Sodom

The narrative in Genesis runs in two scenes. In the first, Abraham argues God down from fifty righteous inhabitants to ten, a bargaining sequence that is one of the boldest passages in the Hebrew Bible, since the patriarch is holding the judge of all the earth to a standard of justice. In the second, two visitors arrive in the city, Lot presses them to shelter under his roof rather than sleep in the square, and the men of the town surround the house and demand them. Lot offers his daughters instead, which the text reports without approving, and the visitors strike the crowd blind and lead the family out before the destruction.

Where the meaning of the story is concerned, the Hebrew Bible itself is not silent. Ezekiel says plainly that the guilt of Sodom was pride, surfeit of food and prosperous ease, and that she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. Isaiah addresses corrupt rulers as rulers of Sodom and links the name to bloodshed and injustice, and Jeremiah applies it to prophets who deceive. The Wisdom literature and Josephus emphasise arrogance and the refusal of hospitality to strangers.

Rabbinic tradition developed that reading into a portrait of a society that made cruelty into law: a city where giving bread to a beggar was a crime, and where a guest was measured against a bed and cut or stretched to fit. The offence, in that reading, is not one night's violence but a settled system of it.

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.