Sodom Had Judges and Laws and Beds Designed to Mutilate Strangers

The Welcome at the Gate

A stranger came to Sodom. Perhaps he had heard it was wealthy. Perhaps the road simply passed through it. At the gate, or in the street, or wherever the city received its visitors, he encountered the procedure. Six men brought the bed. The city kept several of them, positioned in the streets for exactly this purpose. They measured the visitor. If he was shorter than the bed, six men took his limbs and stretched him until he fit, until the joints screamed and the screaming stopped, until whatever was too short had been corrected by force. If he was taller than the bed, they hacked off whatever extended past the frame. Either way, he fit the bed when they were finished with him.

"Thus shall it be done to a man who comes into our land."

Not a mob. An official procedure. A welcome ritual administered with civic authority by men appointed to positions of judicial power.

The Judges and Their Names

The city had four judges: Serak, Sharkad, Zabnac, and Menon. The tradition remembered these names because Abraham's servant Eliezer was said to have given each of them a nickname that summarized their character. The Hebrew words he chose translated roughly as Liar, Ultimate Liar, Fabricator, and Perverter of Justice. The nicknames stuck. Eliezer had looked at the legal system of Sodom and named it precisely.

These were the men who decided cases. Their names in the texts are effectively a verdict on the institution they represented. A judicial system whose judges are named Falsehood and Fraud by the first decent person who encountered them is not a justice system that went wrong. It was a corruption system that wore the costume of law.

Generosity as a Death Sentence

The beds were the most famous policy, but not the only one. The judges of Sodom had worked out a system for handling the poor that was particularly refined in its cruelty. When a poor man came to Sodom, every resident would give him silver and gold. Coins with the donor's name stamped on them, passed over with apparent generosity. The poor man collected them. Then the judges issued a ruling: it was forbidden to sell him bread. He could walk around the city carrying silver stamped with the names of every person who had given it to him, unable to buy food, and he would die of hunger in a city full of people who had officially welcomed him with gifts.

When he died, the donors would come and collect their coins back. His body had served the additional function of a temporary storage facility for their wealth.

The War That Came Before the Fire

Sodom's destruction was not the first catastrophe that visited it. Before the angels came with their fire, four kings came with eight hundred thousand men. The tradition elaborated on this coalition in detail: Amraphel, Arioch, Chedorlaomer, Tidal. Four kings against five. The five kings of the plain, including the king of Sodom, had served the coalition for twelve years. In the thirteenth year they rebelled. In the fourteenth year the four kings came back to settle the matter, and what followed was a rout. The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fell in the bitumen pits of the valley while their armies scattered into the hills.

Abraham rescued Lot in that war, chasing the four kings with his trained men and recovering the captives. The king of Sodom came out to meet Abraham afterward and offered him the goods. Abraham refused. Not one thread, not one sandal strap. He did not want the king of Sodom to be able to say he had made Abraham rich. Even rescue did not create an obligation to take anything from this city.

The Arrogance That Called Down Fire

The tradition that examined Sodom's destruction from every angle kept returning to the same root. The beds and the judges and the system for starving the poor were symptoms. The disease was arrogance. The city had resources: wealth, agricultural fertility, trade routes, a strong defensive position. It had decided that this abundance was entirely its own achievement and that the obligations created by wealth, the obligations toward the stranger, the poor, the traveler, simply did not apply inside its walls. What happened to visitors in Sodom was not disorder. It was the logical conclusion of a society that had decided its comfort was the only value that mattered.