• Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Technically speaking the wickedness of the cities that were under divine review were because they were narcissistic, enjoyed excess and “prosperous ease” without considering properly the poor and did “abominable acts” before God. Those abominable acts could have been anything. We get the homosexuality related misconception because the test involved hosting two angelic dignitaries disguised as humans whom a mob decended on an demanded they let them “know”…

    Funny trick here. The original Hebrew text used for the angels was anashim and the OG word Lot uses for them when he greets the dignitaries is non-gendered as analogous to “master”. Anashim is a non-gendered term, it encompasses specifically both the terms woman and man and means “of mankind”. However, the English translations of the Bible use male gendered terms like “Lords” “Gentlemen” and “Men” for the angels… Meaning the lust for the angels in the original story was probably not gendered. The angels in the original are not named nor gender coded in any way but there were specifically two of them. We might interpret this to mean there were either angels that appeared to be of both genders or that the genders were deliberately not important because the pluralism means they are never gendered by any other mention in the story. Just as in English when a plural is used it disguises the individual nature of the particular makeup of the group. The crowd calls to know “them”.

    The test was ultimately a litmus test failure of the town to show it lived up to the laws of hospitality and morality but there’s nothing specifically outlining gay sexuallity in the original text of that story moreso than any other sexuallity. The abominations could have been anything and the horny onslaught against the angels was potentially supposed to be coded as lust to defile or possess the divine or even just a lack of consent. The crowd isn’t asking if the angels want to come out and play, they are demanding it.

    In the end it was a bunch of English translators who had very specific cultural ideas about who was worthy of the term “Master” that occluded any potential of the feminine potential reading and were the ones who through the cultural game of telephone made it a story about gay sex. It kind of benefited the Church to make it less a story about hoarding wealth and comfort because a lot of individual Churches were very VERY wealthy.