Said one Sodomite to another, "This fellow Lot came in to sojourn and now he wants to be a judge." To Lot they said, "Now we will deal worse with you than with your guests. The men of Sodom pressed sore upon Lot and nearly broke the door; but the visitors inside reached out, pulled Lot into the house, shut the door, smote the intruders with blindness and prevented the breaking in. The strangers asked Lot, "Have you any relatives here? Bring them out; for we will destroy this place because of its disrepute." Lot sneaked out and told his sons in law, "Get out of this town: Jehovah is going to put a hex on it," but they paid him no heed.

Next morning the angels, hereto called men, hastened Lot, saying, "Arise, take your wife and two daughters, escape for your life to the mountain and don't look behind you, neither stay in the plain lest you be consumed in the iniquity of the city." The men (or angels) brought Lot, his wife and his two daughters forth and set them outside the city. Lot said, "My lord, you have been merciful and saved my life. I cannot escape to the mountain lest some evil take me and I die. This little city of Zoar is near to flee to. Let me escape thither." His escort said to him, "See, I have accepted your proposal concerning this also, that I will not otherthrow Zoar, for which you have spoken. Escape thither." Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar, meaning "little." The Sun was risen when Lot entered Zoar. Then the Lord rained fire and sulfur from heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah; he overthrew those cities and all the inhabitants and that which grew upon the ground in all the plain.

Lot's wife looked back from behind Lot and she became a pillar of salt.

Abraham got up in the morning and stood before the Lord. He looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah and the land of the plain; and the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. Why the sight did not saltify Abraham as it had Lot's wife the report does not say.

Come's now some hanky-panky in a cave. Fearing to stay in Zoar, Lot went and dwelt in a mountain with his two daughters, in a cave. The firstborn daughter said to the younger, "Daddy is old, we shed our hsubands in Sodom's destruction and there is no man to fuck us. Let us get our father drunk and go to bed with him that we may preserve his seed." Accordingly they induced Lot to drink a lot of wine that night, and the elder daughter got herself impregnated by him without his knowing it.

In the following evening the younger daughter followed her sister's suit. Thus were both of Lot's daughters with child by their father.

What is the point of all this Sodom story? For us, virtually none: the story's writer was not pointing any moral. It is rather to be inferred that he was explaining the distribution of the tribes in and around Palestine. By his geography Jordan runs south and empties into the Dead sea. To the west of Jordan Abraham's descendants out of Sarah included the Children of Israel. In the territory east of the Jordan, emptying into the Jordan about twenty miles north of the Dead sea, runs the river Jabbok. To the north of that river (and east of the Jordan) dwelt the Moabites, and some philologists take Mo Ab, "water of the father," to mean "The semen of the father." Moab, we are told in Genesis, was the elder of the two children that Lot got in his daughters.

Lot's other son, by his other daughter, was Ben-ammi. "He is the father of the Ammonites to this day." The Ammonites dwelt to the south of the Jabbok. In geology and paleontology you find mention of ammonites, but this word is pronounced ammon-i'-teez and means a kind of sea shells. Lot, you remember, was Abraham's nephew. Abraham begot a son by

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his Egyptian concubine, Hagar, and that bastard was called Ishmael. He is considered the ancestor of those who lived on the fringe of our Genesis geographer's world, notably to the south of the Dead sea, both to the east and to the west.

Genesis tells in detail about Abraham's get out of Sarah. Indeed the book's main business is an explanation of the proliferation and distribution of those Palestinian families.

The man who wrote the chapters under our notice was little preoccupied with rights and wrongs. He may have considered the way of a man with a man reprehensible, but he may have had in mind additional misbehaviors when he reported that "The men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly." Their violation of the customary rules of hospitality might be one of the additional shortcomings, as their failure to defend themselves against the armies leagued against them might be.

Polygamy and incest occur without much editorial comment, though the Lord appears offended when Abraham's wife-and-half-sister are loaned to another man — and it is the innocent other man whom the Lord gives hell.

All in all, there is nothing in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah that should impede a Jew or a Christian should he wish to have sexual congress with a person of his own sex.

Jacob and his genitals are told about in Genesis, Chapter 35, verse 11. The events are supposed to be dated about 1,732 b.c. God changed Jacob's name to Israel and said, "Kings shall come out of your testicles." In Genesis 46, verse 26, seventy persons, the fruit of Jacob's ejaculations, came with him into Egypt. Jacob, the son of Isaac, was Abraham's grandson.

It is written in Genesis, Chapter 32, verse 24 and following, "Jacob was left alone, and there wrestled a man with him." ("Wrestled" hmmm! Mind if we joist an eyebrow at that? Was it a contest or an embrace? Were they enemies though Jacob did not know the other's name?) And Jacob said. to the other, "I will not let you go except you bless me." As a clem, this begins to look like a pillow fight. As a love tussle, well, the original meaning of bless was to consecrate by pouring blood or something.

Along here, as other parts of the Bible, the word thigh is mentioned, and whether it means the leg from hip to knee or whether it takes the place of a word the translator durstn't write we can't be sure. In the same way we occasionally read "loins," "reins" (literally, kidneys, but how many Bibliolators know that?) and other words that are stand-ins for, simply, "cock and balls." It is asserted that modern orthodox Jews, when giving an oath, take hold one man of another's scrotum. Our best guess is that in the original tale Jacob and the stranger played with each other's prick in the way two males have always liked to play and that Nice Nellies balked at copying the naughty words.

We read in this story of Jacob that the thigh was out of joint and the sinew "upon the hollow of the thigh," wherever that is, shrank. The writer's assertion that the Jews consequently do not eat that sinew is without meaning unless we infer that eating the remainder of a man is permitted. Incidentally the word sinew is apparently used in its obsolete sense of muscle.

Onan's story is an instance in which teachers, as is their wont, have read into a passage a meaning that is not there. In Onan's case the teachers are clergymen, but they could as well be government officials or newspaper writers and practice the same deception. They tell us the Lord struck Onan dead for spilling his semen on the ground; but when you read the passage for yourself (Genesis 38) you see they are lying. If God struck Onan dead you may be sure it was for something else than "onanism." The Lord, for all his fabled whimsicality,