Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text: Ideas
The customs, offices and ideas a first reader knew without being told, what each meant then, and the nearest thing you already know.
Sodom and Gomorrah
The cities of the plain that God destroyed with fire in Lot's day. The prophets and later Jewish teachers made Sodom the byword for wickedness and sudden judgment, and its burned ruins by the Dead Sea were still pointed out in the first century.
A town whose name has become shorthand for disaster. Genesis 19 tells how God rained fire on Sodom and Gomorrah and rescued Lot and his daughters. The later prophets used Sodom as the name for a people gone completely wrong, and Jewish teachers paired it with the generation of the flood as the two great examples of wickedness and judgment. In the first century people could still look at the scorched land by the Dead Sea. What exactly Sodom's sin had been, the ancient writers did not all say in the same way.
Sodom was the epitome of sin in the prophets, who often applied the image to their own people (Deuteronomy 32:32; Isaiah 1:9-10; Ezekiel 16:46-49). Jewish teachers often paired it with the flood generation as the great examples of wickedness. 3 Maccabees 2:5 does so, and the rabbis often do. Sirach 16:7-8 has God not sparing the giants of Noah's day and then Sodom, the same order as 2 Peter 2:4-6. Keener observes that Philo is the exception: hardly any other ancient Jewish writer made the Sodomites' homosexual acts the main charge. Most pointed instead to their inhospitality, their arrogance or sexual immorality in general. Josephus says the Sodomites "grew proud, on account of their riches", were unjust to men and impious toward God. They "hated strangers, and abused themselves with Sodomitical practices" (Antiquities 1.11.1). By the Dead Sea, he writes, "the traces [or shadows] of the five cities are still to be seen", with fruit that turns to smoke and ashes in the hand (War 4.8.4). According to Philo and Wisdom of Solomon 10:7, smoke still rose from the site, and it was taken as a sign of eternal judgment. Jewish tradition was divided over whether Lot was righteous. Most rabbis said he was not, though Genesis shows him personally righteous, and Wisdom of Solomon 10:6 has Wisdom rescue him as the righteous one. Heiser notes that 2 Peter and Jude place the angels' sin before the flood in the same category as Sodom's.
An analogy: a place name that has become a byword for catastrophe. A speaker need only say it for the whole audience to remember what happened there, and why.
Because Sodom was the standard example of a city judged by God, 2 Peter 2:6 can set it beside the fallen angels and the flood as proof that God judges and rescues, and Jude 7 can call it an example of eternal fire. When Jesus warns in Matthew 10:15 that a town refusing his messengers will fare worse than Sodom, he uses the same byword for a place that rejected God's messengers.
Not a byword everyone read the same way. A modern byword carries one agreed story of what happened and why. Ancient writers named Sodom's sins differently, pride, contempt for strangers and sexual sin among them, and the New Testament uses the city first as an example of judgment.
What Jude 7 means by going after strange or other flesh. Wright and Bird read it as the Sodomites' lust for the unnatural flesh of the angelic visitors, and Keener allows that reading, since in the same way as the angels of Jude 6 may imply angels and people having intercourse. Keener and the cultural backgrounds notes also point out that Jewish tradition would not call angels flesh and that the Sodomites did not know their visitors were angels, so that attempted homosexual acts may be in view; the ESV Study Bible takes the phrase as the homosexual activity of Sodom, citing Josephus and Philo.
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- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-passages\/jude-5-7\/","n":"Jude 5-7, Israel in the desert, the angels who left their place, and Sodom","s":"Jude reminds his readers that the Lord who saved a people out of Egypt later destroyed those who did not believe; that the angels who did not keep their position are held in darkness, bound in everlasting chains, for the judgment of the great day; and that Sodom and Gomorrah serve as an example of the punishment of eternal fire.","r":"Jude 5-7"}
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on 2 Peter 2:6, 2:7-8 and 2:9, on Jude 7, and on Matthew 10:14-15
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on 2 Peter 2:4, 2:6, 2:7-8 and 2:9, and on Matthew 10:15
- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.11.1, trans. William Whiston
- Josephus, The Wars of the Jews 4.8.4, trans. William Whiston
- ESV Study Bible, study notes on 2 Peter 2:6 and Jude 7
- N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World, ch. 31, The Argument of Jude, section 3
- Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm, ch. 12, Divine Transgression, section Peter and Jude
