Text Summary:
The Lord tells Abraham he has heard great accusations about Sodom. Abraham negotiates with God to spare Sodom if He finds 50, 45, 40, 30, 20, and finally only 10 innocent people. God agrees.
Abraham’s nephew Lot urges two Angels to stay at his house. The men of Sodom surround Lot’s house and demand he give up the two men so they could have sex with them. Lot begs them to take his two virgin daughters instead. The men try to barge their way in but are struck with blindness by the Angels.
The Angels tell Lot to leave Sodom for the hills before they destroy it. Lot negotiates for the small town of Zoar since the hills are too far. The Angels agree. At sunrise, the Lord rains burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot’s wife looks back and turns into a pillar of salt.
My Thoughts:
Negotiating: This story was likely used periodically to teach the next generation how to negotiate. I mean, if Abraham can negotiate with God, you can negotiate with anyone. It shows how to find a common point to agree on, like that God does not want to harm innocent people, and the whittling technique of slowly moving your counterpart down towards your goal.
Pillar of Salt: This story sounds right out of science fiction. Three men show up and all of a sudden men are blinded outside a house, two cities are destroyed by flames from the sky, and a woman is turned into a pillar of salt.
I think the answer is more geological. The middle-east is sitting on top of the world’s largest oil reserves. It is possible that an earthquake caused a huge reservoir of underground petroleum to explode, destroying the area. This would explain the raining down of sulfur. The pillar of salt is likely that Lot’s wife was covered in ash. See an example in this 9/11 picture of Marcy Borders.
Golden Rule: Lot serves and protects the Angels, so is saved from the destruction.
Homosexuality: It sounds like the storyteller is trying to teach the listener not to be homosexual. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of their sins as pointed out by the gay men wanting to have sex with the men Lot was protecting in his house.
I’m in a catch-22 here. No matter what I write, some people will perceive me to be anti-gay and others that I am pro-gay. What I would like to address is the fear in the topic of homosexuality.
Prior to the 1980’s, gays feared about “coming out” because they would be ostracized by their families and friends and could even lose their jobs over this “socially unacceptable behavior”. The 1980’s added the hysteria of catching AIDS to this burden and gays kept very quiet about their sexual orientation.
In the 1990’s, movies like Philadelphia with Tom Hanks portrayed gays as real people and opened the doors for acceptance of gays in films and TV shows.
Gays have “come out” in droves and with their new found freedom are now demanding their rights; the biggest being marriage that has now become legal in many states. I’m not sure gays and lesbians are looking to be recognized as married as much as they want to gain the same benefits as a husbands and wives: insurance, social security, common law property, etc.
The scale of fear seems to have tipped in the opposite direction today. Now, all the heterosexuals are afraid to make any negative comments about gays for fear of not being “politically correct” and potentially losing their jobs.
Frankly, I believe we are all people on this little blue marble cruising through space and we need to figure out how to get along with everyone and stop labeling and stop judging just so we can feel superior. It should not matter about a person’s color, religion, sexual orientation, height, age, weight, job, economic status, hobbies (as long as they are legal), shoe size, or where their ancestors happen to have lived. We are all human beings. We all eat, breath, sleep, and bleed the same. We all dream, hope, want someone to listen, and wish to be loved the same!
The only way to reduce fear is to open yourself up to new experiences. Meet other people. Find out what they like, dislike, do for work, do for fun, eat and don’t eat. You will discover that we are all not much different from each other.