Now, Sodom and Gomorrah. The sins of the cities are multifaceted, but at the heart of them all is a self-centered crude and offensive behavior. The acts that the people in Sodom and Gomorrah wanted to commit with the angels are often held up as the worst of sins. That Lot would rather they attack his daughters than the two guests speaks to how special and beautiful these messengers must have been. Regardless, the terms Sodom and Gomorrah are now synonymous with selfish disregard for others, including senseless, meaningless attacks.
The controversial aspect of Sodom and Gomorrah is the desire of the townsmen wanting to have sex with the angels. What has been overemphasized is the apparent homosexual rape hinted at in the story, but the offense is more expansive than that. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah want to rape divine beings, which is a different thing than a human being. Don’t get me wrong, the entire account is awful. Lot is so committed to protecting his guests he would rather the townspeople attack his daughters than the angels! This is a horrible situation all around.
The result? God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah. He tells Lot and his family to flee and to not look back. Lot’s wife looks anyway and is turned into a pillar of salt for disobeying the instruction to not look at the destruction. As an aside, image-search the words “Dead Sea Pillars of Salt.” Sodom and Gomorrah were located south of the Dead Sea near some spectacular salt formations, some of which rise up in a very statuesque manner. Students ask me if one of these pillars is Lot’s wife. Perhaps. But it begs the question, did those salt formations help shape the story?
What happens next is one of the worst stories in the Bible, but keep in mind that the scriptures are not celebrating it. Lot flees from the area and lives in a cave with his daughters. Anxious they will not be able to find someone adequate to marry, Lot’s daughters get their father drunk and trick him into impregnating them. The offspring of this horrific act becomes the ancestral origins of the Moabite people, a group with which Israel shares a contentious relationship for centuries to come. So make a mental note: we will see the Moabites again.
Questions for Reflection or Discussion
1. Sarah is ninety-nine years old. By laughing at the three visitors’ news, was she being unfaithful to God? Why or why not?
2. Is arguing with God about whether or not to punish the righteous along with the wicked more an act of faith or faithlessness?
3. Do you think the three visitors are just messengers and angels? Or do you think they might be a pre-appearance of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
Read Genesis chapters 20, 21, and 22.
Abraham did it again! He lied again.
Abraham encounters a foreign king, and out of fear, tells them Sarah is not his wife but his sister. Déjà vu. This time it is with Abimelech, a tribal king in the Negeb, southwest of the Dead Sea. Apparently, Sarah (even in old age) was a pretty good-looking old lady.
Abraham tells Abimelech that Sarah is in fact his half-sister, that they have different mothers, but the same father. This is generally ignored by readers of the Bible, because we don’t want to think that the patriarch of our faith married his half-sister. One safe interpretation of this story was that it was a continuation of his previous lie, and Abraham was still living out of his fear. In this era and culture it was very important to marry within your tribe, so marriage between cousins was common, and marriage between half-siblings was allowed under extreme circumstances, though it was later forbidden in the law of Moses. Regardless, it does not paint a picture of Abraham being a person of consistent faith, but rather one who’s faith undulated, up and down, depending on the circumstances.
Sound like anybody you know? Are Abraham and Sarah people of great faith?
Sarah finally bears a son (Isaac) and the jealousy between her and Hagar flares up again. Now there are two firstborn sons in the household. She once again tells Abraham to cast Hagar and Ishmael out, this time to their pending death in the desert. God hears Ishmael crying (Ishmael means “God hears”) and saves them. They live in the Sinai Peninsula, and God promises that a great nation will emerge from his descendants.
Islam does not emerge for some 2,700 years after Abraham. But when the prophet Mohammed has his vision in the seventh century CE, he is living in Arabia, the same region where Hagar and Ishmael settled. In that sense, the Arabian people are considered descendants of Ishmael. Islam shares regional and cultural ties to Abraham. That is why Abraham is considered the father of three world religions. In chronological order they are:
Judaism 2,000 BCE (through Isaac)
Christianity 33 CE (through Isaac)
Islam 670 CE (through Ishmael)
The Testing of Abraham
If I heard a voice claiming to be God and telling me to take my son up a mountain and sacrifice him as an offering, I would reject it out of hand. In fact, I would check myself into a hospital. My sense of the character of God has no room for such a request. I would venture that most of you feel the same way.
This is a difficult story to digest. Here are four common interpretations:
1. God is putting, what has been up to this point, a contentious relationship to the test. Thus far, Abraham and Sarah’s faith has been an up and down endeavor. Could the point of God’s request be to see if Abraham finally fully trusts in God? If this is the primary interpretation, then notice that Abraham does not question God at all, but simply does what he is asked. This is in stark contrast to the other encounters we have read.
2. Some of the surrounding Mesopotamian religions practiced child sacrifice. This could be a literary device to draw a dramatic distinction between their gods and the God of Abraham.
3. This is a theological foreshadowing of the sacrifice that God will make of his own son for the sins of humanity. Just as Abraham and Sarah have an only son in Isaac, so God gave his only son for the sins of the world. Isaac asks his father where the animal they will be sacrificing will come from, and Abraham says, “God will provide the lamb.” Christians see a fulfillment of this promise when Jesus offers himself as the “lamb of God.”
4. A nonreligious reading takes severe issues with such a story, seeing it as child abuse, and would read it as a dark schizophrenic episode.
As I’ve said previously, religious notions and stories often have more in common with literary and artistic imagination than they do the rational, logical mind. In that sense, these encounters are a kind of dark poetry, full of highly charged symbols, that point to the bigger notions of sacrifice and trust. I don’t discount the darkness, nor the difficulty of them.
Personally, I would have walked away from the relationship had it been me. A typical devotional rendering of the story is that God asks us to surrender everything to him, even the things that God himself promised to provide. This is what one might call “advanced spirituality.” It would be similar to living into a certain vision for your vocation or family that you prayed and worked for decades to achieve, and then once you obtain it you begin to get the sense God wants you to walk away from it. It’s dramatic, but not outside the realm of possibility. This story enlightens and underscores such journeys, but in a very dark way.
Note: In the Islamic telling of this story, it is not Isaac that God asks Abraham to sacrifice, but Ishmael.
Questions for Reflection or Discussion
1. This is a very difficult story to understand. Which of these interpretations do you think is the best and why?