A Place With a King and a Fate, but No Character of Its Own

Gomorrah rarely travels alone in the sources, yet the ancient texts treat it as a place in its own right: it has a king, it is listed among five towns of a region, it is assigned a fate of its own, and later writers can invoke it separately when they choose. What it does not have is a character. Sodom acquired a reputation, a body of interpretation and eventually a word in several languages; Gomorrah acquired none of these, and the literature offers no account of what its particular offence was supposed to have been.

Its historicity is entirely bound up with Sodom's. The sites proposed for one are proposed for the other, generally as a pair of Early Bronze Age towns southeast of the Dead Sea that were destroyed and abandoned, and the arguments for and against apply equally to both. Nothing in the archaeological record distinguishes a Gomorrah from a Sodom, because nothing in the written record does either.

The name has had a modern afterlife of its own. It is used in ordinary speech for a place of ruinous corruption, and an Italian book and film of the past twenty years borrowed it for organised crime in Naples, playing on the similarity to the name of the local criminal network. That is a pun rather than a religious usage, but it is how most people under forty now meet the word.