Posts by Leolaia

12

80s lyric quiz

by Nosferatu in

jw
friends

.

i got 67.. http://www.yetanotherdot.com/asp/80s.html

The Sin of Sodom & Gomorrah in the Bible and Jewish Tradition

by Leolaia in

i'm starting this thread to post some of my articles that originally appeared on a jokes thread which should probably better appear in the "bible research & study articles" folder.

so here goes...... what was the sin, or sin(s) that sodom & gormorrah was judged for?

the original account in genesis actually does not say.

Narkissos....yes, agreed on the interpretation of Gen. 6 was referring to "angels" is a later development in Jewish tradition, where the original text refers to "sons of God" unlike Gen 19:1 where reference is to "messengers" or "angels". And yes, the crime of the men of Gibeah in Jud. 19 is a close variant of the same story in Gen. 19 and does shed some additional light on what is meant in the Gen. text since it has a different ending -- we see what the mob does do with the virgin daughter.

Pete...I also read some interesting stuff on the Sodom and Gomorrah story being a sort of native Levant version of the Flood myth, as it shares some interesting motifs in common. In a version of the tale in Asia Minor, an aged Phrygian couple give shelter in their humble dwelling to Zeus and Hermes in human guise, when every other door is closed against them. As a reward for their hospitality, they were directed to flee to the mountain and there, looking back, they see the whole district inundated by a flood, except their own wretched hut which has been transformed into a temple. Here we see the same combination of kindness of divine beings rewarded by escape from a destructive visitation in which a whole neighborhood perishes for its impious neglect of the duties of hospitality. Although flooding is nowhere mentioned in the final version of the Sodom tale, there is good reason to believe that it originally formed part of the story. Note that Gen. 13 and 14 present the region around Sodom that is presently at the bottom of the Dead Sea as the "vale of Siddim," and the story would have been the opportunity to explain how the area was flooded and changed into a sea. It is possible that the inclusion of a second flooding story was militated against by the incorporation of the Babylonian flood myth in Gen 6-8 and a deluge of water was changed into a rain of fire and brimestone. On the other hand, the story's special features are suggested by the weird scenary of the Dead Sea region -- its barrenness, the cloud of vapour hanging over it, its salt rocks and grotesque formations, its beds of sulphur and asphalt, and perhaps occasional conflagurations bursting out among them. The catastrophe is presented as a local one, like the Phrygian myth which was a local flood. However, in the story of Lot and his daughters, v. 31 seems to presuppose a universal catastrophe, in which the whole human race has disappeared, except Lot and his daughters. The idea of Gunkel is that the narrative in Gen 18-19, which is set in the Dead Sea region, is a Moabite parallel to the story of the Flood (hence, the etiology of the nations of Moab and Ammon from Lot) which is thus of greater antiquity than the Noah story. Lot is the counterpart of Noah and just as the Noah of 9:20 steps into the place of the Babylonian Flood-hero, so the Lot of 19:30 was identified with the hospitable host of deities in the original Moabite myth that possibly lies at the basis of 19:1-10.

Leolaia

32

"Wise Men," or Duped Men?

by Schizm in

jw
friends

dupe defined:

a person who functions as the tool of another person or power.

the scene in the image below is a most popular one during the month of december.

Leolaia

I personally don't agree with the WT (and your) interpretation. There is nothing in the text that indicates that Satan was the source of the star. I would not confuse the star's purpose and function with King Herod's reaction to it. They're not the same thing. Herod and the Magi understood what the star meant because they knew the symbol of the Messiah was a star. The Magi chose an honorable reaction to the star while Herod's reaction was despicable. The "star" was a Messianic symbol because in the Near East stars signified kings, as Is. 14:12 applies the epithet "Daystar, son of Dawn" to the king of Tyre. The prophecy of Balaam in Numbers 24:17 dominated Messianic expectations for centuries before Jesus' birth: "I behold him--but not close at hand; a star from Jacob takes the leadership, a sceptre arises from Israel." The star motif was elaborated in intertestimental writings, including the Testament of Judah (second century BC) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (first century BC):

Testament of Judah 24:1-6 (which also alludes Joel 2:28-29 and Isaiah 11:1-5)
And after this there shall arise for you a star from Jacob in peace. And a man shall arise from my posterity like the sun of righteousness, walking with the sons of men in gentleness and righteousness, and in him will be found no sin. And the heavens will be opened upon him to pour out the spirit as a blessing of the holy Father. And he will pour out the spirit of grace on you. This is the shoot of God most high; this is the fountain of life of all humanity. Then he will illumine the scepter of my kingdom, and from your root will arise the shoot, and through it will arise the rod of righteousness for the nations, to judge and to save all that call on the Lord.

The War Scroll 11:4-9, Dead Sea Scrolls (originally composed in the second century BC)
Yours is the battle! From You comes the power; the battle is not ours. Not our might nor the strength of our hands display valor; as You declared to us in former times, A star has journeyed from Jacob, a scepter has arisen from Israel; and he shall crush the temples of Moab and overturn all the sons of Seth. And he shall rule from Jacob and shall cause the survivors of the city to perish. And the enemy shall become a conquered land and Israel shall display its valor. And by the hand of your Messiahs, the seers of things ordained, You have announced to us the times of the battles of Your hands, in which You will be glorified.

Damascus Document 7:18-21, Dead Sea Scrolls (also alluding Amos 9:11)
And the star is the seeker of the Law who came to Damascus, because it was written A star has came forth out of Jacob and a scepter has risen out of Israel. The scepter stands for the prince of the congregation. At his coming he shall break down all the sons of Sheth.

The 'prince of the congregation' seems to be have been a common shorthand indicating one of the two Messiahs that the sect at Qumran expected, the war leader who is sometimes called the 'Messiah of David' or the 'Messiah of Israel'. In any case, Jews expecting the coming of the Messiah looked in the heavens for a celestial sign, like the miraculous star. This might underlie the disciples' question to Jesus in Matt. and Lk. of what sign there would be of his coming. As it turned out, a comet appeared in the sky in AD 66 which was widely interpreted by Jews to signal the arrival of the Messiah. It was this event that provided much of the impetus of the Jewish revolt that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 (cf. Josephus). Even the Roman historian Suetonius recorded the impact of these Messianic expectations in the Jewish revolt (Vespasian 4,5 ). And in Revelation 22:16, Jesus himself uses this language to refer to his own future coming: "I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright and morning star." (cf. also Rev. 2:27-28, which calls Jesus "the Morning Star" and the one with "an iron sceptre," an obvious allusion to Num. 24:17) This expectation continued in Jewish circles in the second century AD; the next messianic figure was Simon surnamed bar-Kochba (="star"), and the Star of David continues as a symbol of hope in Judaism to this day. The star that heralds Jesus' birth in the Matt. narrative thus is a miraculous sign that the Messiah has arrived. Note also how the wording has slightly changed regarding the Star; in the original prophecy we read of a "star from Jacob" then that becomes a "star rising from Jacob" in the Testament of Judah and finally a "star has journeyed from Jacob" in the Dead Sea Scrolls. These embellishments are just what we find in the Matt. text; in 2:2 the Magi say "we saw his star as it rose" and in 2:10 "the star journeyed and halted over the place where the child was".

Moreover I know of no early Christian commentary on the Star of Bethlehem that viewed it as evil or as a Satanic plot. Quite different is the impression. The earliest reference to the star that I could find is that of Ignatius in his epistle to the Ephesians, written A.D. 115-117, and indeed he had the exact opposite view -- that the star was sent by God to announce the secret of the Messiah's birth to Satan and his world:

Ignatius, Ephesians 18:2-19:-2
"Jesus the Christ was conceived by Mary according to God's plan, both of the seed of David and of the Holy Spirit. He was born and was baptized in order that by his suffering he might clense the water. Now the virginity of Mary and her giving birth were hidden from the ruler of this age [e.g. Satan the Devil]....How, then, were they revealed to the ages? A star shone forth in heaven brighter than all the stars; its light was indescribable and its strangeness caused amazement. All the rest of the constellations, together with the sun and moon, formed a chorus around this star, yet the star itself far outshone them all, and there was perplexity about the origin of this strange phenomenon which was so unlike the others....As a result, things were thrown into ferment because the abolition of death was being carried out."

For Ignatius, the star was God's way of announcing to Satan that his time was up -- death was about to be vanquished. This of course is Ignatius' own interpretation, but it still shows that the WT interpretation of the star is quite different from what early Christians thought.

Leolaia

39

The problem of Noah's flood and the origins of the Indo-European languagues

by badboy in

jw
friends

jehovah's witnesses say noah's flood happened c.2000bc.. interestingly a possible problem arises with the origins of the indo-european languagues b/c, which linguists have calcaluated(sp?

)2 have originated about 8,900 years ago using a cognate database,hittite being near the root of the ie family followed by tocharian ,greek and armenian.. there4 the ie languagues spread with agriculture in2 europe arriving in scotland 5500 years ago.. question?.

how will they explain this?

Leolaia

It is a body of Canaanite literature discovered at Ras Shamra in Syria....contains myths about Baal, legends about ancient kings, stories about the Rephaim, etc. All written earlier than the Bible.

Leolaia

18

The Sin of Sodom & Gomorrah in the Bible and Jewish Tradition

by Leolaia in

i'm starting this thread to post some of my articles that originally appeared on a jokes thread which should probably better appear in the "bible research & study articles" folder.

so here goes...... what was the sin, or sin(s) that sodom & gormorrah was judged for?

the original account in genesis actually does not say.

Leolaia

In the preceding article, I showed that the Genesis text was not explicit about the what sin(s) the cities were judged for, but it contains a story of an inhospitable mob threatening to abuse and rape the angelic visitors Lot had so kindly taken under his roof. The violation of the right of guests to protection is itself a grievous crime; the "shadow of his roof" (Gen. 19:8) was the place of security for guests, the violation of which constituted a moral crime. Lot's warning, and his offer of his daughters, appeals to their moral responsibility and gives them an opportunity at repentence, which they roundly reject. This story is evidently the kernal from which later writers expanded into what they refer as "the fornication of Sodom and Gomorrah" (Jude 7). But nowhere are acts of fornication mentioned in the Genesis narrative. And nowhere does the Genesis text actually say that the mob succeeded in raping the angels. In fact, it indicates that the rioters were smitten with blindness before they could do any harm.

Some of the earliest allusions of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain make no reference to what constituted their sin (Hosea 11:8; Deuteronomy 29:22; Isaiah 1:9). Ezekiel knows of no explicit sexual crime of Sodom; the sins he lists are all of a non-sexual nature: "Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, gluttony of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty." (Ezekiel 16:49-50) According to this list, it was primarily the Sodomites' pride and their failure to aid the poor amidst their own prosperity that caused God to smite them. This tradition is probably the original or older one and it may represent a stream of tradition independent of the Genesis narrative.

The emphasis on non-sexual sins remained salient in Jewish tradition for centuries afterward, as it is attested in various intertestimental books. Sirach 16:8 states: "He did not spare the neighbors of Lot, whose arrogance made them hateful." Wisdom 19:14 says: "Others [the Sodomites] had refused to receive strangers when they came to them." 3 Maccabees 2:5 similarly states: "You [God] burned with fire and brimestone the arrogant Sodomites." Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1:194-195 wrote:

"Now, about this time the Sodomites, overwhelmingly proud of their numbers and the extent of their wealth, showed themselves insolent to men and impious to Divinity, insomuch that they no more remembered the benefits that they had received from Him, hated foreigners and avoided any contact with others. Indignant at this conduct, God accordingly resolved to chastise them for their arrogance, and not only to uproot their city, but to blast their land so completely that it should yield neither plant nor fruit whatsoever from that time forward."

Note that the historian makes absolutely no reference to a sexual crime! This traditional understanding of the Sodomites' sin was also shared by Jesus. He hurled his curses on the Galilean cities as he was being arrogantly rejected by them and he told his disciples: "And if anyone does not receive you ... truly I say to you it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town" (Matt. 10:14-15). This understanding continued into the rabbinical period. In Pirqei de R. Eliezer 25, we read:

R. Yehudah said: They announced in Sodom that anyone who gave bread to the poor, the sojourner or the destitute would be burned. Now, Pelotit was Lot's daughter and she was married to one of the leaders in Sodom. She saw a poor man afflicted in the public square and she was sorely grieved for him. What did she do? Every day, when she went to draw water, she would take some food from her house and put it in her pitcher, and so would feed the poor man. The people of Sodom wondered: how is this poor man managing to live? When they found out, they took the woman to be burned.

So where the hell did the idea that fornication was the sin of Sodom come from? The text of Gen. 19 indicated that the men of Sodom wanted intercourse with Lot's guests, and though no such act is explicitly described, later writers assumed that the sin of Sodom must have included sexual crimes. The earliest hint of this is in Jeremiah 23:14: "They [Jerusalem prophets] commit adultery and deal falsely and encourage evildoers, so that no one repents -- they are all like Sodom to me." The earliest known work to outright identify the sin of Sodom with fornication is the Book of Jubilees 16:5-6 which described the Sodomites as "wicked and exceedingly sinful, and they defile themselves and commit fornication in the flesh, and work uncleaness on the earth." This idea was advanced further in the same work, which likened the sin of Sodom with the sin of the giants born of the fallen angels: "Later on, Abraham told them about the punishment of the giants and the punishment of Sodom -- how they were condemned because of their wickedness, because of the sexual impurity, uncleanness, and corruption among themselves they died in sexual impurity."

This idea would later be developed in the Enochian literature into a sin of having sex or desiring to have sex with divine flesh. It is THIS stage in the tradition that Jude and 2 Peter draw their allusions from. As most scholars recognize, 2 Peter is literarily dependent on Jude. Jude 6-8 likens the sin of Sodom, the "unnatural fornication" of Sodom, with the situation of the fallen angels of Gen. 6:1-4:

Jude 6-8
"Next let me remind you of the angels who had supreme authority but did not keep it and left their appointed sphere; he has kept them down in the dark, in spiritual chains, to be judged on the great day. The fornication of Sodom and Gomorrah and other nearby towns is equally unnatural, and it is a warning to us that they are paying for their crimes in eternal fire. Nevertheless, these people are doing the same: in their delusions they not only defile their bodies and disregard authority, but abuse the glorious angels as well."

The key to understanding this text are the words "equally unnatural" in Jude 7: what did the situation of Sodom and Gomorrah have in common with the situation of the incarnation of angels before the Flood that was "equally unnatural"? It was having sex with angels. Note also how v. 8 applies both situations to heretics who figuratively "defile their bodies" and "abuse the glorious angels", both descriptions of the same thing situation. The parallel text in 2 Peter 2:6-11 is derivative of the Jude text and its secondary features arise from the author's use of the more original Jude text. It is unclear whether Jude believes that intercourse actually occurred between angels and humans at Sodom and Gomorrah, what constituted the porneia "fornication" for him was the lust for angels -- shared by the human females in Gen 6.

Further light on what Jude meant is found in the Enochian literature. Jude is heavily steeped in the pseudepigraphal literature of the time (such as the allusion to The Assumption of Moses in Jude 9), especially the Books of Enoch which tell the story of the fallen angels who had intercourse with human women. Jude 14 is a verbatim quotation from 1 Enoch 1:9. Jude 14 also matches 1 Enoch 60:8 which refers to Enoch as "the seventh as Adam". Compare Jude 6 with 1 Enoch 10:4-6 ("Bind Azazel hand and foot and throw him into the darkness....He covered his face in order that he may not see light; and in order that he may be sent into the fire on the great day of judgment") and 10:11-12: "Bind Semjaza and the others who are with him, who fornicated with the women, that they will die together with them in all their defilement...Bind them for seventy generations underneath the rocks of the ground until the day of their judgment and of their consummation, until the eternal judgment is concluded." What is more, the connection between the sin of the fallen angels and the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah also derives from the Enochian literature. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs quote and refer to a lost Enoch book that is related to 2 Enoch (cf. 2 Enoch 34:2 which relates sodomy to the sin of the angels), and this book clearly relates the two situations:

Testament of Naphtali 3:4-4:1
"Do not become like Sodom, which departed from the order of nature. Likewise the Watchers departed from nature's order; the Lord pronounced a curse on them at the Flood. On their account he ordered that the earth be without dweller or produce. I say these things, my children, because I have read in the writing of holy Enoch that you will also stray from the Lord."

In another reference to the fallen angels, the Testament of Reuben 5:5 says: "Flee from fornication....For it was thus they [women] had charmed the Watchers, who were before the Flood." The Testament of Benjamin 9:1 also states: "Now I suppose, from the words of the righteous Enoch, that there will be also evil-doings among you: for ye will commit fornication with the fornication of Sodom, and shall perish all save a few, and will multiply inordinate lusts with women." Here the sin of Sodom is again discussed by a work concerned with the sin of the angels, and its likening with "lusts with women" does not suggest homosexuality per se but rather fornication. Similarly Testment of Asher 7:1 says that Sodom "did not recognize the Lord's angels and perished forever," the sin thus being related to a failure to respect the divine angelic order in their fornication and not homosexuality per se. Jude, indebted as he was by the Enochian literature, is probably making a similar point.

The two separate strands of tradition, one emphasizing the arrogance of the Sodomites and the other stressing fornication, were occasionally combined in the intertestamental period and beyond. Philo, Abraham 134-135 wrote in the first century BC: "The region of the Sodomites ... was laden with innumerable injustices, especially those arising from gluttony and lust....The cause of this excess in licentiousness among the inhabitants was the unfailing abundance of their wealth....They threw off from their necks the law of nature by indulging in strong drink, rich food, and forbidden forms of intercourse." The Targum Onkelos Gen. 13:13 states: "Now the men of Sodom were wicked with their wealth, and they were sinful with their bodies before the Lord," and the Targum Neophyti Gen. 13:13 said: "And the people of Sodom were wicked toward one another and sinful with sexual sins and bloodshed and idolatry before the Lord."

So what we, then, see is that in the intertestimental period between the Old and New Testaments, there was a shift in tradition about Sodom and original story in popular storytelling. The traditions in Jude and 2 Peter derive not from the biblical text, but the stream of extrabiblical traditions attested in apocryphal and pseudepigraphal literature.

Leolaia

18

The Sin of Sodom & Gomorrah in the Bible and Jewish Tradition

by Leolaia in

i'm starting this thread to post some of my articles that originally appeared on a jokes thread which should probably better appear in the "bible research & study articles" folder.

so here goes...... what was the sin, or sin(s) that sodom & gormorrah was judged for?

the original account in genesis actually does not say.

Leolaia

I'm starting this thread to post some of my articles that originally appeared on a Jokes thread which should probably better appear in the "Bible Research & Study Articles" folder. So here goes.....

What was the sin, or sin(s) that Sodom & Gormorrah was judged for? The original account in Genesis actually DOES NOT SAY. All we really know is what Gen. 13:13 says: "Now the people of Sodom were vicious men, great sinners against Yahweh." Similarly, Gen 18:20 says: "How great an outcry there is against Sodom and Gomorrah! How grievous is their sin!" without actually saying what the sin is. Then there are the names of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah in ch. 14. While the kings on the offensive have somewhat real historically-based names, the names of the kings of the Cities of the Plain are of a sinister character: Bera king of Sodom is a play on the Hebrew word for "evil," Birsha king of Gomorrah is a play on the word for "wickedness". Bela, the other name for Zoar, means "devouring". In none of this is there a clear picture of what constitutes the sin of the cities, except for perhaps "gluttony" hinted by the name of the city of Bela.

The sin is evidently something that everyone in the judged cities is guilty of, both man, woman, and child, since Abraham tries to intercede in ch. 18 and asks Yahweh to spare the cities if only ten "just" people were found in the cities. The only other indication is the treatment of the visiting angels in ch. 19. The text describes a mob of "the men of Sodom both young and old, all the people without exception" who bear on Lot's door and make the following demand: "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Send them out to us so that we may know [Heb. yada] them." This request could either mean that the men merely wanted to become "acquainted" with the visitors or they wanted to have "sexual relations" with them. Which was it? First of all, Lot's reaction to their request to yada his guests ("I beg you to do no such wicked thing") implies that the kind of yada meant was something "wicked". Merely getting to know someone does not entail this, but demanding sex with one's guests does. That in itself is not conclusive, but in v. 8 Lot offers his daughters whom he specifically describes as "virgin daughters." In the original Hebrew, this reads as "daughters who have not known [yada] man." Only three verses from use of yada in the request by the mob, this use clearly is sexual in nature since obviously, living with their father and living in the city, they were otherwise acquainted with men, hence the translation as "virgin daughters". Aside from Gen 19:5 and 19:8, yada "know" refers to sexual activity in at least two other places in Genesis: 4:25 ("And Adam knew his wife again and she bore a son") and 38:26 ("And he knew her again no more, and it came to pass in the time of her travail, that, behold, twins were in her womb").

A sexual sense of yada thus seems quite probable in v. 5 of Gen. 19. But the crime is not necessarily specified as homosexual rape because the threat of the latter could not be responded with an offer of "virgin daughters". What the mob was after was something more general. Their aim was not to indulge in homosexual desires but rather to commit an act of violence against a household that dared to be hospitable to strangers. This is indicated by the mob character of the crowd. This is indicated by their violence in forcing Lot aside and trying to break down the door (v. 9). Lot's offering of his own daughters was the only thing he could do to maintain his promise of hospitality in v. 2. Lot tells the rioters: "Do nothing to them [my guests] for they have come under the shadow of my roof." Their response shows exactly what their purpose and motivations were: "Here is one who came as a foreigner, and would set himself up as a judge. Now we will treat you worse than them" (v. 9). In other words, the mob was incensed that someone who himself was a foreigner and not originally from their town dared to go against the town's general inhospitable treatment of outsiders (e.g. leaving them to "sleep on the open street" v. 2). The intent of crowd was to treat the visitors as inhospitably as they can by abusing them.

But this event is not the specific sin that Sodom was judged for, since the fate of the cities was already sealed before the angels arrived (v. 13). At most, one would have to extrapolate and assume that what happened the night of the angels' visit was indicative of the general sin of the city. In point of fact, the text does not directly spell out what the sin was. It was up to later writings to develop this theme and bring more specific charges against the city. The specification of the sins as "fornication" and "unnatural fornication" in the epistles of Jude and 2 Peter in the New Testament derive not from the Genesis narrative, but instead from extrabibical developments in the tradition of the cities judged by God. This will be discussed in the next article.

Leolaia

24

homosexuality

by zen nudist in

how can trinitarians

Leolaia

hehe, sorry for "turning the thread," but I was just commenting on San Francisco Jim's page....would it be better to post this again as a separate thread? --Leolaia

24

homosexuality

by zen nudist in

how can trinitarians

Leolaia

Let me add one more thing. The interesting thing is that nowhere does the Genesis text actually say that the mob succeeded in raping the angels. In fact, it indicates that the rioters were smitten with blindness before they could do any harm. Ezekiel also seems to know of no explicit sexual crime of Sodom; the sins he lists are all of a non-sexual nature: "Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, gluttony of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty." (Ezekiel 16:49-50) According to this list, it was primarily the Sodomites' pride and their failure to aid the poor amidst their own prosperity that caused God to smite them.

This tradition is probably the original or older one. And it remained salient in Jewish tradition for centuries afterward, as it is attested in various intertestimental books. Sirach 16:8 states: "He did not spare the neighbors of Lot, whose arrogance made them hateful." Wisdom 19:14 says: "Others [the Sodomites] had refused to receive strangers when they came to them." 3 Maccabees 2:5 similarly states: "You [God] burned with fire and brimestone the arrogant Sodomites." Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1:194-195 wrote:

"Now, about this time the Sodomites, overwhelmingly proud of their numbers and the extent of their wealth, showed themselves insolent to men and impious to Divinity, insomuch that they no more remembered the benefits that they had received from Him, hated foreigners and avoided any contact with others. Indignant at this conduct, God accordingly resolved to chastise them for their arrogance, and not only to uproot their city, but to blast their land so completely that it should yield neither plant nor fruit whatsoever from that time forward."

Note that the historian makes absolutely no reference to a sexual crime! This traditional understanding of the Sodomites' sin was also shared by Jesus. He hurled his curses on the Galilean cities as he was being arrogantly rejected by them and he told his disciples: "And if anyone does not receive you ... truly I say to you it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town" (Matt. 10:14-15). This understanding continued into the rabbinical period. In Pirqei de R. Eliezer 25, we read:

R. Yehudah said: They announced in Sodom that anyone who gave bread to the poor, the sojourner or the destitute would be burned. Now, Pelotit was Lot's daughter and she was married to one of the leaders in Sodom. She saw a poor man afflicted in the public square and she was sorely grieved for him. What did she do? Every day, when she went to draw water, she would take some food from her house and put it in her pitcher, and so would feed the poor man. The people of Sodom wondered: how is this poor man managing to live? When they found out, they took the woman to be burned.

So where the hell did the idea that fornication was the sin of Sodom come from? The text of Gen. 19 indicated that the men of Sodom wanted intercourse with Lot's guests, and though no such act is explicitly described, later writers assumed that the sin of Sodom must have included sexual crimes. The earliest hint of this is in Jeremiah 23:14: "They [Jerusalem prophets] commit adultery and deal falsely and encourage evildoers, so that no one repents -- they are all like Sodom to me." The earliest known work to outright identify the sin of Sodom with fornication is the Book of Jubilees 16:5-6 which described the Sodomites as "wicked and exceedingly sinful, and they defile themselves and commit fornication in the flesh, and work uncleaness on the earth." This idea was advanced further in the same work, which likened the sin of Sodom with the sin of the giants born of the fallen angels: "Later on, Abraham told them about the punishment of the giants and the punishment of Sodom -- how they were condemned because of their wickedness, because of the sexual impurity, uncleanness, and corruption among themselves they died in sexual impurity." This idea would later be developed in the Enochian literature into a sin of having sex with divine flesh, a stage in the tradition that Jude and 2 Peter draw from.

Some writers comprised between the two separate strands of tradition and incorporated both. Philo, Abraham 134-135 wrote in the first century BC: "The region of the Sodomites ... was laden with innumerable injustices, especially those arising from gluttony and lust....The cause of this excess in licentiousness among the inhabitants was the unfailing abundance of their wealth....They threw off from their necks the law of nature by indulging in strong drink, rich food, and forbidden forms of intercourse." The Targum Onkelos Gen. 13:13 states: "Now the men of Sodom were wicked with their wealth, and they were sinful with their bodies before the Lord," and the Targum Neophyti Gen. 13:13 said: "And the people of Sodom were wicked toward one another and sinful with sexual sins and bloodshed and idolatry before the Lord."

So what we, then, see is that in the intertestimental period between the Old and New Testaments, there was a shift in tradition about Sodom and original story in popular storytelling became one of fornication with angels, and by extension, fornication in general -- tho nowhere is fornication indicated in the original text. The traditions in Jude and 2 Peter derive not from the biblical text, but the stream of extrabiblical traditions attested in apocryphal and pseudepigraphal literature.

Leolaia

24

homosexuality

by zen nudist in

how can trinitarians

Leolaia

Agreed on both accounds, Euphemism.

About the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha (and the apostolic fathers, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc. etc.), they shed a lot of light on various aspects of scripture.

Leolaia

24

homosexuality

by zen nudist in

how can trinitarians

Leolaia

For those of you who have not seen it, here is an essay I wrote some time ago regarding what the Bible does and does not say about homosexuality: http://www.gayxjw.org/bible.html

Interesting essay, I agree with much of it but not entirely with your analysis of Gen. 19. I do agree that the cities were not destroyed because of the incident with the angels -- their fate had already been sealed (Gen. 18), and their sin is something that everyone, man, woman, and child, participated in, and the tradition in Ez. 19 makes clear that the sin was "pride, gluttony, arrogance, complacency; such were the sins of Sodom and her daughters" (v. 49), and v. 50 refers to the idolatry which it regards as most filthy of the sins. What I don't quite agree with is that yada "know" in 19:5 means "to be acquainted" instead of "have sex with". First of all, Lot's reaction to their request to yada his guests ("I beg you to do no such wicked thing") implies that the kind of yada meant was something sinful. Merely getting to know someone does not entail this, but demanding sex with one's guests does. Second, in v. 8 Lot offers his daughters whom he specifically describes as "virgin daughters." In the original Hebrew, this reads as "daughters who have not known [yada] man." Only three verses from use of yada in the request by the mob, this use clearly is sexual in nature since obviously, living with their father and living in the city, they were otherwise acquainted with men, hence the translation as "virgin daughters". Aside from Gen 19:5 and 19:8, yada "know" refers to sexual activity in at least two other places in Genesis: 4:25 ("And Adam knew his wife again and she bore a son") and 38:26 ("And he knew her again no more, and it came to pass in the time of her travail, that, behold, twins were in her womb"). A sexual sense of yada thus seems more probable in v. 5 of Gen. 19. Of course, this has no impact on the misapplication of the verse to homosexuality since the kind of yada the mob wanted was dealt with by offering Lot's daughters to the mob.

Leolaia