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Sins of Sodom: Wealth and Nomos
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Authored by Frank Redmond, 2006
I. This paper illustrates how the sins of Sodom have been interpreted by Rabbi Eliezer, on the one hand, and by Philo, on the other hand. But, first, I will outline what the sins of Sodom are in the Book of Genesis in order to give the original perspective. In the telling of Genesis, two major “sins” appear in the text – anal penetration and inhospitality, with the latter being more important than the former. In support, Genesis says, “Bring them out to us that we may have intimacies with them” (Gen. 19.5) and “But do not do anything to these men, for you know that they have come under the shelter of my roof” (Gen. 19.8). What is clear from these verses is that 1). the townsmen wanted to have anal relations with the two angels of God and that 2). the townsmen have breached the guest-host relationship by barraging in on a private gathering between Lot and the two angels. I say that that guest-host relationship’s violation is more substantial than the anal penetration because it is only after this breach has occurred that God’s wrath is unleashed upon the two cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Prior to the violation, there is no indication that the cities will be completely destroyed. For even after the townsmen wanted to have anal relations with the angels, Genesis is silent regarding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Note that there is not a single thread which ties the two sins together. We are never told the reason why Sodom is such a sinful city. (This is something Rabbi Eliezer and Philo later focus attention on).
While the view adumbrated by Genesis is the original perspective, interpreters like Rabbi Eliezer and Philo have differing perspectives. In a nutshell, Rabbi Eliezer considers the sins of Sodom to have occurred due to the Sodomites wealth. It is because of their great wealth that great injustices occur. On the other hand, Philo considers the Sin of Sodom to be multiple sins all tied together through the idea of the violation of nomos. In other words, when the Sodomites commit their sins, it is because they violate the rule of nomos. Note that Philo is also particularly concerned with sexual sin and depravity. These theses will be explained further below. The questions that need to be asked of the two interpreters, Rabbi Eliezer and Philo, are: What is the sin that the Sodomites commit? Are there multiple sins? And, if so, what idea ties them all together?
II. Rabbi Eliezer first indicates that the Sodomites were “wealthy men of prosperity” (PRE XXV:4). He says, using a quote from Job, that the Sodomites had “dust of gold” (Job 28:6). And like the Garden of Eden, Sodom was loaded with precious stones and pearls of great price. Rabbi Eliezer comments that it is this wealth which causes the Sodomites to sin. The Sodomites have forgotten how to trust in the Creator and instead trusted in their wealth. Rabbi Eliezer uses Psalm xlix:6 as proof: “They that trust in their wealth”. What is apparent is that Rabbi Eliezer is filling in the background details of the story. He desires to discover the reason why the Sodomites were so sinful to begin with. So Rabbi Eliezer points to their wealth as the cause of their sins. It is wealth, as we shall see, that ties all the sins of Sodom together for Rabbi Eliezer.
This wealth had repercussions; it caused the people of Sodom to refuse charity to their neighbors. As it says, “The men of Sodom had no consideration for the honor of their Owner by not distributing food to the wayfarer and the stranger, but they even fenced in all the trees on top above their fruit so that they should not be seized” (PRE XXV:5). In this parable-like sentence, the Owner is God. The people of Sodom have dishonored God by not giving out charitables to these strangers and wayfarers, and even worse, they were so selfish they fenced in their fruit. Furthermore, these same strangers and wayfarers were persecuted by the Sodomite judges due to their perverse judgments. Rabbi Eliezer uses Ezekiel for his proof: “They have oppressed the stranger without judgment” (Ezek. 22:29). Another repercussion of this wealth is that those who show charity will be burnt by fire (PRE XXV:8). Once, a woman gave water to a poor man in Sodom and the people of Sodom declared that she should be burnt by fire! It is said that Lot, too, was afraid of the men of Sodom, so much so that he did not venture out during the day but only under the cover of darkness (PRE XXV:10). Next, Rabbi Eliezer mentions the young men who wanted to sodomize the two angels in Lot’s house. He says that the young men saw the angels, so they gathered around Lot’s house “to do according to their wont, even deeds of sodomy” (PRE XXV:12). But the angels smote them with blindness. This facet of Rabbi Eliezer’s account is in line with what occurs in Genesis.
The Sodomites, according to Rabbi Eliezer, commit multiple sins, many of which are not mentioned in Genesis. The idea that wealth is the cause of all these sins is not found in Genesis. In Genesis, Sodom is an abstract city where the only known problem is that it is sinful. Rabbi Eliezer colors in this picture by telling us wealth is the key which ties all the sins together. The only reference to Genesis is when Rabbi Eliezer keys in on the young men who wanted to sodomize the angels. But this episode is not the major focus of Rabbi Eliezer’s chapter. In fact, Rabbi Eliezer pulls many of his ideas from Ezekiel. It is interesting that Rabbi Eliezer uses Ezekiel for a few of his proofs, since Ezekiel’s view of Sodom is analogous to his own. Ezekiel, too, believes that Sodom suffered from prosperity and haughtiness. As it is said: “Behold, this is the iniquity of your sister Sodom; pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy” (Ezek. 16:49). Likewise, Rabbi Eliezer uses Job to prove that the Sodomites were corrupted by their wealth. So to back up his ideas, Rabbi Eliezer uses biblical sources like Ezekiel, Job, and the Psalms. It is from these sources that he gets his main ideas.
Rabbi Eliezer’s conception of Sodom revolves around wealth. Using Sodom as a paradigm, Rabbi Eliezer is making a commentary on the use and abuse of wealth. Perhaps Rabbi Eliezer is developing this commentary for a sympathetic audience that saw the abuse of wealth on a daily basis. By backing up his ideas about wealth with a biblical story, Rabbi Eliezer gains credibility for his ideas. It is very likely that these stories that Rabbi Eliezer casts onto the Sodomites were true life examples from the times Rabbi Eliezer lived in. It is very believable that someone would, for instance, fence off their fruit so wayfarers could not get a hold of it. Or that judges would oppress strangers due to their corruption. It is likely that oppression of the poor was rampant in Rabbi Eliezer’s time. And this is why Ezekiel and Job, rather than Genesis, proved to be such great sources for Rabbi Eliezer. Genesis provided him with the framework and Ezekiel, Job, and the Psalms provided him with the data by which he could develop his ideas. It is this desire to comment on the conditions of his time that motivates Rabbi Eliezer.
III. Philo has a particularly interesting slant on what caused the sins of Sodom to occur. For Philo, the Sodomites “threw off their necks the law of nature (ton tes physeos nomon)” (Philo, On Abraham 135). The key word that Philo uses here is nomos, which means in Greek both law and custom. So what caused the sins of Sodom were the violations of the philosophical idea of nomos. For instance, in his text, On Abraham, Philo describes a Sodom having gone out of control, having broke the nomos of nature, by “deep drinking of strong liquor and dainty feeding and forbidden forms of intercourse” (Philo, On Abraham 135). What is clear is that there are a plethora of sins mentioned here that are not found in Genesis. This is because Philo considers things like drunkenness, gluttony, and forbidden forms of intercourse to all be violations of nomos. And since the Genesis account has no idea of nomos in it, all these sins are Philo’s interpolation. Philo interpolates even more sins into the Genesis account. When talking about male sex, he says, “Not only in their mad lust for women did they violate the marriages of their neighbors, but also men mounted males without respect for the sex nature which the active partner shares with the passive; and so when they tried to beget children they were discovered to be incapable of any but a sterile seed” (Philo, On Abraham 135). It is evident that Philo is developing these sins as a response to Genesis 19.5 – “Bring them out to us that we may have intimacies with them”. In a way, Philo is trying, through his idea of the violation of nomos, to fill in the background details of Genesis 19.5. Philo makes Sodom out to be this sexualized city where men lust for their neighbors’ wives, men mounted other men with no regard to their stature, and all this chaotic sexual activity somehow leads to sterility. Philo also states that Sodom is a cesspool where men contract venereal diseases because they engage in homosexual relationships. According to Philo, these are all violations of nomos and that is why they are all sins that the Sodomites commit.
Philo is writing for his own times when he condemns homosexual relationships and pederasty by using the sins of Sodom and the idea of nomos as his basis. What is at stake is the purity of the Jews in the face of Gentile groups, notably, the Greeks. Philo, to a certain extent, condemns homosexual relationships and pederasty because the Greeks (mainly the Athenians) practiced this sort of behavior. Philo sees in Plato’s and Xenophon’s “symposia” nothing but homosexual and pederastic depravity. Although Philo idolizes the Greeks and their civilization, he detests their acceptance of such impure acts. As such, Philo is motivated by a desire to educate his audience about the sexual depravity of the Sodomites, as well as by a desire to show that violating nomos is the way of sin. He uses the Sodomites as a paradigm for this lesson.
As we have seen already with Rabbi Eliezer, it is a very tempting to try to determine what caused the Sodomites to sin. It seems that Philo is saying that once the Sodomites got a taste of what it is like to violate nomos, then they proceeded to spiral down and got more and more sinful as time went on. In the text On Abraham, Philo first says that the Sodomites were taken in by strong liquor and dainty food, relatively minor sins. But as time went on, they proceeded to become less inhibited as they began to commit, in the eyes of Philo, more heinous sins like homosexuality and pederasty.
But the question remains: why did Philo use nomos as the concept that ties the sins together? I suspect that Philo took his queue from his Greek philosophical education. He saw how philosophers like Plato and Aristotle used the idea of nomos in their texts and wished to use nomos in biblical interpretation in the same capacity. Philo wished to elevate the biblical story and turn it into a paradigmatic, philosophical lesson.
IV. Rabbi Eliezer and Philo agree on certain things. It is clear that both fail to acknowledge the major sin of the Genesis account: the guest-host relationship breach. While both make reference to the sin of anal penetration, both completely ignore the fact that the men of Sodom barrage in on a private gathering and this causes the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. This shows that sexual sin is more important to both authors than the guest-host relationship.
Both authors also make sure to tie the various sins the Sodomites commit in their accounts to one thread, whether that is wealth or the violation of nomos. They could have both just listed sins with no regard to what ties them together or what caused them to occur. How the two authors come up with their ideas is vastly different, but their methodology is the same.
Both subscribe to the idea that the Sodomites suffered from a downward spiral effect. In both interpretations, the Sodomites get a taste of sin and they commit more and more sins as time goes on (or at least that is what can be intuited from Philo’s interpretation). Both believe in some type of root cause for their sins, whether that is wealth or the violation of nomos.
Also, both authors do their best to color in the abstract city of Sodom. Rabbi Eliezer interpolates a bunch of sins and provides a background root cause for these sins, wealth. Philo, too, interpolates sins into the account. He takes Genesis 19.5 and spins his ideas off that verse. So instead of just finding townsmen desiring anal penetration, we find homosexual relationships, adultery, pederasty, and things like venereal diseases.
However, there are glaring differences between the two. Most obviously is Philo’s focus on sexual sins. Philo does present other sins, namely the drinking of liquor and dainty feeding, but these are almost an afterthought. Philo is solely focused on sex and the repercussions of sexual sin. Rabbi Eliezer does mention homosexuality, but it makes up a very small portion of his text. It is by no means the most important part of the text. Likewise, Rabbi Eliezer’s focus on injustice and the abuse of wealth does not even cross Philo’s mind. Philo is too focused on how to explain Genesis 19.5 that he completely ignores the testimony given by such authors as Ezekiel and Job.
Likewise, Philo’s focus on nomos is unique to his text. Nowhere in Rabbi Eliezer is there any discussion of sin being unlawful or what is against custom. Sin to Rabbi Eliezer is unjust, but not unlawful. It is only in Philo that the reader gets the sense that everything the Sodomites do is a violation of nomos. This is in line with Philo philosophical perspective. Rabbi Eliezer has a Midrashic perspective and that is why it is important to find proofs from the Bible and not from external sources.
This may be obvious, but the two have differing sources upon which they orientate their interpretation. Philo takes his queue from the Greeks and their idea of nomos, while Rabbi Eliezer finds his material in the Biblical books of Ezekiel, Job, and the Psalms. Throughout their respective texts, it is easy to see how these sources influence their interpretations.
WORKS CITED
Philo. “On Abraham”. Early Christian Writings. 2007. 3 Nov. 2007 <http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book22.html>. Rabbi Eliezer. “The Sin of Sodom”. Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer. Sepher Hermon Pr; 4th edition. 1981.