Roadside Observance: System of Sodom

Roadside Observation: The System of Sodom

Everyone thinks they know what destroyed Sodom. The left points to Ezekiel's charge of greed and gluttony. The right points to the very next verse and the wider ancient record. Both are reading the same text — and both are stopping exactly where it becomes inconvenient to keep reading.

This is my most recent entry into the Roadside Observation series: a close look at a ruined civilization that refuses to let any faction claim innocence. Drawing on Ezekiel 16, the Book of Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, 2 Enoch, and the Book of Jasher's account of Abraham's servant Eliezer inside the walls of Sodom, this piece traces how economic exploitation, institutional cruelty, and moral collapse were never separate sins — they were one disease, shared by elites and crowds, rich and poor, and men and women of every side of every divide.

Sodom didn't fall because one kind of person sinned. It fell because an entire system — top to bottom — agreed to look away, and then moved to silence anyone who wouldn't.

A short, pointed read for anyone tired of scripture being used as a weapon in someone else's argument.

Roadside Observations is a series of short theological essays examining ancient texts for what they actually say — not what either side of a modern argument needs them to say.