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The Bible names at least six different sins as the reason Sodom was destroyed: same-sex intercourse (Leviticus 18:22 read into Ezekiel 16:50), inhospitality (Matthew 10, Luke 10, Wisdom 19:13), seeking sex with angels and 'strange flesh' (Genesis 19, Jude 7), pride and neglect of the poor (Isaiah 1, Ezekiel 16:49), adultery and lying (Jeremiah 23:14), and generic ungodliness (2 Peter 2). The 'homosexuality' reading is a late interpretive overlay that the Hebrew Bible's own internal cross-references don't support.
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Cited passages
“ ‘ “Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters. She also didn’t strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. They were arrogant, and committed abomination before me. Therefore I took them away when I saw it.
“ ‘You shall not lie with a man as with a woman. That is detestable.
Whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words ... Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city. Matthew 10:14-15 But into whatsoever city ye enter, and they receive you not ... I say unto you, that it shall be more tolerable in that day for Sodom, than for that city. Luke 10:10-12 For they exercised a more detestable inhospitality than any: others indeed received not strangers unknown to them, but these brought their guests into bondage that had deserved well of them. Wisdom 19:13
Cited passages
Whoever doesn’t receive you, nor hear your words, as you go out of that house or that city, shake the dust off your feet. Most certainly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.
But into whatever city you enter, and they don’t receive you, go out into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust from your city that clings to us, we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this, that God’s Kingdom has come near to you.’ I tell you, it will be more tolerable in that day for Sodom than for that city.
Punishments came upon the sinners, not without the signs that were given beforehand by the violence of the thunder, for they justly suffered through their own wickednesses, for the hatred which they practiced toward guests was grievous indeed.
And there came two angels to Sodom. Genesis 19:1 The men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter: And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them. Genesis 19:4-5 Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. Jude 7
Cited passages
The two angels came to Sodom at evening. Lot sat in the gate of Sodom. Lot saw them, and rose up to meet them. He bowed himself with his face to the earth,
But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, surrounded the house, both young and old, all the people from every quarter. They called to Lot, and said to him, “Where are the men who came in to you this night? Bring them out to us, that we may have sex with them.”
This passage isn’t available in the reading corpus yet.
Cited passages
Hear Yahweh’s word, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah! “What are the multitude of your sacrifices to me?”, says Yahweh. “I have had enough of the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed animals. I don’t delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of male goats. When you come to appear before me, who has required this at your hand, to trample my courts? Bring no more vain offerings. Incense is an abomination to me. New moons, Sabbaths, and convocations: I can’t stand evil assemblies. My soul hates your New Moons and your appointed feasts. They are a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Yes, when you make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves. Make yourself clean. Put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes. Cease to do evil. Learn to do well. Seek justice. Relieve the oppressed. Defend the fatherless. Plead for the widow.”
“ ‘ “Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters. She also didn’t strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
Cited passages
In the prophets of Jerusalem I have also seen a horrible thing: they commit adultery and walk in lies. They strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one returns from his wickedness. They have all become to me as Sodom, and its inhabitants as Gomorrah.”
Cited passages
and didn’t spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah with seven others, a preacher of righteousness, when he brought a flood on the world of the ungodly; and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, having made them an example to those who would live in an ungodly way; and delivered righteous Lot, who was very distressed by the lustful life of the wicked (for that righteous man dwelling among them was tormented in his righteous soul from day to day with seeing and hearing lawless deeds): the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptation and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment,
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
This is one of the cleanest cases in the canon of an interpretive trajectory overwriting its source text. Genesis 19 records a mob demanding to "know" (*yadaʿ*) two angelic visitors at Lot's house. The verb *yadaʿ* carries a sexual sense in only a small minority of its occurrences in the Hebrew Bible, but the demand-context here, together with Lot's counter-offer of his daughters, makes a sexual reading of the mob's intent defensible. What the verb does not specify is that the offense lies in the same-sex character of the act rather than in its structure as the attempted gang-rape of foreign guests. Susan Niditch (OTL Judges) and Phyllis Trible (*Texts of Terror*) both show that the Genesis 19 / Judges 19 parallel — the outrage at Gibeah, which reworks the same scene-type closely — is built around the violation of guest-right through sexual violence, not around homoerotic desire as such. Claus Westermann's Genesis commentary reads the scene as an assault on the sacred obligation of hospitality, the gravest breach in the ancient Near Eastern social code.
More decisively, when the Hebrew Bible itself looks back at Sodom, it never names same-sex intercourse. Ezekiel 16:49 itemizes Sodom's iniquity: "pride, surfeit of bread, prosperous ease, and she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and needy." Walther Zimmerli, in the Hermeneia Ezekiel, takes the list at face value — the indictment is socioeconomic and theological. Verse 50 adds that "they committed *toʿevah* before me," and the apologetic reading routes that *toʿevah* ("abomination") to Leviticus 18:22. But *toʿevah* is a wide-spectrum term — applied to idolatry, dishonest weights, dietary violations, and cultic impropriety — and Zimmerli notes it most naturally caps the catalogue of arrogance just enumerated rather than importing the Levitical sex law. Isaiah 1:10-17 calls the corrupt judges of Judah "rulers of Sodom" precisely because they oppress the widow and orphan; Jeremiah 23:14 likens the lying, adulterous prophets to Sodom. The Hebrew Bible's own cross-references are consistent, and they are about pride, injustice, and social oppression.
The Synoptic Jesus follows that same trajectory: Matthew 10:14-15 and Luke 10:10-12 make Sodom the type-case of inhospitality — the rejection of God's messengers — and Wisdom 19:13-17, written in Greek-speaking Jewish Alexandria, makes it explicit that Sodom "practiced a more bitter hatred of strangers." That is the inherited interpretation through the first century CE.
The shift appears with Jude 7's "strange flesh" (*sarkos heteras*) and the Second Temple para-biblical literature — 1 Enoch 6-11, Jubilees 16, the Testament of Naphtali — where Sodom is read through the Watchers lens of Genesis 6, the illicit crossing between human and angelic kinds. Richard Bauckham, in the Word Biblical Commentary on Jude and 2 Peter, traces this carefully: *sarkos heteras* means "flesh of a different kind," i.e., the Sodomites' (unwitting) attempt to have sexual relations with angels, and possibly the inverse motif of the Watchers' descent — not human same-sex orientation. William Loader's study of sexuality in the pseudepigrapha confirms that the angel-flesh transgression, not homoeroticism per se, drives the Second Temple reading. The further collapse into "homosexuality" as Sodom's defining sin is a later Christian retrojection; John Boswell located its hardening in the medieval West, and Mark Jordan's study of how the very category of "sodomy" was invented in medieval Christian theology traces the moment the city's name was welded to same-sex acts as such.
Whether this is best called a "contradiction" or a layered interpretive trajectory is partly a matter of framing, and the surface tension is real: at least six different sins are named across the texts. But the deeper and more secure point is diachronic. Sodom's sin in the Hebrew Bible and among its first-century inheritors is pride, social oppression, and the violation of hospitality; in the Second Temple apocalyptic tradition it expands to include the forbidden crossing of angel-flesh; the modern "homosexuality" reading is anachronistic and unsupported by the canon's own internal cross-references.
Where the critical reading lands: the multiple sins reflect a genuine and traceable interpretive trajectory, and the single most widely asserted reading — homosexuality — is the least supported by the texts that actually look back on Sodom.
Sources for this reading