A Reading With Consequences, and a Site Nobody Has Fixed

A different reading grew up alongside the first. Texts of the late second temple period and the New Testament letters of Jude and Second Peter connect the cities with sexual transgression, and Islamic tradition treats the people of Lut as condemned for a specific practice. Medieval canon law coined a term from the city's name, and that term passed into the criminal law of European states and their colonies, where it carried penalties up to death and was still being enforced within living memory in many countries.

That history is why the exegetical question is not academic. A substantial body of modern scholarship argues that the offence in the text is the threatened gang rape of guests under the protection of a household, that ancient readers said so, and that the later reading imported a meaning the passage does not carry. Others hold that the sexual element cannot be removed from the account. Both camps exist and the atlas records them.

Archaeology has not settled whether the city existed. Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira, Early Bronze Age towns southeast of the Dead Sea that were destroyed by fire, have been proposed as Sodom and Gomorrah for decades. A separate proposal for Tall el-Hammam, northeast of the sea, includes a published claim that the site was destroyed by an airburst, which other specialists have contested in print. The atlas records the candidates and the disagreement rather than choosing between them.