I've spent a lot of time and energy teaching why Genesis 19 is not about homosexuality. Perhaps in the future I'll just tell people, "Watch Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey."
So compelling, Colby! (I always love when another Colby has great ideas.) I think this idea is especially important in the context of declining community and neighborly trust in the US. We need this willingness to take in and care for other people. We need the ability to open ourselves up to the inconvenience and messiness of connecting with a stranger and outsider simply because they are here. It seems like our whole society is built around isolation and separation, not hospitality and unity. And our lives are less happy because of it!
As the Holy Quran also says, we were made different so that we might get to know each other. (Surat al-Hujurat Ayah 13). Encounter and a willingness to meet difference with hospitable open heartedness is something worth cultivating.
Steveo, please be nice. There is a lot of irony about being mean about another person’s religion and faith on a post about hospitality and caring for strangers. There is some weird stuff that happens in the Bible, but it is still within those pages that Jesus says to love everyone. Let’s look for the good in the world and other people.
I am interested in why I those who write/speak on this topic never mention Judges 19. It seems to me that it is a parallel account of Sodom and Gomorrah, but with the concubine of the Levite. It helps explain the importance of hospitality.
Yes, that is a very important dimension in terms of understanding more of how the larger Biblical writers/audience would have understood Genesis 19. Thanks for bringing it up!
I watched it yesterday and that was exactly what I was thinking when it came to those parts mentioning Zeus’ Law. The problem is hospitality is a mostly ignored concept in our culture in the USA. That’s why we don’t see its importance in ancient cultures. And why attacking the gays seems easier. We so easily miss the point.
I think that highlighting xenia and Zeus’s law actually helps to understand a lot of the choices that Nolan made in his retelling. Another thing that stuck with me was how he handled the story about the Sirens. Odysseus isn’t tempted with knowledge but with everything that he lost and can’t get back, the promises made that he wasn’t able to or chose not to keep. Their song was about his sadness, failures, and regrets. And when you think about it, those often have a much stronger impact on us than our curiosity about the future. I can think of so many times when the past kept me from fully seizing on something right in front of me. I let past sadness and regrets keep me from having something new. And in missing those new opportunities, I just added to my failures, regrets, and sadness. So the song just became louder.
Or how tenaciously we can cling to the familiar doctrines and commandments of men.
Anyone who took a math class understood that we had to show our work. The curious among us came to understand why: so we could find errors in our calculations, and learn from our mistakes.
Yet popular preaching can regurgitate prior popular preaching, and we mistakes tradition for sound doctrine. I've started with a bad commentary's bibliography, read the commentaries the new author read, looked in that commentary's bibliography and followed the echoes back four centuries.
Someone comes along, and says, look closer at sacred Scripture! See how in the same book we find the text better explained! Look how later authors spoke of our text, drawing from it, commenting on it!
And we sit with our warmed over leftovers of old teachings of men's words and not the "word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God", and accuse he who reasons from Scripture of not teaching what the text says when he says more about the text and from the text.
Jesus told them, "If you were blind, you would not have any sin. But now that you insist, 'We see,' your sin still exists."
Beautiful piece. I've (thankfully) been taught ( in a progressive and queer-affirming UK church) about the lack of hospitality in that OT story, and been given the importance of hospitality also as connected forwards to the radical and universal hospitality of the NT. I saw the film this afternoon and yes, also appreciated the parallel. As John Caputo argues, Christians are heir to a Jew-Greek tradition. If this film can help a few people to mull over what the virtue of hospitality means, and why a failure of it signals something dangerous and tragic, then it's doing some good stuff.
A fascinating and apropos comparison. Well done! I had never read or heard of you before. It is a welcome discovery!
FWIW, theologically I am probably much more conservative than you. But over the past few years, I've been convicted of wholly ignoring Paul's direction to be "quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry". In conservative evangelicaldom, there is definitely an echo chamber effect. We are conditioned to hear the word "progressive" or "liberal" and interpret as 'anything that follows is straight from the pits of hell'. In contrast,anything presented as being 'conservative' is most certainly reliable. Insert eyeroll here. Perhaps I exaggerate. If so, it is not by much. I don't know about theological progressive circles, but knowing human nature, I suspect the same tendency is there.
I am not a Bible or ancient history scholar. But I read widely and go on 'deep dives' into topics. Sodom and Gomorrah has been one. What I have read from scholars in both fields (Hebrew Bible and ANE) indicate your assertions about hospitality is spot on. In fact, I'll contribute a point or two from what I learned.
In the Ancient Near East, the hospitality code also required insistence: The host was expected to insist that the stranger accept the offer of hospitality. This is why the angels initially declined Lot's offer. It proved Lot's righteousness (19:3). An unrighteous host would have accepted the angels' counter of sleeping in the public square. Lot knew if they declined, they would be exposed to the deadly reality of Sodom's inhospitable wickedness. Note Lot didn't merely insist like the moral code required: He 'compelled' them to accept through urgent insistence. While incomprehensible to us in our day, Lot's offer of his daughters demonstrates the level of serious commitment to honoring the code. He proved himself as "righteous Lot" as he is called by Peter (2 Peter 2:7).
In short, I concur with your assertion that Sodom and Gomorrah were NOT destroyed 'because of homosexuality'. My opinion is not shared by most in my circles. But I must follow the evidence. With that said, I don't agree with the implication that often flows from this conclusion, namely that same sex activity is irrelevant to those who hold to a high view of scripture (I don't like using the word homosexuality as it is anachronistic to the ANE and Classical worlds).
Careful wrangling with God's revelation is required if we are to be faithful to our calling. It also requires loving, careful speaking and listening among the body of believers, and not just within our many tribal camps. I have been grossly wrong in how I spoke and behaved on this and other topics for years. But I'm trying to do better, and trusting the Lord will help me.
Wow, Daniel, what a refreshingly open, kind, and good-faith comment. Thank you for sharing all of this. I (and other readers) are better for it.
I really jive with your contributions. That "insistence" part is key! The detail of Lot "compelling" them is not random or arbitrary. Well said.
And yes, when I teach this passage and get to the part about Lot offering his daughters, one of the things I say is: While Lots' offer is, by no means, an exemplary or moral offer, perhaps if nothing else we can take from it an indicator of JUST HOW serious the call to hospitality was. Such an offer is obscene and righty should horrify us! AND, it just also awaken our modern sensitivities to the seriousness with which the ancient world held hospitality.
Thank you for acknowledging that (for you) Gen 19 really is not a useful text for determining any kind of "biblical answer" to the questions of homosexuality and same-sex relationships. As I think i've noted in an other comment, this passage is more and more being properly set aside as a clobber passage by conservative scholars.
Also, I 100 agree that using the word "Homosexuality" is wildly anachronistic in these contexts. I often say that it is obvious and undeniable that the Bible has nothing to say about "homosexuality" (precisely for that point). It would be like asking, "What is the Biblical view on investing in Crypto?"
Anyway, thanks so much for reading and for being thoughtful in your engagement. It's rare. And a gift.
It's not just Greek culture that has the code of hospitality. The Fulani culture that I have lived in has a similar imperative and many folk tales about people who did not show hospitality being destroyed and people who did, being blessed. In my village I had to getvout of bed at night to get food for a neighbor who had a guest show up. (Remind you of Jesus's parable?) It's in many other African ethnic groups and Arab and I am sure others that I don't have experience with. And it was in ancient Hebrew culture. The story in Judges of the Levite and his concubine and her father and her death at the city of Gibeah is full of details (that seem irrelevant to an American) of who followed the code of hospitality and who did not. So I am just trying to give more support to your point. One small correction: philoxenia is the correct Greek word for hospitality to strangers.
This is how the epic is set up: "you find yourself rooting for Odysseus and others. After a 10 year campaign of suffering on the beach, they finally get their victory!" The suffering they inflicted on the Trojans is as nothing, because they are Others. The heroes of the story raid, murder, loot, and rape; they take women captive and bring them back to their encampment, to be serially raped, passed around, and fought over (the linchpin of the near-failure of the invasion in the Iliad, not only in the spat over Briseis, but the previous refusal to allow the priest of Apollo to ransom his captive daughter).
The bards and their audience were not rooting for those captive women, but for their rapists, and the wrath of Achilles was because his sex-slave was taken away from him. They treated any woman they seized, even the royal Trojan women, the same way: all potential chattel. No women anywhere in the Troad are safe from the armies that pour out from the Hellenic battleships. The Iliad recounts how Achilles looted Lesbos and carried off women to his camp, years before the fall of Troy. The captive Hekamedē suffered the same trauma, “she that old Nestor had taken from out of Tenedos, when Achilles sacked it.”
Earlier in the epic, king Nestor urged his men not to be in a rush to go home, “until each have lain with the wife of some Trojan, and have got him requital for his strivings and groanings for Helen’s sake.” This passage also blames Helen for the war, even though it was for her jilted husband Menelaos that the Akhaians beseiged Ilios. And Menelaos recaptures her once Troy falls, as the warriors capture its royal women. But these deeds are not lovingly elaborated like the blow-by-blow battles, and they are given no ethical consideration at all. Neither are the daughters of Lot. They're just women, and female kin rank lower than the endangered xenios in the patriarchal honor scheme.
I explain in depth in my book Women in Greek Mythography:
I have just come home from watching The Odyssey so your article is absolutely perfect timing and definitely food for thought.
It has been said that a civilization can only be judged on how it looks after those who cannot look after themselves. Most nations are failing miserably on that one and compassion and wisdom has to step up harder. Thank you for reminding us what we need to do. 🙏
Well put. I had the same thought after seeing the movie, that we now had an excellent example to point to of what is meant by “hospitality” in the context of the Sodom and Gomorrah story, since as you said, the term usually evokes something rather quaint in the present day (mints on pillows was a great example).
No offense but you do know The Odyssey was fiction and so is the “Bible”, right? They’re mythological stories spanning time mostly about the vagaries of male dominate culture which prizes conquest and possession above most other possibilities and the stories attempt to show that it’s a dead end.
So much gets written about the stories of the Bible, which to me, are largely offensive and tedious.
If I took offense at someone's opinion that the Bible is fiction, then my faith (indeed my whole mental wellbeing) would be woefully fragile, :)
As it stands, not only am I not offended by your take, but we probably even share some overlap. When i write about ancient stories in teh Bible (specifically those found in Genesis, which includes Sodom and Gomorrah), I join the many, many scholars who categorize these stories as Myth, or Sacred Saga. So while you and I may disagree as to the purpose/intent of such myths in the Bible, at least we both agree that these stories were not told/re-told because they were literal/historical accounts of something that actually happened.
Thank goodness we agree about that. The problem I have both with the Bible and the Odyssey is how tangential women are in these epics.
Boys can have books that satisfy them but we mustn’t pretend they are universal in truth or interest.
We need more women’s adventure or more inclusive epics or both.
I’ve read both of these cover to cover and found myself angry and not knowing why until I realized neither speak to or include my existence as anything but an object.
And I completely hear you on the tangentiality of women... however, I'd probably put it like this: Women were, for the most part, tangential in the Ancient World. So rather than saying the Bible/Odyssey treated women tangentially, I'd frame it as the world reflected by such Myths held women in poor regard. So naturally, the stories told from those worlds would as well.
That being said, while I know you mentioned that you've read the Bible cover to cover, I'm curious if you've ever engaged works by scholars (specifically feminist scholars) who have done some incredible work to point out that the Bible--while yes, being rooted in its day/age/world--also tells some pretty incredible Woman-centric, Woman-hero stories.
I don't say to that to defend the Bible in any way... there's many, many reasons it deserves it's criticisms... but I do think a holistic critique of the Bible ought include the rather counter-cultural ways it would often speak of and treat women.
Yes, I have. I’m aware of the women Jesus included, according to the story, which is much fuller than ole Paul thought mattered.
And my point is, yes women in many parts of history since the Pagans, were left out of stories. Yet culture continues celebrating these boorish works without mentioning the fact they are half stories, mythologies, built by men, about men, for men and therefore are narrow and frankly childish.
Can’t we do better?
You have a brilliant and academic mind. I challenge you to use it to fuss over works that include women.
For one to have a full understanding of life, philosophy and even mythology one cannot skip the half of the story that doesn’t look like them. Or perhaps you can.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the treatment of women is exactly as it was…which is why it speaks to the reality of our times. The reality that we haven’t truly evolved beyond patriarchy, as we’d like to think. As the elected male officials of our land seek to eliminate the right to vote for married women, as the right to decide what happens to our bodies has already been eliminated, as we still don’t have equal pay for equal work…I think it would be a disservice to describe or highlight stories of women as other than they were/are. Jesus was the one who saw the inherent and true value of women, and he elevated them kept them close to him throughout his time on earth.
Just like the tenet of love your neighbors that Jesus taught, the world is trying to get their heads and hearts around the notion that women are central to everything.
How are they central to everything? Seems kind of self-important. Were they central to inventing or manufacturing the ships of old? Are they central to the construction and maintenance of our infrastructure? What central contributions do they make to military defense, aside from operating machines designed by men?
If the right to decide what happens to their bodies has been taken from women, why are men being sentenced to prison on this day for rape? If they had no right to decide what happens to their body, why would intercourse without consent be a crime? This is a very straightforward logical question, but the twisted way you presented the issue makes me doubtful you'll address it in good faith.
It seems like your view may be a little distorted where youve forgotten the reason we're walking around on streets and in safe reliable structures, instead of through wilderness, is all by the work and ingenuity of men.
The reason we just can't seem to get over the hump of defeating sexism is because the very reality of biology exists in a way that could be called "sexist." Men are bigger and stronger than women - that's not fair: it's sexist - and it has nothing to do with culture or conspiracy against women.
Please explain how women are central to firefighting, a corollary of your claim they're central to everything. Thanks in advance for edifying me. If you do anything other than ignore or name-call me to avoid the substance of my arguments, you'll have defied my expectation and I'll reconsider my opinion immediately.
I can't believe anyine watches movies by a cult which is rich in pedophilia, sexual abuse, trans (even one of the main characters) torturing, raping, drinking od childrens blood. It's a disgusting industry and the world would be a better place without it.
Actually I’m not. While fiction is for entertainment and myth solidifies that which speaks to the sacred—both are intended to point to truth through other means than truth.
I agree that some sacred truths are pointed to in both works, the Christian Bible and the Odyssey, the fact that they leave half the world’s population out makes me question how serious these texts are. I’m not a literary scholar, just another person seeking wisdom, but the old story of a heroes journey that leaves out women is half or about a third of the story. (Joseph Campbell—sorry, not sorry)
This gave me a much fuller understanding of what hospitality meant in the ancient world. It was not simply friendliness, good food, or making someone comfortable. It involved protecting the stranger’s safety and dignity—especially when that person had no power, connections, or protection of his own.
Your connection to Ezekiel was especially important. Sodom had abundance and security, yet refused to help the poor and needy. In Genesis 19, that failure had grown beyond neglect into violent domination and humiliation of outsiders. Whatever conclusions readers reach about the wider sexual-ethics debate, the attempted gang rape in this story is clearly about coercion, power, and the complete dehumanization of the stranger.
The warning at the end landed: civilizations reveal their character by how they treat people who are vulnerable, unfamiliar, or unable to offer anything in return. When we stop seeing outsiders as neighbors bearing God-given dignity, hospitality gives way to fear, exploitation, and eventually cruelty. Thank you for making the ancient weight of that responsibility easier to see.
"Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen."
So compelling, Colby! (I always love when another Colby has great ideas.) I think this idea is especially important in the context of declining community and neighborly trust in the US. We need this willingness to take in and care for other people. We need the ability to open ourselves up to the inconvenience and messiness of connecting with a stranger and outsider simply because they are here. It seems like our whole society is built around isolation and separation, not hospitality and unity. And our lives are less happy because of it!
"to open ourselves up to the inconvenience and messiness of connection." Yep. That part. Well said!
As the Holy Quran also says, we were made different so that we might get to know each other. (Surat al-Hujurat Ayah 13). Encounter and a willingness to meet difference with hospitable open heartedness is something worth cultivating.
The quran isnt a "holy book," and ut's a religion that worshiped a prdoohile, and they practice pedophilia. Just like in the talmud. It's disgusting.
Steveo, please be nice. There is a lot of irony about being mean about another person’s religion and faith on a post about hospitality and caring for strangers. There is some weird stuff that happens in the Bible, but it is still within those pages that Jesus says to love everyone. Let’s look for the good in the world and other people.
Aswell asoutcuntru’dshitty treeatmeof migrants I agree AReally thought provoking piece
I am interested in why I those who write/speak on this topic never mention Judges 19. It seems to me that it is a parallel account of Sodom and Gomorrah, but with the concubine of the Levite. It helps explain the importance of hospitality.
Yes, that is a very important dimension in terms of understanding more of how the larger Biblical writers/audience would have understood Genesis 19. Thanks for bringing it up!
I watched it yesterday and that was exactly what I was thinking when it came to those parts mentioning Zeus’ Law. The problem is hospitality is a mostly ignored concept in our culture in the USA. That’s why we don’t see its importance in ancient cultures. And why attacking the gays seems easier. We so easily miss the point.
So good, right?!
And yes, "missing the point" seems like one of our greatest strengths 🥴
I think that highlighting xenia and Zeus’s law actually helps to understand a lot of the choices that Nolan made in his retelling. Another thing that stuck with me was how he handled the story about the Sirens. Odysseus isn’t tempted with knowledge but with everything that he lost and can’t get back, the promises made that he wasn’t able to or chose not to keep. Their song was about his sadness, failures, and regrets. And when you think about it, those often have a much stronger impact on us than our curiosity about the future. I can think of so many times when the past kept me from fully seizing on something right in front of me. I let past sadness and regrets keep me from having something new. And in missing those new opportunities, I just added to my failures, regrets, and sadness. So the song just became louder.
Oh man, that Siren scene was fire!
Shows how far a person will go to avoid what the Bible actually says.
Or how tenaciously we can cling to the familiar doctrines and commandments of men.
Anyone who took a math class understood that we had to show our work. The curious among us came to understand why: so we could find errors in our calculations, and learn from our mistakes.
Yet popular preaching can regurgitate prior popular preaching, and we mistakes tradition for sound doctrine. I've started with a bad commentary's bibliography, read the commentaries the new author read, looked in that commentary's bibliography and followed the echoes back four centuries.
Someone comes along, and says, look closer at sacred Scripture! See how in the same book we find the text better explained! Look how later authors spoke of our text, drawing from it, commenting on it!
And we sit with our warmed over leftovers of old teachings of men's words and not the "word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God", and accuse he who reasons from Scripture of not teaching what the text says when he says more about the text and from the text.
Jesus told them, "If you were blind, you would not have any sin. But now that you insist, 'We see,' your sin still exists."
Loooove this reflection, D. Thank you for sharing! And I totally agree.
I know, right? It's wild.
Beautiful piece. I've (thankfully) been taught ( in a progressive and queer-affirming UK church) about the lack of hospitality in that OT story, and been given the importance of hospitality also as connected forwards to the radical and universal hospitality of the NT. I saw the film this afternoon and yes, also appreciated the parallel. As John Caputo argues, Christians are heir to a Jew-Greek tradition. If this film can help a few people to mull over what the virtue of hospitality means, and why a failure of it signals something dangerous and tragic, then it's doing some good stuff.
Queer affirming, that says it all. That is incompatible with God’s word.
A fascinating and apropos comparison. Well done! I had never read or heard of you before. It is a welcome discovery!
FWIW, theologically I am probably much more conservative than you. But over the past few years, I've been convicted of wholly ignoring Paul's direction to be "quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry". In conservative evangelicaldom, there is definitely an echo chamber effect. We are conditioned to hear the word "progressive" or "liberal" and interpret as 'anything that follows is straight from the pits of hell'. In contrast,anything presented as being 'conservative' is most certainly reliable. Insert eyeroll here. Perhaps I exaggerate. If so, it is not by much. I don't know about theological progressive circles, but knowing human nature, I suspect the same tendency is there.
I am not a Bible or ancient history scholar. But I read widely and go on 'deep dives' into topics. Sodom and Gomorrah has been one. What I have read from scholars in both fields (Hebrew Bible and ANE) indicate your assertions about hospitality is spot on. In fact, I'll contribute a point or two from what I learned.
In the Ancient Near East, the hospitality code also required insistence: The host was expected to insist that the stranger accept the offer of hospitality. This is why the angels initially declined Lot's offer. It proved Lot's righteousness (19:3). An unrighteous host would have accepted the angels' counter of sleeping in the public square. Lot knew if they declined, they would be exposed to the deadly reality of Sodom's inhospitable wickedness. Note Lot didn't merely insist like the moral code required: He 'compelled' them to accept through urgent insistence. While incomprehensible to us in our day, Lot's offer of his daughters demonstrates the level of serious commitment to honoring the code. He proved himself as "righteous Lot" as he is called by Peter (2 Peter 2:7).
In short, I concur with your assertion that Sodom and Gomorrah were NOT destroyed 'because of homosexuality'. My opinion is not shared by most in my circles. But I must follow the evidence. With that said, I don't agree with the implication that often flows from this conclusion, namely that same sex activity is irrelevant to those who hold to a high view of scripture (I don't like using the word homosexuality as it is anachronistic to the ANE and Classical worlds).
Careful wrangling with God's revelation is required if we are to be faithful to our calling. It also requires loving, careful speaking and listening among the body of believers, and not just within our many tribal camps. I have been grossly wrong in how I spoke and behaved on this and other topics for years. But I'm trying to do better, and trusting the Lord will help me.
Wow, Daniel, what a refreshingly open, kind, and good-faith comment. Thank you for sharing all of this. I (and other readers) are better for it.
I really jive with your contributions. That "insistence" part is key! The detail of Lot "compelling" them is not random or arbitrary. Well said.
And yes, when I teach this passage and get to the part about Lot offering his daughters, one of the things I say is: While Lots' offer is, by no means, an exemplary or moral offer, perhaps if nothing else we can take from it an indicator of JUST HOW serious the call to hospitality was. Such an offer is obscene and righty should horrify us! AND, it just also awaken our modern sensitivities to the seriousness with which the ancient world held hospitality.
Thank you for acknowledging that (for you) Gen 19 really is not a useful text for determining any kind of "biblical answer" to the questions of homosexuality and same-sex relationships. As I think i've noted in an other comment, this passage is more and more being properly set aside as a clobber passage by conservative scholars.
Also, I 100 agree that using the word "Homosexuality" is wildly anachronistic in these contexts. I often say that it is obvious and undeniable that the Bible has nothing to say about "homosexuality" (precisely for that point). It would be like asking, "What is the Biblical view on investing in Crypto?"
Anyway, thanks so much for reading and for being thoughtful in your engagement. It's rare. And a gift.
That is very kind. Much appreciated!
(BTW as a retired financial advisor, I really liked your Crypto analogy! Lol)
So well written and moving! (Your post as well as The Odyssey)
Thank you, Shari!
It's not just Greek culture that has the code of hospitality. The Fulani culture that I have lived in has a similar imperative and many folk tales about people who did not show hospitality being destroyed and people who did, being blessed. In my village I had to getvout of bed at night to get food for a neighbor who had a guest show up. (Remind you of Jesus's parable?) It's in many other African ethnic groups and Arab and I am sure others that I don't have experience with. And it was in ancient Hebrew culture. The story in Judges of the Levite and his concubine and her father and her death at the city of Gibeah is full of details (that seem irrelevant to an American) of who followed the code of hospitality and who did not. So I am just trying to give more support to your point. One small correction: philoxenia is the correct Greek word for hospitality to strangers.
Love this perspective/insight, thank you for sharing.
This is how the epic is set up: "you find yourself rooting for Odysseus and others. After a 10 year campaign of suffering on the beach, they finally get their victory!" The suffering they inflicted on the Trojans is as nothing, because they are Others. The heroes of the story raid, murder, loot, and rape; they take women captive and bring them back to their encampment, to be serially raped, passed around, and fought over (the linchpin of the near-failure of the invasion in the Iliad, not only in the spat over Briseis, but the previous refusal to allow the priest of Apollo to ransom his captive daughter).
The bards and their audience were not rooting for those captive women, but for their rapists, and the wrath of Achilles was because his sex-slave was taken away from him. They treated any woman they seized, even the royal Trojan women, the same way: all potential chattel. No women anywhere in the Troad are safe from the armies that pour out from the Hellenic battleships. The Iliad recounts how Achilles looted Lesbos and carried off women to his camp, years before the fall of Troy. The captive Hekamedē suffered the same trauma, “she that old Nestor had taken from out of Tenedos, when Achilles sacked it.”
Earlier in the epic, king Nestor urged his men not to be in a rush to go home, “until each have lain with the wife of some Trojan, and have got him requital for his strivings and groanings for Helen’s sake.” This passage also blames Helen for the war, even though it was for her jilted husband Menelaos that the Akhaians beseiged Ilios. And Menelaos recaptures her once Troy falls, as the warriors capture its royal women. But these deeds are not lovingly elaborated like the blow-by-blow battles, and they are given no ethical consideration at all. Neither are the daughters of Lot. They're just women, and female kin rank lower than the endangered xenios in the patriarchal honor scheme.
I explain in depth in my book Women in Greek Mythography:
https://veleda.net/product/women-in-greek-mythography/
I have just come home from watching The Odyssey so your article is absolutely perfect timing and definitely food for thought.
It has been said that a civilization can only be judged on how it looks after those who cannot look after themselves. Most nations are failing miserably on that one and compassion and wisdom has to step up harder. Thank you for reminding us what we need to do. 🙏
Well put. I had the same thought after seeing the movie, that we now had an excellent example to point to of what is meant by “hospitality” in the context of the Sodom and Gomorrah story, since as you said, the term usually evokes something rather quaint in the present day (mints on pillows was a great example).
Yes! Glad others thought this, too. Thanks, Benjamin.
No offense but you do know The Odyssey was fiction and so is the “Bible”, right? They’re mythological stories spanning time mostly about the vagaries of male dominate culture which prizes conquest and possession above most other possibilities and the stories attempt to show that it’s a dead end.
So much gets written about the stories of the Bible, which to me, are largely offensive and tedious.
If I took offense at someone's opinion that the Bible is fiction, then my faith (indeed my whole mental wellbeing) would be woefully fragile, :)
As it stands, not only am I not offended by your take, but we probably even share some overlap. When i write about ancient stories in teh Bible (specifically those found in Genesis, which includes Sodom and Gomorrah), I join the many, many scholars who categorize these stories as Myth, or Sacred Saga. So while you and I may disagree as to the purpose/intent of such myths in the Bible, at least we both agree that these stories were not told/re-told because they were literal/historical accounts of something that actually happened.
Thank goodness we agree about that. The problem I have both with the Bible and the Odyssey is how tangential women are in these epics.
Boys can have books that satisfy them but we mustn’t pretend they are universal in truth or interest.
We need more women’s adventure or more inclusive epics or both.
I’ve read both of these cover to cover and found myself angry and not knowing why until I realized neither speak to or include my existence as anything but an object.
It’s mind numbing in that way.
Thanks for engaging, Julie!
And I completely hear you on the tangentiality of women... however, I'd probably put it like this: Women were, for the most part, tangential in the Ancient World. So rather than saying the Bible/Odyssey treated women tangentially, I'd frame it as the world reflected by such Myths held women in poor regard. So naturally, the stories told from those worlds would as well.
That being said, while I know you mentioned that you've read the Bible cover to cover, I'm curious if you've ever engaged works by scholars (specifically feminist scholars) who have done some incredible work to point out that the Bible--while yes, being rooted in its day/age/world--also tells some pretty incredible Woman-centric, Woman-hero stories.
I don't say to that to defend the Bible in any way... there's many, many reasons it deserves it's criticisms... but I do think a holistic critique of the Bible ought include the rather counter-cultural ways it would often speak of and treat women.
Yes, I have. I’m aware of the women Jesus included, according to the story, which is much fuller than ole Paul thought mattered.
And my point is, yes women in many parts of history since the Pagans, were left out of stories. Yet culture continues celebrating these boorish works without mentioning the fact they are half stories, mythologies, built by men, about men, for men and therefore are narrow and frankly childish.
Can’t we do better?
You have a brilliant and academic mind. I challenge you to use it to fuss over works that include women.
For one to have a full understanding of life, philosophy and even mythology one cannot skip the half of the story that doesn’t look like them. Or perhaps you can.
Wake me when it’s over.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the treatment of women is exactly as it was…which is why it speaks to the reality of our times. The reality that we haven’t truly evolved beyond patriarchy, as we’d like to think. As the elected male officials of our land seek to eliminate the right to vote for married women, as the right to decide what happens to our bodies has already been eliminated, as we still don’t have equal pay for equal work…I think it would be a disservice to describe or highlight stories of women as other than they were/are. Jesus was the one who saw the inherent and true value of women, and he elevated them kept them close to him throughout his time on earth.
Just like the tenet of love your neighbors that Jesus taught, the world is trying to get their heads and hearts around the notion that women are central to everything.
How are they central to everything? Seems kind of self-important. Were they central to inventing or manufacturing the ships of old? Are they central to the construction and maintenance of our infrastructure? What central contributions do they make to military defense, aside from operating machines designed by men?
If the right to decide what happens to their bodies has been taken from women, why are men being sentenced to prison on this day for rape? If they had no right to decide what happens to their body, why would intercourse without consent be a crime? This is a very straightforward logical question, but the twisted way you presented the issue makes me doubtful you'll address it in good faith.
It seems like your view may be a little distorted where youve forgotten the reason we're walking around on streets and in safe reliable structures, instead of through wilderness, is all by the work and ingenuity of men.
The reason we just can't seem to get over the hump of defeating sexism is because the very reality of biology exists in a way that could be called "sexist." Men are bigger and stronger than women - that's not fair: it's sexist - and it has nothing to do with culture or conspiracy against women.
Please explain how women are central to firefighting, a corollary of your claim they're central to everything. Thanks in advance for edifying me. If you do anything other than ignore or name-call me to avoid the substance of my arguments, you'll have defied my expectation and I'll reconsider my opinion immediately.
I can't believe anyine watches movies by a cult which is rich in pedophilia, sexual abuse, trans (even one of the main characters) torturing, raping, drinking od childrens blood. It's a disgusting industry and the world would be a better place without it.
Julie Akins, it seems to me you're confusing the concept of fiction and myth.
Actually I’m not. While fiction is for entertainment and myth solidifies that which speaks to the sacred—both are intended to point to truth through other means than truth.
I agree that some sacred truths are pointed to in both works, the Christian Bible and the Odyssey, the fact that they leave half the world’s population out makes me question how serious these texts are. I’m not a literary scholar, just another person seeking wisdom, but the old story of a heroes journey that leaves out women is half or about a third of the story. (Joseph Campbell—sorry, not sorry)
Really beautifully connected and explained ♥️ the world would be so much gentler if we returned to this ancient concept
This gave me a much fuller understanding of what hospitality meant in the ancient world. It was not simply friendliness, good food, or making someone comfortable. It involved protecting the stranger’s safety and dignity—especially when that person had no power, connections, or protection of his own.
Your connection to Ezekiel was especially important. Sodom had abundance and security, yet refused to help the poor and needy. In Genesis 19, that failure had grown beyond neglect into violent domination and humiliation of outsiders. Whatever conclusions readers reach about the wider sexual-ethics debate, the attempted gang rape in this story is clearly about coercion, power, and the complete dehumanization of the stranger.
The warning at the end landed: civilizations reveal their character by how they treat people who are vulnerable, unfamiliar, or unable to offer anything in return. When we stop seeing outsiders as neighbors bearing God-given dignity, hospitality gives way to fear, exploitation, and eventually cruelty. Thank you for making the ancient weight of that responsibility easier to see.
"Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen."
- Ezekiel 16:49-50
Exactly! Great verse. It's why I included it above in the article itself :)