Dr. Dylan Johnson, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern texts, argues that Sodom and Gomorrah is not one story but a tradition, told in different ways across Scripture. Genesis 18 and 19 frame the sin of Sodom around hospitality, Ezekiel 16 names pride, gluttony and neglect of the poor, and Jude points to sexual immorality. He invites readers to let the texts disagree, read every reference for themselves, and stop fixating on only one answer.
Dr. Johnson starts with his road from a small Lutheran church in western Canada to archaeology in Israel, Harvard and New York University. He explains the two timelines of the Bible, the story it tells and the time it was written, then walks through Abraham and Sarah's hospitality at Mamre, the bargaining over the city, and the night at Lot's house. From there the conversation turns to who wrote Genesis, what archaeology can and cannot tell us, from the Rast and Schaub surveys south of the Dead Sea to the recent claims about Tall el-Hammam and a comet airburst, and why Gomorrah never appears without Sodom. He closes with Genesis 14, where Sodom is destroyed by eastern kings with no mention of sin at all, and with practical advice for reading the story fresh.
Key takeaways
- The Bible has two timelines: the story it tells from creation to exile, and the time each text was written. Dr. Johnson places Genesis 18 and 19 somewhere between the 9th and 6th centuries BCE, likely written by a literate palace or temple scribe in Jerusalem.
- Genesis 18 and 19 are built around hospitality. Abraham and Sarah welcome three strangers and are blessed with the promise of Isaac, while the men of Sodom do the exact opposite to the two messengers at Lot's house.
- Scripture does not agree on the sin of Sodom. Ezekiel 16 names pride, gluttony and failure to help the poor and needy, Jude points to sexual immorality, and Genesis frames it around the treatment of strangers.
- Genesis 14 tells a different Sodom story. There is no sin and no divine judgment, only a war with kings from the east who destroy the cities of the plain.
- Archaeology cannot confirm which ruins are Sodom. Bronze Age sites south of the Dead Sea were found by Rast and Schaub, but without a text naming the city, no site can be identified for certain.
- Gomorrah never appears without Sodom, though Sodom appears alone. Dr. Johnson suspects separate stories about Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim later merged into one.
- Sodom became the archetype of a city destroyed for sin. The prophets compare Jerusalem and Samaria to it, but usually add that, unlike Sodom, a remnant will survive.
Key quotes
Sodom is a tradition and not just a story.
Dr. Dylan Johnson
Sodom becomes the archetype of sin and sanction.
Dr. Dylan Johnson
I wish I could give you more consistency, but the scripture's not consistent and is open then to these interpretations within itself.
Dr. Dylan Johnson
The challenge is to let it become unfamiliar again.
Dr. Dylan Johnson
Read it for yourself and read it without some kind of commentary or some kind of interpretive guide. You can turn to those afterwards, but just read it for yourself.
Dr. Dylan Johnson
About the guest
Dr. Dylan Johnson is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern texts. He studied at the University of Lethbridge, earned a Master of Divinity in Old Testament at Harvard, spent about six years at New York University, and now works in an ancient history department in Europe.
Questions this episode answers
What was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah?
Dr. Johnson argues the Bible gives more than one answer. Genesis 18 and 19 center on the violation of hospitality toward strangers, Ezekiel 16 names pride, gluttony and neglect of the poor and needy, and Jude points to sexual immorality. Only a couple of texts mention sexual sin, so he encourages readers not to fixate on that alone.
Has Sodom and Gomorrah been found by archaeologists?
Dr. Johnson says no site can be identified with certainty. Rast and Schaub surveyed Bronze Age sites south of the Dead Sea in the 1970s, and a more recent team proposed Tall el-Hammam north of the Dead Sea, linked to a comet airburst theory. Without a text found on site naming the city, he says archaeology cannot tell us which ruins, if any, were Sodom.
Who wrote the story of Sodom and Gomorrah?
Tradition credits Moses, but Dr. Johnson notes Genesis does not say Moses wrote it. Historical scholars think it was written by an elite Israelite scribe, probably connected to the palace or temple in Jerusalem, sometime between the 9th and 6th centuries BCE.
Why did Lot's wife turn into a pillar of salt?
Dr. Johnson calls the reference to Lot's wife enigmatic and notes it has produced many interpretations. He links the story's imagery of salt, sulfur and fire to the strange, harsh landscape around the Dead Sea, which the biblical writers could see in their own day.
Full transcript
Read the full transcript
Johnny Ova: Hey everybody, welcome to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova of the Sound of Heaven Church, and today we are joined by Dr. Dylan Johnson. Dr. Johnson, thank you so much for taking the time today to join me to discuss the ever-so-popular Sodom and Gomorrah.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Johnny Ova: Let's jump right in. I want to start with a little about you. Can you share your academic background and what led you to focus on ancient Near Eastern legal texts, the Hebrew Bible and these biblical stories?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: I grew up going to church and Sunday school, a little Lutheran church in western Canada, so think small. Really this whole career started when I went to university at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. There we had a unique group of academics who all worked in and around the field of Hebrew Bible, history and art, and probably the best thing you could do at that university was go on a field school in Israel. That really got me into it. I dug at a couple of different sites in Israel, and those experiences in archaeology got me into the academic side of Old Testament study.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: After I graduated from the University of Lethbridge, I did a Master of Divinity at Harvard in Old Testament. There I picked up a lot of the languages and more of the history, and I learned how you go about studying the Bible from a historical perspective, what we call the historical-critical approach, along with literary analysis, what the Bible is trying to tell us as a whole, and other approaches that ask where these ideas come from and which peoples they reflect. Then I went to New York University for about six years, and since then I've been working in Europe.
Johnny Ova: What a journey. It's taken you all over. How exciting is that? As I shared before we jumped on, the goal of these podcasts is to take more of a historical approach, because I believe as Christians we get caught in a little bubble. This is how we were brought up and taught, and any new information is treated as bad information. I find this stuff really interesting and powerful. I heard you on the History Hit podcast, and as soon as I did, I went through all the other ones you did, including the Moses one. It was so intriguing. So for those unfamiliar with a scholar's approach to biblical history, how would you describe the difference between reading it devotionally and treating it as a literary or legal text from the ancient world?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: I think the key difference has to do with timelines. I'm focusing on the Old Testament, not the New Testament, so I'll stick to what I know. You essentially have two timelines when you approach it historically. One is the narrative: from the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, through the patriarchs, Egypt, the Exodus, wandering in the desert, the promised land, the rise and fall of Israel and Judah, and the exile. That's the story. For people who just read it, you have a chronological history laid out fairly clearly in the biblical text, and we take that very seriously.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: But historical-critical scholars accept that there's another timeline that overlaps with that one at points and also deviates from it. That timeline is when the texts were written. Obviously we don't think the texts were written at the beginning of time. They reflect later thinking for later audiences, and that's not very controversial. The text itself says in many places, in those days, in past times. The writers and scribes are reflecting back in time. So we're interested in where these timelines intersect, the potential for memory, how far back they could remember things, and how that aligns with the chronological timeline.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: In those cases we pull in neighboring cultures, usually Mesopotamian cultures, the Assyrians and Babylonians and Moabites, all the cultures around Israel. They appear quite frequently. They wrote texts too, and they talked about Israel and the people of Israel. At times they line up very closely with the Bible, and at other times they don't. So we're always balancing as we reconstruct biblical history, because the Bible isn't a history book in our sense, but it is the story, the unfolding story of the relationship between the children of Israel and their God, told in historical time. Historians then ask, okay, that's important, and this is a very specific type of literature, so what can we learn about these people, their culture, what they thought, how they saw themselves and the people they lived alongside? Archaeology also helps with a lot of places, and that will be an important theme today. You can read these stories, but it's a whole other experience to actually go to the places.
Johnny Ova: Interesting. That's a good way to put it, because we tend to look at the Scriptures as one unfolding story written from start to finish. Very rarely do mainstream Christians reading it think, wait, these overlap? When was this written? Genesis wasn't the first thing written? That can challenge some aspects of faith, but I believe it forces people to think outside the box as well.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Right. One thing we'll go over today is that when you ask when things were written, we'll be jumping around, because Genesis 1 probably wasn't the first story written. It becomes really complicated when it's time to work through a story like Sodom and Gomorrah. The first one we encounter as we read the text forward may not be the oldest one. It could be something in Ezekiel, something in Isaiah, something in any of the prophets. It's a bit of a moving target. There's a lot of data, and we have basic parameters around when we think things were written, but our oldest manuscripts are pretty late, so we can't be sure on a lot of these pieces.
Johnny Ova: We're going to get into Sodom even more, but I want to take a quick timeout. Your microphone is sounding a little muffled. Is there an adjustment you can make?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: I can't switch the microphone while recording. If you pause the recording, I might be able to switch.
Johnny Ova: All right. When I heard you walk through this on the History Hit podcast, it was awesome. So take us through Sodom and Gomorrah. What is the biblical narrative, but from this historical angle? Bring our listeners through the story.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Most people read the biblical text from start to finish, more or less. The key narratives about Sodom and Gomorrah are in two places in the book of Genesis: once in chapter 14, and a second time in chapters 18 and 19. They're completely different stories. The only thing they share is that they both talk about Sodom and Gomorrah and the geographic, geological space around them. There's clearly some correlation between the two, most notably through the figure of Lot. He's Abraham's kinsman and really the Israelites' connection to these cities.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Let's start with the one most people will know. Most people associate Sodom and Gomorrah not with the first story in chapter 14 but with the stories in chapters 18 and 19, which are actually two stories combined. Chapter 18 begins with an episode at the oaks of Mamre. That's not in Sodom and Gomorrah. It's somewhere in Israel-Palestine, where the patriarch Abram, Abraham at this point, lives with his family. It's a story of a divine visit. It begins with three men, and they're called men in Hebrew at first, who show up at the house of Abraham and his wife Sarah. This sparks a very short episode about hospitality to guests. That's really important, because this becomes a key theme for interpreting ultimately the sin of Sodom.
Johnny Ova: The hospitality aspect of it, right?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Hospitality, exactly. In chapter 18, Abraham and Sarah are paragons of what you're supposed to do when guests come. These aren't mom and dad visiting for the weekend. These are unknown people you don't recognize, and this is about how you're supposed to treat strangers. It's not complicated. You're supposed to give them lodging, give them food, and protect them from whatever exists outside the home. When you follow the hospitality rites properly, and this is an almost universal feature of human societies, you're often blessed. Here the blessing comes specifically as the promise of a child. That's very important for the biblical authors, because this is the line of Israel. This is how the Israelites continue.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: At a certain point in that episode, at least one of these three men is revealed to be God himself. And because Abraham and his wife showed the proper guest rites, God promises Sarah a son, who will become Isaac. This kind of episode plays out a few times in Scripture: if you follow the proper rites, you're blessed. That's the good part of the story, chapter 18.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Then the narrative shifts suddenly and starts talking about these two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, as places of sin. Sin will be a key theme. What is the sin? Chapter 18 doesn't get very specific. It just says they're extremely sinful and God is planning to destroy them. Then comes a really interesting dialogue in which Abraham actually challenges God, pressing on the morality of destroying an entire city, and on how many righteous people would have to be in it for it to be spared. They go back and forth, which raises interesting theological questions about questioning God and the morality of all of this. Basically God relents and says, okay, if you can find so many righteous people in the city, I won't destroy it. Spoiler alert: they don't find very many righteous people in this city.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: At the end of chapter 18 and into chapter 19, the other two guests are revealed to be angels, messengers. The Hebrew word is malakhim. Not human beings, essentially. These two are the ones who go to Sodom, and they meet Abraham's kinsman Lot in the city. What the Sodomites do is the exact opposite of what Abraham and Sarah did in terms of guest rites. This is the key debate about the quintessential sin of Sodom. The two messengers come to Lot's house, and Lot does follow the proper hospitality rites. He feeds them and brings them into his home. But then the Sodomites show up and demand that Lot send these two men out into the square, and then comes the quintessential biblical euphemism, so that we may know them. That has spawned a whole cavalcade of interpretations that the fundamental sin of Sodom is some kind of sexual immorality.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: That becomes an important question for interpreting the story. Is it about that particular episode, or is it the larger theme of the violation of guest rites? They're actually connected in the story. Ultimately, though, the question isn't really relevant in the narrative, because Lot refuses, and since these are angels, they manage to ferry Lot and his family out of Sodom to a nearby town called Zoar. Then we get the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Fire and brimstone rain down on the city, and it's essentially made desolate. And of course we have the enigmatic reference to Lot's wife turning back and becoming a pillar of salt, which has also spawned a myriad of interpretations. That, in a nutshell, is the key narrative most people would probably know.
Johnny Ova: So who do they think wrote this? One of the things we teach here is that the Bible is not God-dictated. It's God-breathed, and there's a big difference. God isn't placing a phone call to Hosea saying, I need you to write this down exactly as I say it. There's a humanity to the Scriptures. We teach a redemptive arc: the sin of Adam and Eve, separation from God, and the finished work in Christ. You see God breathing on and inspiring things that bring us closer to the finished work of Christ. That's what we teach. But we know that in the book of Genesis, it's not like there's a scribe following people around as everything's going down. So what's the common thought on who wrote this part?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: The simple answer is an Israelite. Some Israelite wrote this. Tradition holds that the Israelite was Moses, because there's a scriptural reference to Moses writing. But that's an interpretation of Scripture. It doesn't say explicitly that Moses wrote Genesis. It's more explicit that Moses wrote Deuteronomy. With Genesis it's less clear, because Moses isn't alive at this point in the narrative. For historical-critical scholars, the best we can do is look at the type of language the scribes were writing with. Just like you and I have our own idiosyncrasies when we write, so did ancient scribes. They used particular words and had specific ideas.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: In an earlier generation of scholarship, we thought we could really pinpoint sources: the Yahwist source, the Elohist source, the Priestly source, each tied to a specific group. That's starting to fall by the wayside. Now we take more of a fragmentary approach: these two chapters were written by some group, probably associated with Jerusalem, for reasons we'll probably get to later. It would have to be a fairly elite group, because literacy rates were extremely low in antiquity. That leaves us with the palace or the temple, the two major institutions where we think writing was going on. Beyond that, it's guesswork. These stories obviously have religious importance, but there's no reason a palace scribe couldn't have written them. We also can't be too specific about time frames. Generally speaking, we think these texts were written somewhere between the 9th and 6th centuries BCE. That's a pretty wide range, and that's about all we can say with any certainty about who wrote it.
Johnny Ova: That's got to be so hard to pinpoint people, places and times with so little to go on. Staying on this, what do we know about Sodom and Gomorrah outside the Bible, if anything? Are there similar themes or cities in Mesopotamian or Syrian texts that parallel this? I know this is a topic in Christian circles as well.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: The basic storyline, cities of sin destroyed for various offenses, either directly by divine actors or indirectly by human actors driven by a god or the gods, has a fair number of examples. Cities were destroyed all the time in the ancient world. But there is something a bit unique in the way this story is told. Typically in the Mesopotamian myths, for example, we have stories about the destruction of cities, but usually a human agent causes the destruction. They're driven by gods or goddesses who abandon their cities, but direct destruction of a city by the gods is actually not that common. Ironically, the closest parallel is the myth of Atlantis in Greek tradition, where the gods themselves destroy the city, never to be found again. That's the myth I point to as the closest parallel.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: But in that world, I like to say there's pretty much no such thing as an atheist. Everything happened because your god or the gods willed it. That's just how they explained and understood the world they lived in. Why did you get sick? You must have sinned. You must have done something wrong. Why did the crops fail? You didn't pray to the god, or you didn't pray to the right god. It's so ubiquitous that it's actually hard to narrow down a single parallel.
Johnny Ova: Interesting. What about Sodom and Gomorrah outside the Scriptures in terms of digs? I know it's controversial. I've seen pictures of sulfur balls, and other people dispute those claims. What do we know from outside the text?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Once we leave Scripture, there are a couple of places we can turn. One is extra-biblical Near Eastern sources, and we don't have a lot. For a while we thought we had some from an ancient city called Ebla that mentioned a couple of places that looked like Sodom and Gomorrah, but we didn't really understand those texts. Now that we do, they're probably talking about places in Syria, not Israel, Palestine or Jordan. So textually, we have the Bible.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Archaeologically, there have been a lot of suggestions. I think the most concerted effort to locate these cities happened in the 1970s, with two archaeologists named Rast and Schaub. They did archaeological surveys all around the area just south of the Dead Sea. That matters because the biblical narratives about Sodom and Gomorrah mention the strange geology of the region very frequently. It's one of the key themes. At the end of the story these places are destroyed and turned into inhospitable wastelands. Furnace is one of the words used. Sulfur, fire. If any of your viewers have visited the Dead Sea region, it's a very, very strange geological place. It's extremely hot, incredibly salty, with sulfur deposits. So if we're trying to find these places, or at least the places that inspired the stories, it makes sense to go to that area, and that's exactly where Rast and Schaub went. Sure enough, they found sites. People did live in these places, more or less in the time frame we could imagine for the story, maybe the late third millennium BCE.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: But it's so challenging, because we have names and narratives, and what we find archaeologically are ruins of foundations. What tells us this specific site was Sodom and that one was Gomorrah? And there aren't just two. In the biblical narratives there are actually five sites: Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Zoar. How are we supposed to tell them apart when there are no texts? When we've identified biblical sites, and we have identified a lot of them, the key to saying definitively that this is the site is to find a text there that mentions the city's name. Sometimes we can make a good guess based on distance between two settlements, but the smoking gun we need is a text that says it, and we're not going to find that there.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: What Rast and Schaub found were sites destroyed by factors we don't really know, whether earthquakes or armies coming through. Ultimately they said, we have Bronze Age settlements in this region. The connection to the biblical narrative would be that these ruins were visible when the biblical writers lived. They could have encountered them in the landscape. You can imagine what a biblical writer would have thought, walking into this hellish, completely inhospitable landscape and finding ruins there. They'd start to wonder, what happened to these places? What could they possibly have done to turn the land into this?
Johnny Ova: Like, how did they anger the gods?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Exactly. The wrath of God must have punished these people. Think how sinful they must have been to have the entire landscape destroyed this way. The region around Israel, Palestine and Jordan is actually fairly fertile. It's not all desert. They grew crops there. So this would have stood out to ancient peoples too. So there are those excavations. They tried to identify the cities, maybe. There are a lot of sites.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Then there's another site, actually north of the Dead Sea, Tall el-Hammam. This was a much more recent suggestion, from an evangelical university, Trinity, I think, connected with Texas. The site is a little later than those south of the Dead Sea. They partnered with a scientific group that tried to explain the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah through natural phenomena, specifically the idea of a comet airburst, exploding above the landscape, so that the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah would be ancient interpretations of a natural event. Unfortunately, they didn't do a very good job of explaining why it would be this site. In fact, other people think Tall el-Hammam is a different biblical site, Abel-Shittim. That's a very important biblical site as well. It's where the Israelites allegedly camped before entering the promised land, where Moses may have delivered essentially the book of Deuteronomy. These are the kinds of debates we have. If it's not Sodom, what other biblical city could it be? So the short answer is that archaeologically we can't tell. We can't find it in the landscape.
Johnny Ova: You mentioned something I thought was fascinating. I never put two and two together before. It was one of those duh moments, to be honest. Gomorrah is always mentioned with Sodom, never on its own, yet we see Sodom mentioned plenty of times by itself. Why do you think that is?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: I don't have a definitive answer, but it's very clear that, first off, there's no story about Gomorrah. Nothing happens in Gomorrah. It's frequently paired with Sodom, though not always. Gomorrah only ever appears with Sodom, but Sodom appears on its own. What that says to me is that there's a tradition about Sodom first and foremost, narratives about it, and Gomorrah just tags along. There are no independent stories about Gomorrah. Why these two are paired, I have no idea. They seem to be paired from the earliest stories.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: And they're not alone. There's another pair, Admah and Zeboiim, other cities of the plain, presumably destroyed alongside them. What's interesting is that Admah and Zeboiim are sometimes mentioned without Sodom and Gomorrah, in prophetic texts and sometimes in texts from the Pentateuch. So the short answer is I think we had independent stories circulating, stories about Admah and Zeboiim, stories about Sodom, stories about Sodom and Gomorrah, and at a certain point they all coalesced into one story. But I can't prove any of this, because I'd need to see the independent stories on their own, and unless we find more Dead Sea Scrolls or something that shows them separately, all we have is the biblical text. That's my best guess. Honestly, I don't know why Gomorrah gets pinned onto Sodom the way it does, especially since it has no real independent narrative. That's just one of those mysteries.
Johnny Ova: Man, if you're going to get paired with anything in the Bible, getting paired with Sodom is not really ideal.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Well, it's fairly common. Sodom becomes the archetype of sin and sanction, of cities that sin and then have terrible things happen to them. So Sodom gets paired with pretty much every city worthy of destruction. Of course the enemies of Israel, Babylon and Nineveh, but also Israel itself. Samaria and Jerusalem are routinely identified with Sodom as places of sin.
Johnny Ova: Can you expand on that? Is it referencing judgment? Are they using Sodom as the base story? Like in the book of Revelation, where it says you've been seduced by Jezebel. We know Jezebel isn't literally walking around seducing the churches in Revelation. They're using her, the way she lived, taught and acted. Is Sodom similar? Sodom got judged by God, so every enemy that's going to be judged by God is now Sodom in their eyes?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Yes, exactly. It becomes the archetype of sin, and every calamity after this, whether happening in the present or projected into the future, especially in the Gospels, is compared to it. What's interesting, especially in the prophetic texts, is that it's routinely the cities of Judah and Israel that are compared to Sodom. But the prophets tend to relent. They say, listen, something terrible is going to come to Jerusalem. You've all sinned, and we're going to be destroyed. But unlike Sodom, and this is usually a refrain, there will be a remnant. It won't be completely annihilated or forgotten and become a wasteland forever. There's a chance for renewal, at least for Jerusalem.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: What's also interesting, especially in the prophets, is that they can't seem to agree on what that sin was. What was the fundamental sin that made Sodom so irredeemably wicked that it had to be destroyed? People have focused intensely on the narrative, especially the episode where the Sodomites demand that the angels be brought out so that they may know them, and that certainly becomes a fixation of some later writers. The book of Jude, for instance, seems to think sexual immorality of some kind is the fundamental sin of Sodom, and that really becomes the predominant view. But it's not uniformly accepted. If you read Ezekiel, chapter 16, Ezekiel seems to have no awareness of any sexual misconduct going on in Sodom. Sodom's sin was hubris, gluttony and over-extravagance, and that's why the city was destroyed. And then we have the narratives that say it's also about hospitality: these people violated the hospitality rites. So across the biblical texts, narrative or not, there are different interpretations of exactly what the sin was. The one thing they all agree on, with the exception of Genesis 14, is that Sodom was sinful and got what it deserved.
Johnny Ova: That's fascinating. I know you're an expert in the ancient Near East. Are there dominant legal or cultural values that could help us understand how the story was shaped? Any of those ideas that seeped into the Jewish telling of Sodom and Gomorrah?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: I don't know if it's legal. I think it would be custom. Custom is the unwritten rules, the way we know we're supposed to behave. Why do you hold the door open for someone coming in behind you? Even more, it's how you're supposed to act, whether or not you could be prosecuted for it in court. That's beside the point. It's ethics and morality and how you're supposed to act not just with people you know, but with strangers. I think that's a really key part of this story. These are strangers, and strangers in the ancient world were extremely vulnerable. They didn't have rights or protections, so it became incumbent on the people who lived in a place to protect them.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: This becomes a very prominent theme in the biblical legal texts. Remember, you yourselves were sojourners in the land of Egypt, so protect the sojourners who come to you. On some level it corresponds to that idea of protecting the marginal, and that certainly seems to be part of Ezekiel's understanding of the Sodom and Gomorrah story: they didn't protect the weak and the needy. So Ezekiel takes it that way. That's what the story is about for him. Jude takes it in another direction. And when you get to the Gospels, they pick up more on the comparison theme you see in the prophets: as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah was, so are these cities the Gospel writers are railing against, Capernaum and Bethsaida. As bad as Sodom was, you're even worse. I wish I could give you more consistency, but the scripture's not consistent and is open then to these interpretations within itself, and also for people today.
Johnny Ova: So we see this story as layered, symbolic and evolving. You mentioned a couple of instances. Are there more you could walk us through, showing how different scribes or communities shaped this story over time?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: The one episode I've completely left out is Genesis 14. I think very few people have much awareness of what's going on in that story when they think of Sodom and Gomorrah, because in that story there is no sin and no sanction. It's about a military conflict with strange kings from the east, with some very fantastical names like Chedorlaomer and Amraphel. To make a long story short, we don't know who any of these people are. We know some of the kingdoms, kingdoms of the east: Elam, which is in Iran, Shinar, which is basically in Iraq, and a couple of places we don't know. But it shows that Sodom is a tradition and not just a story. This story is also interested in the strange landscape of the Dead Sea region. It talks about bitumen pits and so on. And it talks about the destruction of these cities, not because of some fundamental sinfulness or divine judgment, but because these armies come from the east and destroy the cities of the plain.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: So what do you do with that narrative? You have that one, you have chapters 18 and 19, and you have all these later references in the prophets. Some prophets seem to know 18 and 19, some seem to know 14, and some seem to know both. That doesn't mean they didn't know the others. It's just what they talked about. If they're using Sodom as an archetype of sin, they won't talk about kings of the east destroying it, because sin isn't present in that narrative. What we have to do as historical-critical scholars is not simply read everything as a unified whole, but accept that there may be different traditions on specific themes and places. Not everything said about Shiloh or Jerusalem has to tell the same story, and so too with Sodom. If Sodom existed at one point, presumably there were different stories about it. That's why we think there are layers, or at least different perspectives, on what the city represents.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: One of the key differences in how historians approach it is that we just let the text disagree. We accept that not every text has the encompassing narrative in mind when it talks about these places. That becomes challenging once you've read the story, because once you've read chapters 18 and 19, every time you see Sodom you think of that story, which is probably intentional in some cases. But the challenge is to let it become unfamiliar again. That's one thing I challenge my students to do, especially students who are really steeped in Scripture and sometimes know it too well. I say, let it become a little unfamiliar, and you can start to read it in different ways and come up with new interpretations.
Johnny Ova: It's almost like zooming out on a map. You're so zoomed in, and when you zoom out, there's all this additional information. We do a lot of this at our church, and the biggest topic is the fall of the temple in 70 AD and the references to the end of the age. When we bring that narrative in, we hear all the time, I've never heard this before. It blows their minds, but it makes all these verses easier to understand.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Yeah, exactly.
Johnny Ova: So with Sodom and Gomorrah and this divine judgment, and you touched on this with your students, how would you invite people to consider the value of a more historical and literary reading, versus just the biblical narrative they've been taught? How would you encourage someone to read these and expand their knowledge?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: I would invite them, first off, to read it. Just go read it. That's the first step. Read it for yourself and read it without some kind of commentary or some kind of interpretive guide. You can turn to those afterwards, but just read it for yourself. That's exactly what I tell all my students. Don't go straight to the articles and books and people telling you how to interpret it. And read all the accounts. We have great resources now where you can look up the word Sodom and read every reference to the place in the Old and New Testaments and see what they say about it. See where you can group different trends. Okay, these Gospel writers are probably reading Isaiah or influenced by Isaiah, because they talk about Sodom the same way Isaiah does. This one seems to talk about it the way Ezekiel does. You start to see the interconnections and the human aspect behind these traditions: groups of people thinking, writing and relating these things, falling into different camps. And of course there will be standouts where you have no idea where the tradition comes from. Let it stand alone. It doesn't all have to fit together neatly.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: So do that first, and then make up your mind on the bigger questions. Okay, sin seems to be an overarching theme. And don't fixate on the same things other people fixate on. Is it about sexual immorality? Only two texts even mention that. What about all the other texts that mention other kinds of sin, hubris and hospitality? Isn't that an important part of the narrative too? Maybe even the more important part? Once you do that, you come away with a much more nuanced understanding of the story, both of what it's saying and of its message. That's probably more important for your listeners and the people in your church: what the story is trying to teach you. I think the best way to get there is from the text.
Johnny Ova: Here's a personal question. You were raised in a Christian home in Canada, if I remember correctly, and then came all your travels and studies. What has surprised you the most or stayed with you as you explored these ancient stories, sites, legal frameworks and cultural frameworks?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: I think the first thing is this project of defamiliarization. These texts were all very familiar to me from Sunday school. It's realizing that they are ancient Near Eastern documents, ultimately the products of ancient Near Eastern peoples who were distinct. They're not Babylonians writing these things, but they're part of that world. And it's really interesting how much they know about that world and how we can use it historically. The potential of biblical memory interests me, because it's in fact quite old. I work with a lot of colleagues who study ancient Greece, and there are biblical texts far older than some of our oldest Greek myths. So the antiquity of this document is really surprising to me, along with what it remembers and the detail with which it remembers it. I also work a little with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it's fascinating how faithfully the texts were transmitted over the centuries. At around the turn of the era, the Old Testament looks quite a bit like the Old Testament we have now. It hasn't changed much in those two thousand years. There are some differences, because scribes make mistakes, but basically it's the same. Those are the things that really surprised me when I started.
Dr. Dylan Johnson: And having worked in different departments, a divinity school, theological departments, and now an ancient history department, I've seen how we can bring the biblical texts into all these different arenas. It's the one thing that brings people with very different interests together for discussion. I'm interested in history, but I have many colleagues who work on the theology of the Old Testament, and we have lots to say to each other. So it's very much about encouraging dialogue and not thinking there's only one way to read this text. In fact, there are quite a few different ways to read it.
Johnny Ova: Well, Dr. Johnson, this has been awesome. Talking us through Sodom and Gomorrah, I know everybody listening is going to be blessed. A lot of eye-opening things were said today, and I believe it's going to encourage people to study more. Is there a way people can follow you and your work? Are you active on social media? Any projects coming up?
Dr. Dylan Johnson: Nope, not really a social media person. You can go check out the stuff I write.
Johnny Ova: Awesome. Dr. Johnson, thank you so much. Hopefully we can do this again on some other narratives. Being able to learn from you and listen to you has been great. It's been a great time.
Filed under Job, Psalms and the Prophets