Sodom Burned From Below, Not Just Above

Everyone knows about the fire from the sky. The Torah says God rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah from the heavens (Genesis 19:24). What almost no one knows is what was happening beneath the city at the same moment. Jewish tradition, in texts ranging from the 2nd century BCE to the medieval period, describes a fire that came from below as well, rising out of Gehinnom, the netherworld of punishment. Sodom was caught between two fires, and neither was accidental. Both had been prepared before the world was made.

Was the Fire Beneath Sodom Created Before the World?

Gehinnom is not an afterthought in Jewish cosmology. According to the tradition preserved in Bereshit Rabbah, compiled c. 400–500 CE, Gehinnom was among the seven things created before the world. The Throne of Glory, the Torah, repentance, the Garden of Eden, the Temple, Gehinnom, and the name of the Messiah: all of these preexisted the six days of creation. Gehinnom was not built in response to human sin. It was prepared in advance for sin that was foreseen.

This changes how you read the Sodom story. If Gehinnom existed before the world, and Sodom's fire came partly from Gehinnom, then the punishment of Sodom was not improvised. It was the execution of a sentence that had been written into the structure of reality before Abraham was born, before Canaan was settled, before the Jordan valley was even formed. The lush plain that Lot chose because it looked like Eden was built on top of a fire that had been waiting for it since before Eden itself existed.

What the Rabbis Said About the Fire Beneath

The seven levels of Gehinnom in the midrashic tradition each contain fires of different intensities and types. The deepest levels contain the hottest fires, reserved for the worst transgressions. Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg, drawing on Talmudic and midrashic sources compiled across centuries, describes the fire of Gehinnom as sixty times hotter than ordinary fire, a fire that does not consume but continuously burns.

The connection to Sodom is made explicit in several traditions. The three gates of Gehinnom, according to the 12th-century Chronicles of Jerahmeel compiled by Jerahmeel ben Solomon, open at the sea, in the wilderness, and in inhabited land. The gate in inhabited land opens where wickedness has soaked the ground so thoroughly that the boundary between the upper world and the lower world becomes thin. Sodom, according to these traditions, was exactly that kind of place.

Why Sodom's Wickedness Was Cosmically Unique

The Book of Jubilees, written c. 160–150 BCE, states that God burned Sodom with fire and brimstone and destroyed it until that day, meaning until the author's present. The destruction was total and permanent. The land itself was cursed. But Jubilees does more than report the physical fact. It connects Sodom's punishment to a cosmic principle: certain sins defile the land itself, not just the people who commit them, and a defiled land cannot be purified by anything short of fire.

Jubilees 16 makes the principle explicit: the land cries out when it is defiled, and God hears the cry of the land. This is a specific claim in the text, not a metaphor. The land of Sodom had been saturated with violence, sexual crime, and the deliberate inversion of hospitality into predation for so long that the earth beneath it had become a kind of mouth, open and crying. When God's judgment came, it came from above and the earth opened from below to receive it.

The Zohar and the Fire That Never Stops

The Zohar, first published c. 1280 CE in Castile, Spain, and attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai though likely compiled by Rabbi Moses de Leon, adds a further dimension. In its discussions of divine judgment, the Zohar describes the fire of Gehinnom as a fire that is continuously fed by the energy of human wickedness. Each act of cruelty, each deliberate perversion of the divine image, adds fuel. The Sodomites had been adding fuel for generations.

The Zohar's treatment of the Abraham hospitality narrative is relevant here. The text describes God boring a hole in Gehinnom to release heat onto the earth on the day the angels visited Abraham, to keep travelers off the roads so Abraham could rest. This is not a frightening detail in the Zohar's telling. It is proof that God can open and close the gates of Gehinnom at will, that the fires below are under divine control, not autonomous forces. When those gates opened beneath Sodom, they opened by command.

What the Fire Was Meant to Accomplish

Bereshit Rabbah's description of how God overturned Sodom focuses on the word hafakh, overturned. Rabbi Levi, quoting Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman, describes the inversion as structural: the city was literally turned upside down, its foundations exposed to the sky, its streets buried underground. The fire from above and the fire from below met in the middle and consumed everything.

The rabbis were not describing this to frighten their audiences into obedience. They were making a claim about how the creation works: that Gehinnom is not separate from the world but built into it, that its fires are available as instruments of justice when justice has been exhausted every other way, and that those fires were prepared before the world so that they would be ready exactly when Sodom was ready for them. Creation included its own correction mechanism. Sodom, in the end, triggered it.