Why Does the Sodom Story Parallel the Flood Traditions?

This article is based on a paper presented at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in 2009, and again, later that year, at a department seminar at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva. In both cases, Prof. Victor Avigdor Hurowitz z”l was present. It struck me that not only did he come the second time around, even though he had heard the paper already (and didn’t agree with my thesis), but he came prepared with constructive criticism, even though I was not his student in any way. I dedicate this article to his memory.

The J-P division of the flood story I am using follows that of Baruch J. Schwartz, “The Flood Narratives in the Torah and the Question of Where History Begins,” in: M. Bar-Asher et al. (eds.), Shai le-Sara Japhet: Studies in the Bible, Its Exegesis, and Its Language, Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2007 [Hebrew], pp. 143-147. See also, “A Textual Study of Noah’s Flood,” TheTorah.com (2013). 

 This does not mean that the Sodom story should, like the flood story, be divided into documentary strands. I find the arguments for the basic narrative unity of Genesis 18-19 convincing, especially as virtually all narrative details are connected and most cannot stand on their own.

In Table 1, an asterisk (*) denotes a deviation from the order of elements in the other stories. Two asterisks (**) denote a deviation from the content of the element in the other stories.

Although these verses are not included in Schwartz’s article, they are commonly attributed to J.

Schwartz, “The Flood Narratives.”

 Adolphe Lods, “La caverne de Lot,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 95 (1927), pp. 211-215. He specifically argues for the Sodom tale as a reworking of a Horite version of the universal flood myth.

Gordon Wenham notes that these parallels do not distinguish between the so-called J and P strands of the flood narrative and thus undermine the traditional source-critical division; Gordon J. Wenham, “Method in Pentateuchal Source Criticism,” VT 41 (1991), pp. 103-105. But this seems like an overstatement, since each of these versions contain similar parallels with the destruction of Sodom. For more criticism of Wenham’s approach, see J.A. Emerton, “An Examination of Some Attempts to Defend the Unity of the Flood Narrative in Genesis”, VT 37 (1987), pp. 401-420, VT 38 (1988), pp. 1-21.

Laurence A. Turner, “Lot as Jekyll and Hyde: A Reading of Genesis 18-19,” in: D.J.A. Clines et al. (eds.), The Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebration of Forty Years of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield, Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990, pp. 96-99.

Editor’s note: For more on this, see Shalom Holtz, “The Flood Story in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context,” TheTorah.com (2014); Guy Darshan, “The Motif of Releasing Birds in ANE Flood Stories,” TheTorah.com (2017); Norman Solomon, “The Torah’s Version of the Flood Story,” TheTorah.com (2013).

Translation here according to B.R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, vol. 1, Bethesda: CDL, 1993, pp. 168-169.

A number of critical scholars have argued that this section of the Abraham story is a later addition. My analysis, however, points to the opposite conclusion: in a story based on flood traditions, it is only natural to use such motifs.

See Jacob Klein, “A New Look at the Theological Background of the Mesopotamian and Biblical Flood Stories,” in: A Common Cultural Heritage: Studies on Mesopotamia and the Biblical World in Honor of Barry L. Eichler (eds., Grant Frame et al.; Bethesda: CDL Press, 2011), 151-176.   

This possibly gives some support to the idea (originally suggested by Lods) of an alternative flood-like catastrophe recalled in the tale of Sodom.

Most of these parallels were noted by Wenham. For #10 (the mountain), see Haggai Gross, “A Comparison of the Generation of the Flood to the People of Sodom According tho the Bible and the Midrashim,” `Alon Shevut 128 (1990) [Hebrew], p. 95. For #12 (knowledge), see Yair Zakovitch, Through the Looking Glass: Reflection Stories in the Bible(Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1995) [Hebrew], p. 49.

 Especially when broken down into narrative strands, the verbal parallels seem quite negligible, and the absence of significant verbal parallels between J’s flood and Abraham’s Sodom, when the Sodom narrative is generally considered a J text, just reinforces this point.

See Joshua Berman, Narrative Analogy in the Hebrew Bible: Battle Stories and Their Equivalent Non-Battle Narratives, Leiden: Brill, 2004, pp. 8-17.