Monday, October 14, 2013

One of the Earliest "Honor Killings"

Sodom had a wall fencing in the city. It was the "Gate of Sodom". The wall surrounded the entire sprawling city. It must have looked like an aqueduct, with many semicircular passageways underneath it. After all, Sodom had to accommodate, or screen out, a large volume of human traffic.

The city wall served as a platform from which guards can spy on their own citizenry to see if any "crime" or mischief was been committed. In this way, Sodom wished to rule its own destiny against conservative, logical foreigners whose customs and mores Sodomites wished to distance themselves from. These guards were euphemistically called "Judges", each given legislative or executive authority to persecute the "offenders". Each night another team of Judges got appointed to the job, each guard assigned to Judge/Spy from the city wall, the Gate of Sodom.

For example, the night Lot persuaded passers-by into his house to lavish a feast upon them, he feigned anger as he spoke to them for fear the Judges would detect the truth. The wall's guards would see him angry with passers-by, and would think, he figured, he chased them off. It was a long wall around the big metropolis and many interactions with passers-by were common. To make it look as if he is shooing away from Sodom the passers-by, Lot feigned anger as he spoke to them.

A young girl in Sodom (?Lot's daughter?) underestimated the resolve of these Sodomite Judges that guarded the wall, and also underestimated or forgot to consider the consequences of her actions. She was seen by the Judges of the Wall to have taken food from her water pitcher to feed poor people. To make it look like she was retrieving water from the public wells, the girl figured no one would notice the food she hid in her water pitcher for the stealthy, unlawful purpose of feeding the poor.

So they laid in waiting and caught her one night "red-handed". Then they spread her with honey, fastened her atop the Gate of Sodom, and wasps came and consumed her. (Sanhedrin 109:b)

This incident locked in the final fate of Sodom's existence. It was this girl's cries that shut down Sodom for good. God would overturn Sodom and its neighboring sister-cities, and burn them in the process.

You see the same behaviors that follow perverse logic among Muslim communities today, where they perform "honor killings" against women, and cruel and unusual punishment meted out against "sinful" men and children. You easily sense among these people the worthlessness with which they characterize all of humanity. They often treat their own kind as if humans can be literally trashed at any time; And always the reasoning is either absent or perverse.

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