What was the sin of Sodom?

A city with a reputation

Sodom is condemned before its story is told. When Lot chooses the green plain, the narrator adds that “the men of Sodom were exceedingly wicked and sinners against Yahweh” (Genesis 13:13). Years later God tells Abraham that “the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great” (18:20). The Hebrew word for that outcry, tse’aqah in the next verse, is the one Exodus uses for Israel’s cry under its taskmasters (Exodus 3:7): the cry of people who are wronged. God goes down to see whether the deeds match the reports, and Abraham bargains for the city, from fifty righteous people down to ten. Ten are not found.

What Genesis shows

Two visitors reach Sodom at evening. Lot, sitting in the city gate, insists they stay with him, offers water for their feet and bakes them bread. Then the city arrives.

But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, surrounded the house, both young and old, all the people from every quarter. They called to Lot, and said to him, “Where are the men who came in to you this night? Bring them out to us, that we may have sex with them.”

The Hebrew verb is yada, to know, as in “The man knew Eve his wife” (Genesis 4:1). The scene is a whole town, young and old, threatening sexual violence against strangers under a host’s roof, then turning on the host: “Now we will deal worse with you than with them!” (19:9). Lot’s offer of his own daughters (19:8) shows how sacred a guest was in that world, and it horrifies modern readers. The contrast with the chapter before is deliberate. Abraham ran to welcome three strangers at Mamre; Sodom besieges two.

What the prophets say

The prophets use Sodom as a byword, and they name other sins.

this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters. She also didn’t strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

Ezekiel adds that they “were arrogant and committed abomination” (16:50). Isaiah calls Jerusalem’s leaders “rulers of Sodom” and tells them, “Seek justice. Relieve the oppressed” (Isaiah 1:10, 17). Jeremiah compares prophets who “commit adultery and walk in lies” to Sodom (Jeremiah 23:14). For the prophets, Sodom stands for a society that is rich, proud and closed to the weak.

What the New Testament says

Jesus links Sodom with towns that turn away his messengers: “it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city” (Matthew 10:15). The letter of Jude says the cities had “given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh” (Jude 1:7). Many readers take “strange flesh” as same-sex relations; others note that the Greek says “other flesh” and link it to the angels the mob wanted, since Jude’s previous verse is about angels.

Two ways of remembering

Jewish tradition remembered Sodom above all for cruelty. The Talmud tells of laws that punished charity, and of a young woman put to death for secretly giving bread to a poor man (Sanhedrin 109a–b). The Mishnah records the view that the person who says mine is mine and yours is yours has the trait of Sodom (Avot 5:10).

In Christian Europe, from the Middle Ages on, the sin of Sodom came to mean sexual sin, especially between men. The Latin sodomia, spread by writers such as Peter Damian in the eleventh century, gave English “sodomy.” Today many traditional Christians read Genesis 19 with Jude as condemning same-sex acts as well as violence, while many other scholars argue the story is about rape and broken hospitality, and note that Ezekiel and Jesus point to injustice and rejected guests. All these texts stand in the same Bible.