How Sodom Became a City That Deserved Destruction

The sin of Sodom was not a single act of violence. It was a legal system.

The Book of Jasher, a second-century pseudepigraphical text, gives us Sodom's law code in detail that is almost comic in its precision and almost unbearable in its implications. Four judges administered four cities. Their names were Serak, Sharkad, Zabnac, and Menon. Eliezer, Abraham's servant, had a name for each of them: Liar, Habitual Liar, Fabricator, and Perverter of Justice. He had met them personally. He knew.

The bed law was this: if a stranger came to the city, the judges had beds installed in the public square. The stranger was laid on the bed and measured. Too short, six men stretched him until he reached the gates of death. Too long, the sides were folded in. Either way, when he cried out, the judges replied: this is what we do to those who come into our land. Word spread. Strangers stopped coming.

The money law was more elegant. If a poor man arrived, every resident of the city gave him silver or gold -- lavishly, generously, until the man felt he had stumbled into a place of abundance. Then a proclamation went out: sell this man nothing. No bread, no water. When he died of starvation, the residents came back and retrieved their coins. If the dead man still had clothes worth fighting over, they fought over them and left the body in the desert under a shrub. The Ginzberg tradition, drawing on this same layer of midrashic elaboration in Legends of the Jews, describes a valley outside the city where the people gathered four times a year for feasts that descended into organized depravity. They did this openly and returned home as if nothing had happened.

Then there was the case of Paltith.

Paltith was Lot's daughter, born after the war of the four kings -- named for deliverance, because God had delivered her father from captivity. She had married a man of Sodom and lived inside the system. When a poor man appeared in the city and she found him starving in the street, she began to feed him in secret. Every day she walked to the well with her water jar, put bread at the bottom, drew water over it, walked past the man and handed him the bread through the pitcher. For weeks she kept him alive this way.

The Sodomites noticed. A man cannot stay alive that long without eating. They watched. They caught her. The judges condemned her: she had violated the law by giving. Her sentence was burning. The Ginzberg account says her cry rose to heaven.

In the city of Admah, a young woman gave water to a traveler who was resting outside her father's house. She was caught. Her sentence was different: the judges had her anointed with honey and placed near a beehive. She cried out until she died. That cry also rose to heaven.

This is what the tradition means by Sodom's sin. Not a single monstrous event but a civic architecture built to make mercy a crime. The Book of Jasher's account of the three angels who came to Abraham before the destruction is a deliberate mirror: Abraham ran out to greet strangers, pressed them to rest, killed a calf, made bread, set a feast. Sodom had beds designed to torture strangers to death. These two households stood on opposite ends of the same question: what do you owe a person who shows up at your door?

God sent two of the angels to Sodom and one back to heaven. Lot sat at the city gate -- the traditional place of a judge -- and recognized the angels for what they were, or at least recognized something in them that required hospitality. He brought them home and fed them. That night, the men of Sodom surrounded the house. Every man of the city, the Book of Jasher says, young and old, all of them. What happened next confirmed the verdict that had already been pronounced.

The angels led Lot and his family out by the hand. The text of (Genesis 19) says they seized their hands, pulled them, urged them: flee for your lives. Look back and you will die. Lot's wife looked back. The tradition differs on why. The Ginzberg tradition says her compassion moved her -- she had daughters still in Sodom, and she turned to see what was happening to them. The fire fell while she was still turned. She became salt. The oxen came daily to lick her, and each morning she rose again.

Fire and brimstone fell from the sky. The five cities burned. Abraham rose early the next morning to look out from Mamre and saw smoke rising from the plain like smoke from a furnace. The cities he had rescued goods from, the cities his nephew had chosen over his company, the cities that had perfected the legal murder of mercy -- they were ash.

The Book of Jubilees, composed in the second century BCE, draws the lesson bluntly: God burned them because they had abundance and refused to sustain the poor and the needy. The sin was not only what they did. It was what they refused to do with what they had.