What Does Genesis 19:5 Mean?

They called to Lot, "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them." The demand of the Sodom mob is explicit: they want to sexually assault the visitors. The connection between the specific sin of Sodom and the term "sodomy" as it entered English is rooted in this verse. The sin of Sodom in the Genesis narrative includes this specific demand, but the prophets' wider descriptions of Sodom's sin (Ezekiel 16:49-50 emphasizes pride, gluttony, and failure to help the poor; Isaiah 1 emphasizes injustice) indicate that the sexual violence of this scene is the most extreme symptom of a broader social pathology rather than the complete definition of what made Sodom wicked.

The demand to "bring them out" is the demand to surrender guests to violence, which is the precise violation of the fundamental hospitality covenant that made ancient Near Eastern society function. Guest protection was among the most sacred obligations in the culture Lot inhabited; the refusal to protect guests was the equivalent of abandoning all social obligation. The mob's demand puts Lot into an impossible situation: comply with the mob's demand and abandon the guests he has undertaken to protect, or refuse and face the mob. His response in verse 6-8, though morally deeply problematic, is driven by the covenant obligation to protect his guests.

That the violence demanded is sexual is significant for the theology of the scene. The specific form of the violence communicates the reduction of persons to objects of domination and violation, the refusal of the other person's humanity, and the assertion of the mob's will as the only relevant factor in the interaction. This is the theological root of what the prophets condemn: the society that treats strangers and the vulnerable as available for exploitation rather than as persons made in God's image. Jesus said what is done to "the least of these" is done to Him; the mob at Lot's door would have violated the one who came to find and seek what is lost.