Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/62

 so long termed "sodomy" should ever have such a meaning. The incident of Lot and his guests, and of the mob that attacked Lot's house in Sodom with the clamorous "Bring out the men, that we may know them!" correctly read, is simply a common civic episode of a suspicious Oriental town. A mob-element being excited, feared some political treachery; and violated the hospitality that Lot had offered to two strangers, supposed to be spies or what else, by the unfriendly crowd. There is no textual or other reason to give the verb "know" a sexual value, no warrant for sexual colouring of the affair. Almost exactly the same incident occurs in another defense of guests; set forth in Judges XIX, vv. 16-26 (retold in Chap. XX, vv. 4-5) in the night-attack of the curious and alarmed townsmen of the city of Gibeah. There, too, a stranger, a Levite, had been taken into a house, with the same Eastern hospitality, and saved his life by allowing his concubine to be the victim of the mob, precisely as Lot offered his virgin daughters. Both episodes are plainly tales of violated hospitality. The same devices to appease the citizens are mentioned; but there is no evidence even in this last detail of sexual insults to the guest. In the story of the Levite, we distinctly read that the object of the attack was because "they thought to have slain" him; and Sodom's mob included both "young and old, all the people from every quarter". The two stories are absolutely of Oriental "guest and host" duties and claims.

The Mosaic charge to Israel that similisexual love was an abomination in the. sight of the Jewish Jehovah, a particular moral enormity meriting death, had no basis in any moral "revelation to Moses," any more than had other wise provisions of the Mosaic Code. The warning, the death-penalty, were inserted for directly practical motives, not theological nor ethical objections. (The very words that are used of similisexual relations as a sin, refer to many other matters often; to what we consider