Episode 186: Hospitality, Family, and Travel in the Days of Sodom

Genesis chapters 18 and 19 read as very shallow morality tales without an intimate understanding of the social dynamics going on in the arena of hospitality expectations. This is the first of two teachings describing the established parameters and rituals associated with dealing with strangers to a community and the who, what, when, where and why’s of offering sustenance and lodging. What did Abraham do right? What did Lot do wrong? This is where we can begin to understand these two complex chapters of Scripture—as well as Judges 19.

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So, having finished up with the fruit of the Spirit backward through kindness—which segues excellently into hospitality—the kids and I are ready to delve into some of the complex issues of Genesis 18 and 19 because there is a lot more going on there than most preachers would lead us to believe. The concepts of travel, hospitality as a social non-negotiable, and family dynamics are all going to be very important throughout the rest of Genesis because as of chapter 12, Genesis has become the story of a family of travelers and, with the birth of Ishmael and then Isaac, an increasingly family related story. The dynamics, therefore, become more and more complex and very different from what we would see as normal in our own lives and in the world around us. As I teach the kids all the time over on Context for Kids, the only perfect examples in the Bible are God, the Holy Spirit and the Son of God Yeshua/Jesus. Everyone else, almost to a person, is portrayed as deeply flawed and as living very flawed lives according to sometimes very messed up understandings of right and wrong. We need to treat the Bible people with a lot of grace sometimes—remembering that Abraham and Sarah are “Straight Outta Babylon” and have to be taught how to stop seeing Babylonian ways and Canaanite ways as normative and acceptable in God’s Kingdom. They often do what makes sense to them, and since the Bible is a rescue story, let’s not pretend that they don’t need rescued from their own nonsense. The Bible makes no excuses when they behave badly and so we don’t have to either. That’s why we have the Messiah as our plumb line of absolute excellence and perfection instead of Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets,  or even John the Baptist or Paul. The Bible tells us what did happen and not always what should have happened. We can’t enshrine any era of Biblical life as though it represents an ideal because God through His prophets was always after them about something—or a lot of somethings.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. However, everything changed last year when the Lord told me in no uncertain terms that my days of teaching adults are over, so now this portion of my ministry is devoted to teaching adults how to teach kids by making sure that we are supporting their growth and faith in the Messiah instead of hijacking it. Which is super easy to do, by the way—hijacking it. I’ve done it, and you’ve done it. Let’s stop doing it and teach kids how to take Yeshua/Jesus seriously as the greater Moses, greater Temple, and greater Prophet whom Matthew tells us He is. So, from now on, this is a satellite ministry of Context for Kids, which has become my primary ministry. Lots for adults to learn still, but geared more toward discipleship and less toward context studies—but still very much contextual. I still have a ton of teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel, and I think that most of the listeners to Context for Kids are probably grownups anyway so you can catch me there as well if you enjoy crawling through Genesis at a snail’s pace. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

I squeezed the basics of this into one teaching for the kids, which will be expanded as we go verse by verse through Genesis 18 and 19 but for you guys, so you can answer their questions and impress them with your knowledge, this will be a two-parter. Obviously, when we get to Genesis 19 there is a whole lot of stuff that I will not teach the kids about but I will have more in depth teachings for you so that you can answer the hard questions when they come up. And of course, you can always message me through my email or via my websites or through social media. Just not on twitter because I never go there. My goal is to equip you to equip them as your and my equals in Messiah, full brothers and sisters, taking them seriously as disciples.

So, let’s look at travel in the ancient world first and foremost. Travel was weird. Most people in the ancient world never went anywhere unless they absolutely had to. Travel was inconvenient, dangerous, and costly. It was something considered to be deviant behavior—normal people stayed put, near their families and on their own land. It’s been a long time since I have taught about dyadic social identity but it was very important within the ancient world to be very predictable and to fit in to society, to do things as they had always been done, to honor the gods your parents honored, and to do exactly what the community expects of you given your status and gender. This was the whole pagan world, okay? Some scholars refer to this as the cultural waters that everyone was drinking from. Just as sacrifice meant the same thing to everyone in the ancient world—pagan as well as Israelite—so did familial relations, which were modeled after how the gods ran their families and their communities. To depart from society’s expectations was to be a deviant and therefore dangerous influence—an affront to the gods who might retaliate and kill everyone slowly or quickly depending upon their mood.

People often don’t appreciate how radically Yahweh redefined what it meant to be a family and to be the family of God. Before Yahweh, gods were gods and people were just their slaves. Gods had families and people had families but they weren’t the same thing. Yahweh created this innovative hybrid where He was the paterfamilias (a term I will explain in a bit) and all of Israel were His children; children who were meant to mediate His presence and ways to the rest of the world as a priestly nation. Yahweh stripped human fathers of the right to execute, devalue, and violate family members by reminding them that it is Yahweh, and not any human, who is the true father of the nation and thus of every household. He also laid the foundations for seeing all other humans in that light—something that wouldn’t truly begin to bear fruit until the days of the Messiah. When we see the institution of slavery that was normative in the ancient world, and then look at the limitations Yahweh placed upon slavery and even the Deuteronomic law that commanded Israelite cities to harbor escaped slaves instead of returning them, we begin to understand that Torah was a beginning and not the end—paving the way toward total and complete love of other. The prophets went farther still, going above and beyond what was commanded. Yeshua went so far beyond the prophets that their heads would have spun. With grace also comes the command to move toward the perfection of Christ through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit.

But Yahweh hadn’t made any of these changes yet. He told a man from a family of Babylonian idol worshipers to follow Him and to learn to walk in His ways. And it was pretty rough for Abraham and Sarah both and Lot never really got it, as we will see. Lot was very much a man of the world while Abraham was stumbling his way out of it—some days doing a better job than others. You know, just like us. Abraham was a traveler, which made him odd in the ancient world. Even normal shepherds in those days only moved around so much and we do see that Abraham had a few favorite locations he liked to stay in such as Hebron and Beersheba—but those areas belonged to other nations and he wasn’t a citizen but a foreigner. The closest he ever got to belonging was when he would make a covenant with local leadership to do no harm in exchange for going unharmed, or in the case of his ongoing relationship with Mamre and his brothers, a mutual protection pact. But this means that outside of his general campsite, Abraham wasn’t a man with any sort of political power or official standing. In fact, I don’t believe that sort of community belonging was ever even offered to anyone in his family before Jacob was solicited to merge his family with the people of Shechem in Genesis 34, unless I am forgetting something. In fact, I guess they were always outsiders in one way or another until Joseph became the vizier of Egypt. But I digress.

Let’s backtrack and talk about travel. There were limited reasons why anyone would travel in the ancient world—festival pilgrimage, escaping famine, migration due to war displacement, trade (merchant caravans), formal messengers, spying, and armies for the purpose of making war. And so what time of year you saw travelers made a very big difference in how worried you had to be about them. If it was springtime, when the roads finally dried up and the grain was ripening, you had to worry about spies scouting out the land for an invasion. Armies needed dry roads and wouldn’t ever travel in winter during the early rains. They would hunker down for the winter. They also needed grain to feed their armies, which they would “liberate” from the fields on their way to and from the war zone. They wanted to have their fighting done before the hot, dry summer months when there was no food or water easily available. This, by the way, was why the Babylonian women wept for Tammuz in the summer desiring the rains to return in the fall. Messengers could appear at almost any time and would generally travel in the cool of the morning, or in the evening or even at night. Trade caravans were always welcome as they had no supermarkets even if they weren’t really trusted or respected due to their status as suspicious social deviants. Larger people groups might be seen on rarer occasions escaping famine or attempting to find new homes after being forced out of their own. Travelers, unless they were part of an army or on official business, were by definition vulnerable and/or suspicious. They were in danger or they were dangerous. They were either at the mercy of wild animals, weather, bandits, etc. or they were to be feared.

As travelers and foreigners in general were considered to be deviant and outliers—aka not part of the established and safe community—they had to be dealt with and almost every people group handled this through the extension of formal hospitality. Sodom (Genesis 19) is a shocking and notable exception to this rule of thumb, as was the Benjamite city of Gibeah (Judges 19). If you were traveling, you would rely on the kindness of strangers to host you and so everyone (mostly) lived by this social ethic which had an expectation that it was good, right, and required to host and protect strangers. But this wasn’t just some willy nilly arrangement, there were firm rules in place as well as taboos that couldn’t be violated. I promise you will never read either Genesis or Judges 19 the same way again. Hospitality was a matter of survival, as well as an honor/shame issue. Now, we need to get back to the paterfamilias and why that was so important to the expectations and rules of offering hospitality.

Hospitality in the world of Abraham could only be offered by a paterfamilias of the community in question. Although this is a much later Roman term, it describes the ancient practice of the eldest male in the household being completely in control of everything and everyone within his domain. That means you could be a seventy-year old grandfather of forty and still be under the thumb of your father if he was still alive and kicking. It was really only a fun system for the top dog in the family. The paterfamilias had the power of life and death over everyone in the household—wives, children, slaves, etc. Under ancient Near Eastern law, the only real restrictions to the rights of the paterfamilias were from outside the household. The king, for example, had the same rights over everyone in his kingdom that the paterfamilias as he had over his wives, children, and slaves. The Torah, instituted at Mt Sinai, made some huge changes to this institution that had previously been considered normal—which is why we see Judah ordering the burning of his daughter in law Tamar because in the eyes of the pagan world, his seeing a prostitute was fine and even expected but her having sex outside of marriage was worthy of being burned over. He had absolute rights over her, and no one tried to stop him. That’s how the pagan gods handled things, after all, they required absolute obedience and were very heavy handed with their retribution. So, male heads of households had that as their example. We also see this all the way through the Greco-Roman era of how they worshiped their own gods through emulation and why they considered Christians to be so weird. Who would emulate an executed criminal when they could be like the big guy Zeus instead?? In fact, city identities could often be traced to the character of the gods they worshiped—a huge reason to have no other gods before Yahweh, who is patient, merciful and gracious. We don’t know who they worshiped in Sodom because the site hasn’t been positively identified, but it sure wasn’t anyone good.

And so, the father of any family would reflect the gods worshiped—this shouldn’t be any shock. Psalm 115 and 135 both warn people that we become whatever it is that we worship. And our behavior over time will always reveal our opinions about the true character of God. There is no way, for example, for a man to beat on or cheat on his wife (or vice versa) unless the god he worships is cool with it in some way. Or, for that matter, a pastor or teacher with their congregation. Which should put a whole new light on the first couple of commandments! But even with the plethora of gods worshiped throughout the ancient Near East, all people pretty much agreed on one thing—hospitality was a sacred duty that brought honor to both self and guests and upheld the fabric of the social order. It was absolutely essential for a functioning society not to descend into utter chaos. Hospitality provided a sense of order within their otherwise unpredictable world. It was something they could control and all agree on. Like, not marrying family members today. Every society has their taboos and for them, refusing to be hospitable was like marrying your mom. Okay, maybe not quite that bad but still fairly unthinkable for civilized folks. It was one of the unspoken rules that everyone lived by. Of course, in the first century, all of the traveling evangelists and teachers depended upon it for their continued existence. By this time, a paterfamilias could be a materfamilias and a woman could indeed serve as host to travelers as well. Yeshua depended upon the personal benefaction and hospitality of quite a few women, according to the Gospels.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to be a male head of household in Abraham’s day. One also had to be a community member. I couldn’t, for example, rent a house and then start inviting everyone who traveled along the road to hospitality. Inviting someone into your community, even on a temporary basis (all hospitality was temporary, which I will come back to later), was a privilege of community members only. A foreigner couldn’t, which is something that got Lot personally into trouble when he overstepped his bounds and invited the two angelic messengers to spend the night—even if he was right in our eyes to do so. Abraham had that right within his camp. Lot would have had that right outside of the city of Sodom when he was living there.

Let’s look at Abraham because he did everything right. His interaction with the three visitors corresponds to almost everything we know about how hospitality was expected to be carried out within the ancient world. Usually, the male head of the household would see or be alerted to travelers coming within the reasonable boundaries of the camp or community. It was his responsibility to or not to go out to the travelers and offer them very meager edibles—maybe some bread and water—along with lodging for the night (depending upon the time of day). Evening would be more likely to gain an offer of overnight accommodations and morning less so. Usually, people didn’t travel at midday because of the heat. Generally, the travelers would respond to the offer with a refusal—saying that they really did have places to get to. At this point, the host would insist and the travelers would usually honor the offer and the offerer by accepting the hospitality. A good host, assuming it wasn’t a time of famine and drought, would provide them with water for their feet and would perhaps wash them personally or provide a servant to do so. Oil for the head might even be offered. Then, instead of the bare basics of water and bread, delicacies such as meat, dried fruit, fresh unleavened bread made with wheat instead of barley, and vinegar, fermented milk or wine might be offered if the traveler came across some well to do hosts. Abraham was very wealthy and so he had the fatted calf slaughtered—which would take quite a while to prepare—and waited on them himself in the meantime. Providing more than what was promised gave honor to both the host and to the guest.

Now, of course the host wants to know all about the guest but he is not permitted to ask. The guest can volunteer information but he cannot be interrogated—not even gently. While in the home of the host, the guest is under the absolute protection of his household. This doesn’t, however, mean that the guest is always right or the boss or anything. The guest cannot ask for anything not freely given to him. He cannot look around, covet something and ask for it. If you remember Jacob and Laban, it wasn’t until Laban asked Jacob what he wanted that Jacob was free to ask for Rachel as a wife. To make a demand of a host was to shame the host. It was to assert that the host hadn’t been generous enough. The guest behaved like a guest and not like the head of the household. Shaming a man in front of his whole family was tantamount to an act of war. Remember when Ham exposed the nakedness of his father and then told everyone about it (and there are serious debates as to exactly what that meant)? It was an act that undermined Noah’s position as head of the house. Ham was making a power grab. Fortunately, no one else went along with it.

So, the guest refuses the first offer of hospitality in order to protect his own honor from looking needy or vulnerable. And he cannot ask for anything which he has not specifically been given. His third responsibility is not to stay any longer than he is welcome and oftentimes that is negotiated beforehand in a subtle way. Lot, for example, offers only one night lodging and tells them that they are welcome to stay and then leave in the morning. The fourth responsibility of the guest is much the same as the host. As the host has granted the visitor temporary community membership, it means that he cannot harm nor attack the community or anyone with in it for the extent of his stay or for a while longer. The fifth responsibility is the imperative to give a lift of life to the host either through blessing or a promise—the three visitors promised Abraham a son by Sarah at the same time the following year. Lot was given the gift of the lives of his immediate family. Rahab was given her life and the lives of her family as well in Jericho.

It’s easy to see how important all of this would have been in the ancient world when even when there were inns, they were considered disreputable (at best) and downright dangerous at worst. Having a societal system in place throughout the ancient Near East provided a safety net for travelers, a way to receive knowledge of the outside world, and temporary protection (or permanent protection) from attack through the granting of temporary community membership. There were rules in place to keep hosts from being taken advantage of and also to protect innocent travelers from being interrogated and victimized and robbed. It’s only when we understand the absolute seriousness with which they upheld and depended on hospitality that we can really grasp why the sin of Sodom in the prophets is equated not with sexual sin but with a failure to be hospitable. The rape gangs of Sodom were merely symptoms of a much more grievous institutional sin, which I will talk about once I get to Genesis 19 with the kids and will not be sharing that with them. Really, it isn’t until the first century biblical writings that we see the interpretation of Sodom’s sin as sexual at all, reflecting different interpretations indifferent eras so it is much more appropriate for me to talk to them about Sodom in the way it was originally written. Both Genesis 18 and 19 concern the hospitality rules of the ancient Near East and learning it will help us see it elsewhere in Scripture. Next time, I am going to share different situations in Scripture with you to talk about what does and doesn’t count as hospitality—right offhand, I am planning on talking about Yael in Judges, Rahab in Joshua, David, Nabal, and Abigail in I Sam 25, Elisha and the widow, and a good deal of the book of Acts and the Gospels. Not everything is hospitality so it is important to know the difference.