Lecture: Biblical Series XI: Sodom and Gomorrah

[Music] Three difficult stories tonight, and hopefully my plan is to get through all three of them, so we'll see how that goes. So we're going to talk about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and then the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, which is an extremely complicated story. And so, we'll try to make some headway with that. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is plenty complicated.

All right, so what we established last week, at least in part, was this idea that the Abrahamic narratives are set up as punctuated epochs, I suppose, in Abraham's life. We were hypothesizing that, you know, you set out a goal for yourself in your life. It's like a stage in your life, you might say that. And then when you run that goal to its end, when that stage comes to an end, then you have to regroup and orient yourself once again.

I was making the case that that's a good time to make necessary sacrifices, you know, and part of that because as you move through your life, you have to shed that which is no longer necessary. Because otherwise, it accretes around you and holds you down, and you perish sooner than you should. And I think that's in large part because if you don't dispense with your life as you move through it, then the stress of all that undone business and all those unmade decisions turns into a kind of chaos around you.

And that chaos puts you in a state of psychophysiological emergency preparedness chronically, and that just ages you. So it's necessary, in some sense, to stay light on your feet and also, I think, to renew your commitment to your aim upward. I believe that that's what the sacrificial routines in the Abrahamic stories dramatized.

I said already that these things are often first portrayed very dramatically and concretely before they become psychological. We'll see, because one of the things that happens tonight as well in these stories is that when God makes his covenant with Abraham, this is the next part of the story. It's also when the idea of circumcision is introduced into ancient Hebrew culture.

There's every bit of evidence that other cultures were utilizing circumcision beforehand, so it wasn't necessarily a novel invention of the Abrahamic people. But I see its introduction as a step on the road to the psychologization of the idea of sacrifice. Right, first of all, it's giving up something concrete, and then second, it's signified by the sacrifice of a part of the body instead of for the sake of the whole.

It's something like that. It's dramatizing the idea that you have to give up a part of yourself for the sake of the whole. And eventually, well, by modern times, that becomes virtually completely psychological in its essence. We all understand, perhaps not as well as we should, but at least well enough to explain it, that it's necessary to make sacrifices to move ahead in life.

One of the themes that I'd like to explore tonight, in relationship especially to the sacrifice of Isaac, is that, you know, once humanity had established the idea that sacrifice was necessary to move ahead, which is really a discovery of incalculable magnitude, right? The idea that you can give up something in the present, and that will, in some sense, ensure a better future is an unbelievable achievement.

It's equivalent to the discovery of the future. It's equivalent to the discovery of the utility of work—like, its importance can't be overstated. Okay, so it took a long time for people to figure this out. Animals haven't figured it out at all, right? We've figured it out, and it's hard.

It's hard for people to make sacrifices because, of course, the present has a major grip on you, as it should, because in some way, you live in the present. So anyways, there's the twin problem of getting the whole idea of sacrifice up and running and then figuring out exactly what it means. But there's a problem that branches off that too, or a two-fold problem.

So the hypothesis is that sacrifice is necessary to ensure that the future is safe and secure and productive and positive and all of those things. Okay, so then a question immediate...