Sodomites

Sodomites is an English word formed from the city name Sodom and used in Bible translation in two distinct but related ways: for the men of Sodom in the Genesis narrative, and as a rendering of a Hebrew term for male cult prostitutes connected with sanctuaries in Israel and Canaan. The word entered English Bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; many modern translations replace it in the second sense with "male shrine prostitute" or "cult prostitute," and retain "Sodom" only as a place name.

In Genesis 19 the text says that the men of Sodom surrounded Lot's house and demanded, "Where are the men who came in to you this night? Bring them out to us, that we may have sex with them" (Genesis 19:5); the Hebrew verb is yada', "to know," a common euphemism for sexual relations. The visitors strike the crowd with blindness so that they wear themselves out trying to find the door (Genesis 19:11), Lot's sons-in-law treat his warning as a joke (Genesis 19:14), and the city is overthrown when Yahweh rains sulfur and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, destroying the cities, the plain, the inhabitants, and the vegetation (Genesis 19:24-25). Scripture elsewhere frames Sodom's sin differently: Ezekiel 16:49-50 names pride, surplus of food, prosperous ease, and failure to aid the poor and needy, alongside abomination; Jude 7 speaks of going after "strange flesh"; 2 Peter 2:7-8 stresses the lawless deeds that tormented Lot. Interpreters have long weighed these passages against each other, and the text of Genesis 19 itself describes an attempted act of collective rape against guests as well as a sexual demand.

In the second sense, the Hebrew word behind older English "sodomite" is qadesh (plural qedeshim), from the root qdš, "to be set apart, holy," and it denotes a person consecrated to a shrine. Deuteronomy 23:17 forbids any qadesh among the sons of Israel, in parallel with a prostitute (zonah) among the daughters; 1 Kings 14:24 reports that qedeshim were in the land and that the people followed the abominations of the nations; Asa put them out of the land (1 Kings 15:12); Josiah broke down their houses in the house of Yahweh, where women wove hangings for Asherah (2 Kings 23:7). Hosea 4:14 likewise condemns men who consort with prostitutes and sacrifice with shrine prostitutes. Historically, the exact nature of the qedeshim's activity is debated among scholars, since the texts connect them chiefly to idolatrous worship, and the English link to Sodom is a translational and interpretive choice rather than something the Hebrew term itself contains.

The New Testament uses Sodom as a byword for divine judgment rather than as a label for persons: Jesus says it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for towns that reject his messengers (Matthew 11:24; Luke 10:12), and the wider contexts place that saying alongside instructions about receiving or refusing the disciples. Traditions differ in how they connect these threads. One tradition reads Genesis 19 as Scripture's foundational condemnation of homosexual acts and treats "sodomite" as a moral category; another reads it primarily as a story of inhospitality, gang rape, and the abuse of the vulnerable, pointing to Ezekiel's indictment and to the ancient setting in which violating a guest was the grave offense; another emphasizes that the qedeshim were cultic functionaries and that the traditional translation obscures that. The term's history in English, and the differing weights given to Genesis 19, Ezekiel 16, and the qedeshim texts, are the main reasons these readings persist side by side.

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.