either advanced or diminished according to the status of the men he penetrates. … [I]n the ancient Mediterranean world, the act of penetrating other males did not stigmatize the penetrator and that male-male anal sex was considered an act of aggression by which the penetrated male is feminized by the penetrator. … [H]e also notes that male rape was employed as a form of punishment (Carden 31, emphasis mine).

The people of Sodom weren’t looking for recreational sex with the angels. They wanted to perpetrate a violent act of humiliation and abuse visiting strangers who, as a class, they had no respect for. Rape was only the means to degradation.

Ostensibly, this was Sodom’s common practice, and the cities of the Plain had structured their entire society around it. Their degrading behavior was the opposite of the righteous hospitality that Abraham and Lot showed these outsiders.

[T]he incident clearly indicates that strangers may not be welcome, or have no rights, in Sodom. Attempted rape here is illustrative of the evils of inhospitality and abuse of outsiders that are typical of Sodom (Carden 21).

Like the misguided soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, the crime of the people of Sodom wasn’t their sexual orientation, but their xenophobic prejudice and shameless contempt for human rights and debasement of outsiders—individuals unlike themselves. (See Sodom’s Hatred of Strangers.)

When children are taken from their parents simply because they’ve crossed our national border, is the U.S. in danger of committing the sins of Sodom?

God commanded Israel, “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt” (Ex. 22:21 NIV). The people of Sodom flagrantly violated a value dear to the heart of God.

The Sodom and Gomorrah account is not the only one that deals with such ungodly mistreatment. To get to the ultimate meaning of the Genesis 19 account, we must study a similar passage in Judges 19. Next time.