For the sake of ten I will not destroy it

Gaza Fragments, II

There is an extraordinary scene early in the book of Genesis. Abraham and his household are camped on the plains of Mamre, a site now enclosed within the razor wired walls and checkpoints of the West Bank. While his wife and servants rest in the noonday heat, Abraham sits by the entrance to his tent. Three men appear. We are meant to understand that one of them, or perhaps all three collectively, is God himself.

Abraham sets about dispensing the duties of a good Mesopotamian host. The whole scene is wonderfully domestic. With his guests outside, Abraham runs to tell his wife Sarah: “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.” Despite the hospitality, God has really only come to make a test of Abraham and Sarah’s faith. He tells the aged couple they will conceive and bear a son, admonishes Sarah for scoffing at the idea, and leaves.

Then, literally as an afterthought, God decides to mention to Abraham where he is heading next. “How great is the outcry against Sedom¹ and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin!” he says. God is embarking on a factfinding mission to determine whether or not these cities and their inhabitants deserve to be destroyed. Abraham has a nephew living in Sedom, so he pleads with God quite forcefully.

Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”

And God concedes: “If I find at Sedom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” We’ll return to this dialogue, but we all know what the Lord eventually does to these two wicked cities.

“In the history of painting one can sometimes find strange prophecies,” wrote John Berger. “Prophecies not intended as such by the painter.” The same is true of writing. The destruction of Sedom and Gomorrah is surely one of these strange written prophecies, and what it foretells, portends, and prefigures is the destruction of a city by aerial bombardment.

Then the LORD rained upon Sedom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

Nobody alive after Guernica could fail to read this passage as a description of bombing. Even the Qur’an depicts God raining down not fire but actual bombs. “The mighty blast overtook them at sunrise. And We turned the cities upside down and rained upon them stones of baked clay.” The sūrah concludes enigmatically: “Surely in this are signs for those who contemplate.” A sign of what?

Perhaps a sign was what Air Marshall Arthur Harris had in mind when he ordered Operation Gomorrah in July 1943 — ten days of air raids over Hamburg that marked the first successful attempt of civilised man to recreate the annihilating power of the Bronze Age God. The firestorm that resulted killed 40,000 people.

Besides their destruction by fire from the heavens, what Gaza and Sedom and Gomorrah have in common is that they are all cities in Canaan.

And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza; as thou goest unto Sedom and Gomorrah, and Admah, and Zeboim, even unto Lasha.

Anyone who’s paid the slightest attention to the Zionist project knows that the Biblical conquest of Canaan represents the central political, moral, and aesthetic reference for the state of Israel. And here we have the image of a Canaanite city destroyed by fire from the sky. This episode has clearly entered the collective imaginary of Israelis. The Zionist will insist: ours is “a world where Sedom still thrives.”

The rabbinic texts of the Mishnah go even further than Genesis in demonstrating that the annihilation of Sedom and Gomorrah was entirely just and deserved. Their residents, the rabbis inform us, were sadists and torturers. Their barbarism took various flavours: covering a girl in honey to have her stung to death by bees, or amputating or stretching the bodies of unfortunate travellers to fit a sort of Procrustean bed. “We’ve got our modern day barbarians,” Rabbi Dovid Horwitz reminded his listeners in 2024, “They might not be living in Sedom, but they’re not too far away.” Gaza is only about eighty kilometres from Sedom as the drone flies.

So the Zionist sees in the destruction of Gaza a redux of Sedom and Gomorrah. The same fire from heaven, the same awesome devastation, the same barbarians below who earned their annihilation. Yet what precedes the destruction of the twin cities is never mentioned. Remember: God guarantees that for just fifty good people, he will spare the cities entire. This is thanks to an extraordinary denunciation of collective punishment by Abraham, who portrays it as completely against God’s character. “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” says Abraham. “Far be it from you to do such a thing.”

The passage in question is oddly moving — a testament to the moral rectitude that defines the best of the Jewish faith. Having established that God will not destroy Sedom and Gomorrah if he finds there fifty righteous men (צדיקים‎, tzadikim), Abraham steadily bargains the threshold for destruction higher and higher.

Abraham answered, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to my lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” Again he spoke to him, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” Then he said, “Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” He said, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to my lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” Then he said, “Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.”

When in our own day the cities of Canaan are again destroyed by fire from the skies, there is evidently no one left to bargain with their destroyers. How many righteous people are there in Gaza? Would you put the number north or south of fifty? And which would be more horrible?—that the state of Israel accepts its right to murder the innocent with the guilty, or that, like the destroying God of Genesis, they have surveyed the city of Gaza and deemed it to hold not even ten good men?

God eventually finds a loophole. He destroys Sedom and Gomorrah but allows Abraham’s nephew and his household to escape the conflagration. Abraham does not know this when he rises early the next morning, under a sky seething in the dull roar of red.

And he looked down toward Sedom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the plain and saw the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace.

Perhaps, if he knew that his nephew escaped, he could have cheered at the sight of all that smoke — as those who claim to be his descendents would cheer when they brought beer and popcorn to watch Gaza be bombed to rubble from a nearby hill. As it is, however, the image of the solitary patriarch alone in the embers of early morning, watching a city go up in smoke under a rain of ash and the smell of burnt flesh, is an unmistakable image of horror. We never hear Abraham’s reaction to the destruction of Sedom and Gomorrah. But I see him on that hill, hands limp by his side, eyes and mouth frozen in a silent scream, lost in a sort of terror.

1. I have chosen not to represent the city of סְדֹם (Sədōm) in its usual anglicisation of Sodom. First, I wish to avoid a word used against the gay community. Second, the usual spelling implies a false pronunciation (/ˈSɒdəm, or SAWdum), while Sedom comes much closer to the original Hebrew (Sih’DOM).