Gomorrah

Gomorrah was a city of the Jordan plain, always named alongside its neighbor Sodom, remembered in Scripture as destroyed by fire from heaven and used thereafter as a byword for divine judgment. The etymology of the name is uncertain; suggested links to Hebrew or Arabic roots meaning roughly “to overwhelm” or “to destroy” are scholarly conjecture rather than established fact. In the text it first marks a boundary of Canaanite territory (Genesis 10:19), and a king of Gomorrah, Birsha, is named among the five kings who rebelled against Chedorlaomer and were routed in the valley of Siddim (Genesis 14:2, 8–10).

The narrative setting matters for the story: Lot looks over “the plain of the Jordan” and sees it well-watered everywhere, “like the garden of Yahweh, like the land of Egypt” (Genesis 13:10). The cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is described as great and their sin as “very grievous” (Genesis 18:20), and the destruction comes as “sulfur and fire from Yahweh out of the sky” (Genesis 19:24). Deuteronomy recalls the land left behind as “sulfur, salt, and burning,” and lists Gomorrah with Sodom, Admah, and Zeboiim as cities Yahweh overthrew (Deuteronomy 29:23).

Later Scripture uses Gomorrah chiefly as a comparison. The prophets warn Israel and Judah that they have become “as Sodom” and “as Gomorrah” (Isaiah 1:9–10; Jeremiah 23:14), announce that Babylon will be like the overthrown cities (Isaiah 13:19), and pronounce a like end on Moab and Ammon (Zephaniah 2:9) and on Edom (Jeremiah 49:18). In the New Testament Gomorrah is cited as a warning: judgment will be more tolerable for it than for towns that reject the messengers of the kingdom (Matthew 10:15), and the cities are set forth as “an example to those who would live in an ungodly way” (2 Peter 2:6), shown in Jude as suffering punishment for sexual immorality and going “after strange flesh” (Jude 7). As a matter of historical geography, the plain is generally located near the Dead Sea, but no site has been identified with consensus; proposals at the southern and northern ends of the sea remain debated, and the identifications of excavated sites with Sodom and Gomorrah are not established.

Christian and Jewish traditions differ over what the sin of Gomorrah chiefly was. Ezekiel 16:49 names Sodom’s guilt as pride, surfeit of food, prosperous ease, and failure to strengthen the hand of the poor and needy, a reading that rabbinic and later social-justice interpreters have emphasized, while Jude 7 and 2 Peter 2:6–7 lead many other readers to stress sexual immorality, and the Gospel sayings about inhospitality toward God’s messengers (Matthew 10:14–15) support a reading centered on rejection of the stranger. These readings are not mutually exclusive in the texts themselves, and most traditions hold several of them together while weighting them differently.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.