Gomorrah

Gomorrah appears in the Hebrew Bible more than twenty times and almost never alone. It has a king of its own in the account of the war of the kings in Genesis 14, and it stands with Sodom in the description of the well watered plain that Lot chooses, in the destruction narrative, and thereafter in a long series of prophetic warnings: Deuteronomy on a land laid waste, Isaiah on rulers and on the overthrow of Babylon, Jeremiah on Edom and on Babylon again, Amos on a city God overthrew, Zephaniah on Moab and Ammon. The New Testament keeps the pairing in the gospels and the letters, and Paul quotes Isaiah's line that but for a remnant Israel would have become like Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Quran tells the story of Lut and his people at length without naming the cities, referring instead to the townships that were overthrown.

The cities of the plain are in fact a group of five, with Admah, Zeboiim and Zoar named alongside the other two, and Zoar spared at Lot's request. Hosea preserves a variant in which the pair invoked is Admah and Zeboiim rather than Sodom and Gomorrah, which suggests that the standard pairing was one tradition among several before it became fixed.

The consistency of the pairing across a thousand years of writing is itself the point. By the time of the prophets the two names had fused into a single figure of speech for a place wiped out and left uninhabited, and a writer reaching for it was invoking a formula rather than describing a town he could have walked to.

Gomorrah rarely travels alone in the sources, yet the ancient texts treat it as a place in its own right: it has a king, it is listed among five towns of a region, it is assigned a fate of its own, and later writers can invoke it separately when they choose. What it does not have is a character. Sodom acquired a reputation, a body of interpretation and eventually a word in several languages; Gomorrah acquired none of these, and the literature offers no account of what its particular offence was supposed to have been.

Its historicity is entirely bound up with Sodom's. The sites proposed for one are proposed for the other, generally as a pair of Early Bronze Age towns southeast of the Dead Sea that were destroyed and abandoned, and the arguments for and against apply equally to both. Nothing in the archaeological record distinguishes a Gomorrah from a Sodom, because nothing in the written record does either.

The name has had a modern afterlife of its own. It is used in ordinary speech for a place of ruinous corruption, and an Italian book and film of the past twenty years borrowed it for organised crime in Naples, playing on the similarity to the name of the local criminal network. That is a pun rather than a religious usage, but it is how most people under forty now meet the word.