The Well of Sodom Waited at Shittim

Shittim had a spring. The Israelites drank from it. That is the whole story, or the beginning of it, because what the rabbis knew about that spring changed the meaning of everything that followed in Numbers 25.

The spring at Shittim was called, in the tradition preserved by Legends of the Jews, the Well of Lewdness. Louis Ginzberg, assembling the rabbinic sources between 1909 and 1938, recorded the tradition that this particular water source had once been the primary water supply of Sodom itself. The same spring. The same water. After Sodom was destroyed by fire and sulfur, the spring remained. The ground around it was ruins. The cities that had drawn from it were ash and salt. No one went near it for generations. No one dared.

Then Israel arrived at the border of Canaan and camped at Shittim. They needed water. They found it. They drank.

The Ginzberg tradition is careful about what it claims the water did. It does not say the water was physically different. It does not describe a poison or an intoxicant. What it says is that before the Israelites drank from Shittim's spring, the people were known for their chastity. After, they were not. The change was not instantaneous. The change took the form of the sequence described in Numbers 25: the encounter with the Moabite women, the wine in the tents, the worship of Peor. But the tradition roots that sequence in the water the people had been drinking, in the invisible residue of what that spring had witnessed and nourished in its earlier life.

The Zohar, published in Castile, Spain, around 1280 CE, develops the concept of what might be called spiritual contamination through place. Certain locations retain the spiritual quality of what happened in them. Sodom was not simply a city that was destroyed. It was a city that had institutionalized cruelty as law, that had made inhospitality the basis of its social contract, that had organized its entire civic life around the principle that the stranger deserved to suffer. The wicked judges of Sodom, as preserved in the Ginzberg texts, were not simply corrupt. They were systematic. The destruction that came from heaven was not punishment for ordinary wickedness but for wickedness that had been elevated into principle.

That Sodom's water still ran somewhere was, in the rabbinic imagination, a remaining thread of connection between the destroyed city and the living world. The Midrash Rabbah traditions on Bereishit, the 5th-century Palestinian commentary on Genesis, record that Sodom's sin was the sin of abundance: the city was so wealthy, so geographically blessed, that it decided abundance was for locals only. The water that had nourished that wealth, the spring that had made the land of Sodom, in the Torah's own description, like the garden of God (Genesis 13:10), carried something of that original disposition.

The Talmud Bavli (tractate Sanhedrin, 6th-century Babylon) discusses Sodom as one of the places that lost its share in the World to Come entirely. The destruction was complete and the judgment was final. But the water ran on. Water does not hold a share in the World to Come or lack one. It runs where the ground takes it. And the ground had taken it, eventually, to Shittim.

The tradition in Legends of the Jews records that the Well of Lewdness will only lose its power in the Messianic era, when the world is finally healed. This is not a hopeful ending exactly. It is an honest one. The damage done by what happened at Shittim, the twenty-four thousand who died in the plague, the rupture in Israel's relationship with God that required Pinchas's drastic intervention to close, was not reversed by punishing the perpetrators. Some things run too deep for punishment to reach. They run down through the ground and wait at the spring until someone comes along who is thirsty enough to drink without asking where the water comes from. They wait for the Messianic era, when the world will be remade at its foundations and the old springs will run dry at last.

Israel arrived at Shittim with a cloud of glory over them and a history of miracles behind them and the promised land visible in the distance. They were at the border of everything God had promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They found a spring and they drank. No one told them what the spring had watered before.