“And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them.”
The men of Sodom call to Lot: where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can know them. The demand is for the violation of Lot's guests — a fundamental breach of the sacred obligation of hospitality that the ancient Near East held as inviolable. The word know (Hebrew: yada) here carries the same sexual connotation it carries in Genesis 4:1. The sin in view is both sexual and social: the violence of demanding strangers for abuse, the contempt for the guest-host relationship, the assertion of mob power over individual household rights. Jude 7 identifies Sodom's sin as sexual immorality and perversion, and 2 Peter 2:7 describes the lawless deeds Lot witnessed daily. The application: the sexual violence demanded here is not an isolated sin but the expression of comprehensive contempt for the image of God in others — which is the root of every sin Ezekiel names.
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