Sodom and Gomorrah – Valuing obesity over charity

No matter how you look at it, what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah was pretty terrible

In Ezekiel chapter 16, Ezekiel serves as the mouthpiece of the Lord, directly conveying the words of God to us from the dust of ages past. The chapter focuses primarily on the people of Jerusalem and how awful they were for worshiping other gods. You can read more about it here.

The focus of this post is not about how God chose to punish the sinners of Jerusalem 2,500 years ago. Instead, I’d like to introduce a piece of often overlooked wisdom.

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. (Ezekiel 16:49, JKV)

Here’s the deal: back, like forever ago, Jehovah rained down fire from heaven to destroy the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s pretty generally accepted that Sodom was destroyed because Jehovah doesn’t like sodomy. In fact, that’s where the word sodomy originates. Of course the bible never actually specifies the act of anal sex, but there is this bit in Sodom where a mob of unruly men attempted (unsuccessfully) to gang rape a couple of angels. That happened after Jehovah had already decided to destroy the city though. You can read more about it here.



The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah - Pieter Schoubroeck (16th century)

Words like “iniquity” and “abomination” are used to describe why Sodom was destroyed. Those are pretty general, but Christians in general think the word “abomination” refers to anal sex. The only thing I can think of that could drive the association is the attempted gang rape. However, there is TONS of rape in the bible and a fair amount of it is gang rape. None of those other places of rape got torched; presumably because it was guy on girl rape, but I’m not entirely convinced.


This Levite just found his concubine on the doorstep, where she
managed to drag herself before dying after a long night
of especially brutal rape by a gang of biblical miscreants



The only place in the bible I can find that uses really specific language to describe the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah is in the above quoted scripture where The Great God Himself says the iniquity (or abomination) of Sodom was pride, gluttony, laziness, and a failure to care properly for the poor and needy.

Yeah, Jehovah totally torched Sodom and Gomorrah because the non-poor were fat and lazy while the poor went hungry.

Note: according to the USDA, almost 15% of American households experience “food insecurity” every year. These households are uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.

  

Please take the time to visit http://feedingamerica.org/ or http://thehungersite.greatergood.com/ to learn how you can help combat hunger.