The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways. —Florence King—
In Chapter 16, we did a 180-degree turn from the account in Genesis 19 of Sodom’s destruction to a hypothetical version from the point of view of residents of Sodom.
Now we somersault to a system of storytelling that contradicts both previous accounts. It will, I suspect, strike those readers previously unfamiliar with it as strange and also intriguing, like those first photographs of planet Earth sent from the moon in 1969.
Polling a handful of Jewish friends and associates, I discovered that they had scant acquaintance with Talmud and midrash. Those polled belong to the reform branch of Judaism -- the most liberal and the most secular. Had I gone among conservative and orthodox Jews, knowledge of these two cornerstones of Judaica would have been more extensive.
Since this chapter discusses, in some detail, material from both Talmud and midrash, most readers will require a brief introduction to those key writings of extra-biblical tradition. In simplest terms, the Talmud is a central text of Jewish interpretation and instruction -- a vast one of some six thousand printed pages concerned with the teachings and opinions of countless rabbis and other learned men on Jewish law and ethics, philosophy, history, customs, legends, mythology, and an array of other subjects. (Were women occasionally included in the debates? I’m not sure.)
The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud is a helpful introduction to this complex collection. There, the editors explain that "unlike most texts in the Western literary and religious canons, and in contrast to later medieval Jewish literature, the texts of [the Talmud] were not produced by an 'author' or by one particular group of authors, unless one considers generations of sages extending at least six centuries to be a coherent group of authors." 1
Adin Steinsaltz, in The Essential Talmud, asserts that "if the Bible is the cornerstone of Judaism, then the Talmud is the central pillar, soaring up from the foundations and supporting the entire spiritual and intellectual edifice. In many ways the Talmud is the most important book in Jewish culture, the backbone of creativity and of national life." 2
Edwin C. Goldberg, in Midrash for Beginners, defines the two general meanings of the term 'midrash' :
"1. It can refer to a process of interpreting Scripture. According to this definition, any comment which is directly or indirectly related to the Bible is midrashic.
"2. The term can also refer to a specific body of classical rabbinic commentary on the Bible, edited from approximately the year 200 C.E. to the ninth century. For instance, one can go to a well-stocked Jewish library and find in English translation such works as the Midrash of the Book of Genesis." 3 Goldberg further defines midrash (not capitalized) as "a sister genre to the Talmud." 4
More to the point for this chapter, indeed for this book, is a comment by the British literary theorist Terry Eagleton: "In the ancient Jewish practice of midrash or scriptural interpretation, it was sometimes deemed acceptable to assign new, strikingly improbable meanings to the Bible. The word midrash means to seek or investigate, and holy scripture was regarded as semantically inexhaustible. It was able to confront each commentator with a different sense each time it was studied. The Torah...was seen as incomplete, and each generation of interpreters had to help bring it to perfection. No one of them, however, would ever have the last word." 5 Put another way, midrash is the ongoing search for words behind the words.
None of these commentators mention the tediousness of midrash and Talmud. Reading for more than a short time in either genre is akin to tackling the United States tax code, or scrutinizing an insurance policy landmined with exemptions and disclaimers. Many midrashic and talmudic sections are rife with excruciatingly detailed folkloric elements, ranging from the mundane to the fantastic, and incorporating myth, legend, tall tales, fables, sayings, magic, and the like. And yet, if you filter certain well-known biblical stories through the alembic of midrash, you may feel that those generations of Jewish sages created a bible of their own, one whose resemblance to any version of the traditional Bible is coincidental -- even as, paradoxically, their "accidental bible" cleaves to the original, canonical one. Midrash vs. Tanakh; midrash vs. King James Version; or midrash vs. any of the hundreds of available Bible translations, is both fraternal twin and loyal opposition.
For instance, the question of Sodom and Gomorrah.
When a commentator such as Harold Bloom asserts, as in a previous chapter, that Sodom was destroyed because of its contempt "for Yahweh, for strangers, for women, for Lot, for all who are not Sodomites," 6 he is drawing on midrash and Talmud, which in turn drew upon centuries, even millenia, of oral and written explanation for events not fully or satisfactorily explained in the Hebrew Bible. In recent years it has become commonplace for writers of a liberal bent, whether scholarly or popular, to state that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was a violation of hospitality. Unfortunately, they explain only rarely where their information comes from. (In Chapter 14 I discussed the Middle Eastern concept of hospitality as an ironclad moral, legal, and religious obligation.)
Such claims may seem facile until you delve into that vast midrashic ocean of rabbinical lore. There the big surprise is that homosexuality is absent as the sin of Sodom, and so, for the most part, is the attempted gang rape of strangers. The realization dawns that it is latter-day Christians, abetted to some extent by latter-day Jews, Muslims, and others, who attribute the supposed destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to sexual activity of any kind.
In earlier centuries, Jewish commentators blamed the fate of Sodom (and neighboring towns) on greed, cruelty, and yes, contempt and inhospitality, along with the population's general swinishness. What they considered the sin of homosexuality was prohibited not in Genesis 19 but in the so-called Holiness Code of Leviticus, e.g., "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." (Lev.18:22) That prohibition is another story entirely -- another book, really -- and beyond the scope of this one except for the question: Unless you're an Orthodox Jew observing the hundreds of Torah prohibitions, why would you single that one out as applicable? Put that question to a Bible-waving Christian who just had a shrimp cocktail at lunch, followed by an entree of baked pork chops and washed down with a tall glass of milk. Has any fundamentalist Christian ever kept a kosher kitchen?
And yet they are ordered to do so by the Bible they worship and weaponize. Nor do they cease all work and almost every activity except breathing on the Sabbath, i.e., from sundown Friday to sundown on Saturday. The average Christian fundamentalist would be amazed to hear of such practices, even though they are prescribed in the Bible — whose every word is to be taken literally, according to fundamentalist sanctimony.
The same for those myriad other prohibitions in Leviticus, Exodus, Deuteronmy, and elsewhere that only the most orthodox Jews -- and no Christians -- would think of observing. Few even read them, though every fundamentalist Bible-thumper can intone the infamous"abomination" verse.
A famous Internet letter to Laura Schlessinger, the hateful, homophobic right-wing columnist, highlights the self-serving selectivity of using isolated quotations from a document — in this case, the Bible — to establish doctrine, belief, or prohibition. This practice is known as proof-texting.
The letter didn't make it into Schlessinger's column for reasons that become immediately clear. It purports to be from a troubled seeker wishing to obey contradictory biblical injunctions: "When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Leviticus 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How shall I deal with this?
"I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think is a fair price?
"Leviticus 25:44-45 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify?
"I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states that he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
"Leviticus 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a blemish in my eye. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Must my vision be perfect, or do I have some wiggle room here?"
Such satirical hair-splitting could continue for as many pages as the absurdities it targets, which number in the hundreds.
The Rev. James Martin, S.J., writing in the Jesuit magazine America, described the Internet letter as “a healthy antidote to Scriptural literalism of any sort.”
Back to Sodom and Gomorrah, and midrashic discussions of their sins. These stories and teachings were transmitted orally until around the second century C.E., when rabbis and others began the long process of writing them down. Although the written midrash belongs roughly to the first thousand years of the Common Era (formerly designated A.D.), many of its narratives reach back another thousand years, and perhaps much further. Therefore, the material that follows may be contemporaneous with the Hebrew Bible, or even older; there is no way really to know. But if that is the case, midrash might overturn the longstanding popular notion of Sodom's sin. Sodomy would then change definition: from a sexual practice, it would describe the ruthless -- often criminal -- accumulation of wealth by one percent of the population while the other ninety-nine percent goes begging.
Imagine explaining this to a fundamentalist has-been politician like Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-presidential stooge. Or to an ignoramous like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a hypocrite-with-lots-to-hide like Mike Johnson…the list goes on and on.
In the following pages, I have retold midrashic stories from three sources, blending the narratives and updating the language to make them more readable. Those sources are: Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews; Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis; and Angelo S. Rappoport, Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel. These authors and compilers searched through thousands of pages to extract coherent narratives from the long-winded stories and opinions of many centuries. In so doing, they sifted and separated gold from fool's gold, retaining the Au and leaving the FeS2 behind.
Sitting in his tent one day in the springtime month of Nisan, Abraham beheld three men. They were the angels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, each one of whom had been charged by Yahweh, the Hebrew God, with a special mission: Raphael to heal the wound of Abraham, who had recently circumcised himself at age ninety-nine; Michael
to inform Abraham's wife, Sarah, that she would bear a son (at age ninety); and Gabriel to handle the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. After Abraham's lavish meal, his guests prepared to depart. Two of the angels walked in the direction of Sodom, while the third one, having healed Abraham, spread his wings and returned to heaven.
The inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah -- and other cities of the plain -- were sinful and godless. In their country there was an extensive vale where they gathered annually with their wives and children and all belonging to them -- slaves, livestock -- to celebrate a feast that went on for days and that involved protracted orgies. Even
worse, any wayfaring stranger who passed through their territory was besieged by all the inhabitants of these towns -- men, women, children -- and robbed of his possessions, down to the shirt on his back. Indeed, the traveler was stripped bare, and, depending on the whim of the people, either hounded from the city or, as sometimes happened, killed outright.
The sins of Sodom were grievous. The men were wealthy and prosperous because their rich lands yielded great harvests and plentiful fruits. Besides agriculture, the Sodomites mined gold, silver, and precious stones in the countryside near their city. Often it was not necessary even to dig a shallow mine. A landowner would say to his slave, or his hired servant, "Go and weed the garden," and the gardener would soon return with sacks of gold discovered just below the subsoil. At no time in their luxurious days did they thank the true God who had sent them such wealth. (In polytheistic Canaan, so many contenders!) Instead, they worshipped the sun, the moon, and the many stars across the sky. These planet-gods they served with lusty devotion.
But -- no surprise -- none of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, nor their lesser satellite cities, gave a thought to the poor, nor to strangers and travelers who came to their city. On the contrary: they passed stringent laws which mandated that aliens be
expelled and beggars seeking so much as a crust of bread were to be severely punished for their audacity. Charity was a crime within the walls of Sodom.
Whenever an incautious stranger entered the gates of Sodom, the citizens rushed upon him, stripped him of his clothes, purloined his belongings, and chased him away bruised and naked. No one could appeal to a judge, for the courts upheld the rights of all Sodomites to assault, or even to kill, any person who might conceivably pose a threat to the goods and chattels, commodities, effects, estate, personal property, or anything pertaining thereto, of any citizen, bond or free, of the city of Sodom. Gomorrah and the other towns had, early on, enacted similar statutes.
The Sodomite cruelty code proved such a success that an even stricter piece of legislation was passed. This one stated that anyone guilty of a charitable action, even so small a one as a morsel of bread to a starving beggar, should be put to death. Fear of a welfare state haunted the bourgeoisie of Sodom.
From time to time, earthquakes shook the walls of the city, and storms lashed its battlements. No one, however, attributed these disasters to the wrath of a neighboring god, viz., Yahweh, the Almighty Deity of the Hebrew tribe that inhabited scrubby pasture lands in the far distance. If any unlucky traveler sought refuge in Sodom during one of these upheavals, he was ushered into a rickety structure, or told to stretch out beneath an unstable wall. When the structure collapsed, or the wall tumbled on him, his hosts laughed, pretended it was an accident or "an act of God," and grabbed his possessions. Afterwards, given half a chance, they robbed one another as well, for in that place there was no honor among thieves.
Sodom was a law-and-order town whose laws favored the wealthy, the privileged, the powerful, and the enforcers of its laws. But the rules were upside down. Occasionally a stranger dared to bring suit against a Sodomite, using the legal doctrine "for cause." It never worked. "Every stranger," said the judge, "who comes to our town must abide by our excellent laws. Know then, O ignorant sojourner, that the men of our sovereign city can never do wrong where a stranger is concerned. By the laws of our country, we therefore condemn you to forfeit all that you possess."
(Justices of the Sodom Supreme Court readily accepted gold, precious stones, and all-expenses-paid junkets for themselves and their wives to Babylon and Egypt. These were the quid pro quo for decisions favoring the rich.)
What do you think of these midrashim so far? Are you surprised that Jewish commentators over the centuries took issue with the writings of their own holy book?
Once upon a time two young women of Sodom met up at the central well. They had not seen one another for some time, and one of the women said to the other, "You look unwell. What on earth is wrong?"
"Because," answered her friend, "I have had nothing to eat all day. Actually, nothing for two days. There is not so much as a crust of bread in our house."
"Wait here," said the first young woman. She hurried away and returned in half an hour. "Now," she whispered, "You take my pitcher and give me yours. Careful, though -- don't let anyone see."
The hungry woman, surprised at the weight of the pitcher, and knowing it was not full of water, trudged home. Once inside her modest family dwelling, she rejoiced at the gift: meal! She fired the oven, kneaded dough, made cakes, and fed herself and her family. But --
Spies were everywhere, and someone saw the transaction at the well. Owing to her charitable deed, the first young woman was burned at the stake. Since charity posed a threat to the economy, it was outlawed in Sodom. Also, it was felt, enemies were everywhere and every citizen's moves must be monitored.
One of Lot's daughters, Pelotith, (or Kalah, according to a different midrash) who was perhaps acquainted with the unfortunate young woman punished for kindness, was married to a high official of Sodom. Her husband ranked just below the Lord Mayor. One day Pelotith noticed a starving man slumped in a side street of Sodom. Her heart was touched, but she feared the consequences of any act of kindness. Making a mental note of the wretched man's location, she walked home at a normal pace. Once inside the family home, however, she filled a pitcher with edible provisions, then made her way toward the well. Passing near the starving man, she deftly emptied the pitcher's contents beside him. No one saw her, and so she continued to feed the man for days thereafter.
Townspeople, however, began to wonder why the man had not died. "What's keeping him alive?" they groused, annoyed at his presence in their clean streets. Soon, however, the eyes of Sodom burned a hole in the back of Pelotith. She was caught red-handed, abused and spat upon, and taunted with such epithets as "dirty Jewess." They tied her to the stake, and all around it they piled straw and brush and kindling.
Pelotith remembered the God of her ancestors. "Sovereign of all the worlds," she cried out, "Maker of the Universe, hear me! Come to me at this hour, for I have done no wrong!" Her prayer ascended to heaven, where HaShem -- the Name -- was listening:
I WILL DESCEND!
Owing to these transgressions, and many others on the part of the Sodomites, the angels Gabriel and Raphael, after leaving Abraham, made their way toward Sodom. They were under orders from on high to destroy the town and its inhabitants, as well as Gomorrah and all the other places under the wicked hegemony of Sodom and its greedy, crooked rulers.
The rabbis who spun these yarns based their storytelling on ancient texts and oral tradition. For example, the Book of Ezekiel, written in the sixth century B.C.E., condemns Sodom for the same non-sexual sins: "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. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good." (16:49-50).
John J. McNeill, Roman Catholic priest and author, echoes these verses from a Christian perspective: "Hospitality is also a central theme of the New Testament. For example, Jesus tells his disciples, 'And if anyone does not welcome you or listen to what you have to say, as you walk out of the house or town shake the dust from your feet. I tell you solemnly, on the day of Judgment it will not go as hard with the land of Sodom and Gomorrah as with that town.' (Matthew 10:14-15; McNeill quotes from the Jerusalem Bible.) He adds, "This text makes it clear that Jesus understood the crime of Sodom as inhospitality to strangers." 7
Fonrobert et al., The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud, p. 2
Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud, p. 3
Goldberg, Midrash for Beginners, pp. xi-xii
ibid., p. vii
Eagleton, How to Read Literature, p. 143
Bloom and Rosenberg, The Book of J, p. 204
McNeill, Taking a Chance on God, p. 96