Sodom

Sodom was a city of the well-watered Jordan plain, paired throughout Scripture with its neighbor Gomorrah, which Yahweh destroyed with sulfur and fire from the sky and which the Bible thereafter treats as a byword for divine judgment. Genesis places it in "the plain of the Jordan," a region the text describes as well-watered everywhere, "like the garden of Yahweh, like the land of Egypt," lying on the way toward Zoar (Genesis 13:10). When Lot lifted his eyes and chose that country, the narrator adds the aside that "the men of Sodom were exceedingly wicked and sinners against Yahweh" (Genesis 13:13).

The account of its end is framed by Abraham's plea: he asks whether the Judge of all the earth will sweep away the righteous with the wicked, and receives the answer that the city would be spared for even ten righteous people within it (Genesis 18:25, 18:32). The destruction itself is stated without any natural explanation — "Yahweh rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from Yahweh out of the sky" (Genesis 19:24). Deuteronomy looks back on the result as scorched ground of sulfur and salt, unsown and without grass, and names Admah and Zeboiim as overthrown along with the two better-known cities (Deuteronomy 29:23). As a matter of history and archaeology, no site has been identified with certainty; proposed locations have been placed at both the southern and northern ends of the Dead Sea region, and the question remains genuinely disputed among scholars.

Later Scripture uses Sodom less as a location than as a moral category. Isaiah addresses the leaders of Jerusalem as "rulers of Sodom" and "people of Gomorrah" (Isaiah 1:9-10), and Jeremiah says the prophets of Jerusalem "have all become to me as Sodom" (Jeremiah 23:14). The New Testament repeats the pattern: 2 Peter 2:6 describes the cities turned to ashes and made "an example to those who would live in an ungodly way," and Jude 1:7 cites them as an example of judgment, describing the cities as having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone "after strange flesh."

Where Christian traditions differ is chiefly over what the sin of Sodom was. One reading, long dominant in much of the church and grounded in the Genesis 19 narrative and in Jude's phrase "strange flesh" (Jude 1:7), identifies the city's defining offense as homosexual intercourse. Another reading, common in Jewish interpretation and in some Christian traditions, emphasizes arrogant inhospitality and social injustice, noting that elsewhere Scripture describes Sodom's guilt in terms of pride, excess, and neglect of the poor and needy (Ezekiel 16:49), and that the prophets invoke Sodom precisely as a name for oppression and injustice (Isaiah 1:10-17). Traditions also differ over how to read Jude's "punishment of eternal fire" (Jude 1:7), whether as unending conscious punishment or as final destruction, and over how far the narrative should be treated as a recoverable historical site rather than a theological paradigm — most classical Christian teaching has held both the event and its exemplary force together.

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.