Jimmy Akin

A reader writes:

I have a question about Ezekiel 16:48-50

    48  As I live, says the Lord GOD, I swear that your sister Sodom, with her daughters, has not done as you and your daughters have done!
49  And look at the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were proud, sated with food, complacent in their prosperity, and they gave no help to the poor and needy.
50  Rather, they became haughty and committed abominable crimes in my presence; then, as you have seen, I removed them.

It appears from this that guilt of Sodom was a type of moral complacency and indifference towards the less fortunate. How does the Church understand this vis-a-vis the usual description of the sin of Sodom?  Is it that the gluttony and apathy of Ezk 16:49 causes or is merely correlated to the prevalence of sexual sin?  Or could it be that these attributes, along with concupiscence, are emblematic of a narcissistic or solipsistic culture, which is disgraceful in the sight of God? Any commentary would be greatly appreciated.

Although you don’t bring out the point explicitly, I gather that what you are dealing with here is a common argument from homosexual apologists who wish to discount the Sodom narrative as an example of the biblical rejection of homosexuality. The strategy employed is to take passages like this one and use it to argue that the sin of Sodom was some kind of callous inhospitality rather than homosexuality (and homosexual rape in particular).

That argument is total nonsense.

First, let’s look at the structure of the passage in question. Verse 49 starts by listing different things that the Sodomites should have done but failed to do: (a) they were proud, (b) they were gluttonous, (b) they were  complacent in prosperity, and (d) they didn’t give thought to the poor. These are indeed marks of a decaded and self-indulgent lifestyle. But does it follow that one can reduce what is mentioned in the next verse ("they became haughty and committed abominable crimes in my presence") to simply these?

No.

A feature of the text that is not clear in English is that the material in verse 50 simply continues the chain of offenses begun in verse 49. Hebrew is different than English in the way that it handles long strings of conjoined elements. In English, especially in literary English, we don’t keep sticking "and" between elements in a list. Thus we don’t say "I went to the store and bought corn AND peas AND bread AND milk AND meat." What we do–at least in written English–is drop all the "and"s except the last: "I went to the store and bought, corn, peas, break, milk, and meat."

Hebrew doesn’t have that rule, though. It has a much greater tolerance to simply prefixing "and" on the front of each element in the chain. ("And" in Hebrew simply being a prefix you stick on the front of a word.) To give the passage over again, with more attention to preserving the Hebrew word order:

Behold, this is the iniquity of Sodom your sister: arrogancy, fulness of bread, and quiet ease have belonged to her and her daughters, AND the hand of the afflicted and needy she hath not strengthened. AND they are haughty AND they commit abomination before me, AND I take them away as you saw.

The committing of abomination is thus the capping incident in a chain of offenses that led to their being taken away by the Lord. Because of the construction of the passage, the abominations that Sodom committed are not to be  read as simply a restatement of things earlier in the list. If I say, "She committed W and X and Y and Z," the natural understanding of Z is that it is a new and additional item not previously covered in the list. The homosexual activist’s attempt to reduce Sodom’s commission of abominations to just a proud and uncharitable attitude goes against the structure of the text.

The reference to committing abomination in the passage itself, though, is ambiguous. If we just had this passage, we wouldn’t know what the abomination was. Indeed, we wouldn’t even know who Sodom was from this passage. But the text occurs in the broader context of the Hebrew literary tradition, and if we want to understand it, we have to draw upon that tradition.

The tradition makes it clear–following the keystone text concerning Sodom in Genesis–that Sodom was a city known for attempting to committing homosexual rape on travellers, an act which immediately preceded its destruction (also referred to in Ezek. 16:50). The natural understanding of the text is thus that the homosexual rape was the abomination that the text is referring to.

Now, an activist could try a fallback position and argue that it was the rape that was the problem here, not the homosexuality, but this would suppose that the Hebrews put homosexuality and rape in two different categories, the first being non-abomination and the second being abominable. This is simply unsustainable from what else we know about ancient Hebrew mores.

If you look at passages like Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, you’ll see that homosexuality is specifically called "abomination" (the same word as in Ezekiel 16:50). So the idea that the Hebrew ethical tradition viewed homosexuality as a-okay but rape as a no-no is simply wrong. They were both abomination, and combining the two was doubly abominable–the kind of thing that could, y’know, get your city destroyed by God or something.

The natural understanding of Ezekiel 16:49-50 is that Sodom was characterized by a bunch of decadent and self-indulgent sins that eventually led it to commit abomination before God, leading him to destroy it–the abomination in question being understood as homosexual rape in a literary allusion to the Sodom narrative in Genesis, where attempted homosexual rape is presented as confirming the iniquity of the city for the angelic messengers and being the final straw that results in its destruction.