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| From the Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel, 1493 |
The name appears in Genesis 10:19; 13:10; 14:2; 18:16 and many others, e.g. Deuteronomy 32:32, Isaiah 1:9.
Usually rendered as Sodom in English, it is now taken to mean "burning" or "conflagration"; though this is probably a case of retrospective aetiology, based upon the myth, especially as there is no etymological base whatever to this definition; no root that can be found. We have seen numerous examples of the Bible Redactor doing the same thing, so why not for the modern translators and commentators?
Genesis 10:19 etc make it a city in the valley of Sidim (שדים), and this is odd; normally when towns and regions and names of kings are linked in this way, the spelling also coincides, yet here Sedom (סדם) has a Samech (ס) but Sidim (שדים) a Seen (ש).
Sidim is elsewhere given as Emek Ha Sidim (עמק השדים) = "the valley of the plains", treating Sidim correctly as the plural of Sadeh (שדה) = "a field", or more specifically "a meadow". The area is dominated by the Dead Sea, but we do not know how long that sea has been dead - which is to say: at what point did the significant salt and potash deposits appear that have rendered the sea incapable of generating marine life? Was it still alive in patriarchal times, and if so, can we presume that, like the Nile and the Euphrates, it was subject to annual flooding, whence the land surrounding it became "a valley of water meadows", as Emek Ha Sidim should be translated? What caused the sea to die? Was there originally an outlet through the southern Aravah and the Negev to the Gulf of Aqaba, which became silted up by the vast amounts of bitumen that are still to this day eroding the borders of the Dead Sea (there are now islands appearing in its midst; it will soon, like the Aral, disappear into desert altogether)?
And if there was annual flooding, which at some point destroyed habitations (Gomorrah, or properly Amorah, means "a habitation"), are we then dealing with a Yisra-Eli Atlantis, an alternate flood legend set in this case beneath the Dead Sea?
Genesis 10:19 etc make it a city in the valley of Sidim (שדים), and this is odd; normally when towns and regions and names of kings are linked in this way, the spelling also coincides, yet here Sedom (סדם) has a Samech (ס) but Sidim (שדים) a Seen (ש).
Sidim is elsewhere given as Emek Ha Sidim (עמק השדים) = "the valley of the plains", treating Sidim correctly as the plural of Sadeh (שדה) = "a field", or more specifically "a meadow". The area is dominated by the Dead Sea, but we do not know how long that sea has been dead - which is to say: at what point did the significant salt and potash deposits appear that have rendered the sea incapable of generating marine life? Was it still alive in patriarchal times, and if so, can we presume that, like the Nile and the Euphrates, it was subject to annual flooding, whence the land surrounding it became "a valley of water meadows", as Emek Ha Sidim should be translated? What caused the sea to die? Was there originally an outlet through the southern Aravah and the Negev to the Gulf of Aqaba, which became silted up by the vast amounts of bitumen that are still to this day eroding the borders of the Dead Sea (there are now islands appearing in its midst; it will soon, like the Aral, disappear into desert altogether)?
And if there was annual flooding, which at some point destroyed habitations (Gomorrah, or properly Amorah, means "a habitation"), are we then dealing with a Yisra-Eli Atlantis, an alternate flood legend set in this case beneath the Dead Sea?
We cannot ignore two other aspects. First, the tale of Lot's wife being turned to a pillar of salt, a tale which most scholars prefer to see as an aetiological legend to explain some natural phenomenon - a piece of salt-sculpture in the rocks that looks like a woman's body perhaps. But similarities to the tale of Orpheus in the underworld mitigate against this.
Secondly, the role of Lot in the destruction itself, the coming of the "angels" to warn him, the strange incest with his daughters in the cave of Tso'ar afterwards. The destruction of Sedom belongs to this myth, and it must be treated as a whole, not several unconnected parts. See my commentaries on the Genesis text.
Secondly, the role of Lot in the destruction itself, the coming of the "angels" to warn him, the strange incest with his daughters in the cave of Tso'ar afterwards. The destruction of Sedom belongs to this myth, and it must be treated as a whole, not several unconnected parts. See my commentaries on the Genesis text.
What was the sin of Sedom and the other four cities of the plain? Not what we think of as sodomy - so why did that name come to fit? The answer to that lies with Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin in the late 4th century CE, the edition known as the Vulgate. It was Jerome who made the supposition that the sin of Sedom was "sodomy", expressing the view in a series of letters with a priest named Amandus in 395 CE; a surprising conclusion from a Biblical scholar, who would surely have known that the Prophet Yechezke-El had said that "this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy" (Ezekiel 16:49).
But even that is not the full answer, because Jerome's "sodomy" did not mean anal sex, any more than it meant homosexuality, though it was understood to mean the latter for many centuries, and became the former primarily through the pornographic writings of the Marquis de Sade; to Jerome, any sexual encounter outside marriage was "sodomy", including pre-marital sex and homosexuality. At what point the insult against the people of Sedom switched to an insult against the people of Bulgaria (the root of the verb "to bugger") is unclear, but it is known that the change happened in French. After which, at some point, probably in the 19th century, anal sex with a woman came to be known as sodomy, and anal sex with a man as buggery, though in legal parlance these distinctions do not generally apply.
For my near certainty that the destruction of the Five Cities, and the bitumen-destruction of the Dead Sea, were both the consequence of a massive volcanic eruption at some earlier point of history, see my commentaries on both the Lot story (Genesis 19) and the Mosaic journey to Mount Sinai (Exodus 13:21 ff).
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