PART
TWO
Sodom is guilty of great wickedness.
Ezekiel
16:49 Behold, this was the iniquity of
thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her
and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and
needy. 50 And they were haughty, and
committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.
We will be shocked
at the homosexual gang rape threatened by the men of Sodom coming soon but the
Bible shows this wickedness was not unique to Sodom. The men of Gibeah,
Israelites of the tribe of Benjamin, will threaten the same and then commit
heterosexual rape and murder on a Levite’s concubine in Judges 19. We must
understand that this world’s religious and social system was fraught with
sexuality and power/domination rituals such as gang rape to enforce the power
of a group of people over even a stranger passing through.
From Sodom we get
the word sodomite for a male temple
prostitute in contrast to a whore
which denotes a female temple prostitute.
Deuteronomy
23:17 There shall be no whore of the
daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel.18 Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or
the price of a dog, into the house of the LORD thy God for any vow: for even
both these are abomination unto the LORD thy God.
Even
today, in some quarters, a male prostitute is called a dog in slang.
Men would enter a
pagan temple in the Ancient Near East and toss a coin into a temple
prostitute’s lap to have sex with them as part of their worship of Baal and
Ishtar. Greek writers, Herodotus and Lucian, tell us of this practice as a
symbol of Ishtar’s union with Tammuz. It is evident from the Bible that this
was the form of worship that God abhorred and wanted erased.
So, Sodom was
proud, rich, lazy, and without compassion for the poor, passing on the
perverted religious practices of the age that probably started at Babel or even
more likely from the fallen sons of God in the Pre-Flood world who found the
daughters of men desirable. It is even noted in some sources that every woman
who came of age was expected to visit a temple to act as a religious prostitute
at least once.
Temple
prostitution even plays a part in the Greco-Roman world of Paul and the early
Christians. Certainly, the thousand short-haired temple prostitutes at the
Temple of Aphrodite in nearby Acro-Corinth had an impact on the Corinthians
church’s requirement that their women have long-hair so as not to be confused
with a temple prostitute. Read 1Corinthians 11:1-16 but pay attention to verse
16 that shows this was not necessarily an issue with other Christian churches.
Abraham pleads
with God most likely for the sake of his nephew, Lot, and God promises that if
there are just ten righteous men in this city he will spare it. Apparently,
even that is too much to ask of Sodom. Lot, who it is later revealed is
disgusted by the behavior of the people of the city he has chosen to abide in,
will be saved from its judgment.
2Peter
2:6 And turning the cities of Sodom and
Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample
unto those that after should live ungodly; 7 ¶
And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the
wicked: 8 (For that righteous man
dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day
to day with their unlawful deeds;) 9 The
Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the
unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished:
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