Word: sodom
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Tourists for Sodom. Many outsiders who begin as shareholders eventually move into actual property ownership by buying a Rassco enterprise and letting Rassco manage it for a fee. Nazareth's new buildings, for example, are largely owned by Memphis, Tenn., investors. With Rassco, several British millionaires, including Sir Isaac Wolfson and Charles Clore, jointly own G.U.S.-Rassco Ltd., a company affiliate that sets up small industries. Stern is happy to sell off enterprises quickly; sales give foreign investors material and emotional ties to Israel and, more importantly in a capital-short nation, provide funds for further enterprises. Already, although...
...many centuries, interpreters of the Old Testament have thought that the "wickedness" for which God destroyed Sodom with fire and brimstone was homosexuality. That interpretation is mistaken, says Anglican Historian Hugh Ross Williamson in the current issue of Britain's Clergy Review...
...evidence for the old assumption is Genesis 19, which relates how inhabitants of Sodom surrounded Lot's house after he had been secretly visited by two angels. "Where are the men which came in to thee this night?" they asked. "Bring them out unto us, that we may know them." Beginning with rabbinical interpreters in the 2nd century B.C., scholars have assumed that "know" here implied carnal knowledge. Apart from what it may mean in the story of Lot, Williamson argues, the Hebrew word for "know" (yadoa) clearly has a sexual connotation in only ten out of 943 instances...
According to Williamson, the Bible points out other sins that led to Sodom's destruction, such as idolatry and refusal to "strengthen the hand of the poor and needy" (Ezekiel 16:49). "The correct understanding of Sodom," he says, "is of a proud, self-satisfied, materialist society, acting with callous inhospitality to man and at the same time rejecting the true worship...
...first-rate men and second-rate gods, which prized human excellence, beauty and strength above all things. But it owes most to the revolutionary Biblical idea of a direct encounter between man and a single, personal God. Abraham had the temerity to bargain with Jehovah over the fate of Sodom, and Job is noted for having goaded Him into talking back...