The question was about the minimum number of "righteous" people required for the city to be saved. Abraham started at 50, then 45, then 40, 30, 20, and finally 10 -- at each point, God said "OK, if there are that many righteous people in the city, I'll spare it."
It boggles my mind that, given stories in the Bible like this, anyone would think worshiping such a cruel and vengeful god is a moral thing to do.
Granted, the New Testament tries to paint a much more compassionate picture. Just goes to show you that the church will do its best to change its marketing when the need arises.
> It boggles my mind that, given stories in the Bible like this, anyone would think worshiping such a cruel and vengeful god is a moral thing to do.
We're getting far afield from Ellsberg here, but let me just point out the logic of this statement:
1. There is a universal standard of morality -- a standard so universal that it would apply to God himself
2. "kelnos" knows what this universal standard says, at least well enough to judge the actions of "God" in this story as violating it.
Now, for the most part I agree with you (except the conclusion); and in fact, that truth -- that the immorality of killing innocent people applies to God himself, and that mere mortals like Abraham (and kelnos) can be said to know what it is -- is implied by the story itself. But those are pretty big philosophical propositions, and I don't think most people are aware they're making them when they make statements like this.
You could start by asking why God mentioned his intentions to Abraham at all. What the text says about that:
> Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.”
That is, Abraham's idea of justice, and how authorities act, will have a big impact on a fairly big chunk of humanity.
Abraham obviously knows that Sodom isn't a great place. But just how bad is it? Obviously part of Abraham thinks even 10 people should be enough to spare the city; but some other part of Abraham may be more "realpolitik". Abraham thinks this Elohim person is more than just some local tyrant god; but is he really? Abraham thinks that even God should be open to having his decisions measured by justice and morality -- but that's not exactly a common attitude for gods of that time.
God affirms all of Abraham's intuitions. Yes Abraham, you're right: killing the innocent with the righteous is not OK. Yes Abraham, you're right: even my actions are guided by morality. Yes Abraham, you're right: The "judge of all the earth" won't be offended if you check him.
This experience changed Abraham as a person, and affected not only how he ran his own show, but what he passes on to his kids and their kids.
Abraham basically bargained God down to save the city if it had ten honest men, but there were not even ten. So even ten wasn’t low enough of a standard for Sodom to be able to pass.
It's less 'save' and 'not destroy' although that's maybe a fine distinction.
In Genesis God is drawn to do something about Sodom as the din of shrieks from that city has spurred him to action, shrieks either from people of the city oppressed in it or visitors to the city oppressed by it. Considering the Lot story later and God's intention to destroy Sodom presumably shrieks by visitors. Anyhow. Yes, Abraham haggles. Just prior to this we hear God's internal monologue where he decides, for the first time, to include a human -- post Adam, depending on how you read the naming of things -- in the decision making process that governs the world. Abraham is presumably horrified -- the narrator of Genesis does not say -- and haggles God down from destroying the city outright, to 50 etc etc daring to go as low as 10, a number that, just so happens, to be a later minimum administrative unit size in Jewish society. In the narrative structure of Genesis we have already seen an attempt to eradicate evil through destruction -- the Flood -- and that does not work, to the point where God promises not to do outright, global destruction like that again. So it's clear in the narrative -- though perhaps not to Abraham who may or may not have known about the post-Flood promise -- that God has a maximum upper bound on the amount of people that can be destroyed in response to evil: all. Abraham brings this maximum upper bound down to 50 as an opening gambit, then etc etc. It is worth noting that Abraham, at this point in the story, is elderly and rich, so he's presumably used to negotiation as a way of life.
Why would Sodom not be destroyed if there were less honest people? God's intention before consulting Abraham is to destroy the whole city but it is Abraham that bargains the number down to a minimum. If ten can be found, the threshold for destruction isn't reached. An entirely reasonable read here is that Abraham couldn't bear to see an entire city's worth of people destroyed and God was willing to be convinced otherwise. In itself that's a remarkable thing for a Near Eastern deity and is one sign that Genesis as a piece of literature is in conversation with and opposed to other contemporary Near Eastern literature.
Anyway, that's not the only read here -- there are millennia of commentary on this very text -- but it is worth pointing out that the Genesis text comes from the Mesopotamian culture, one that is both distinct from our Greek-derived way of thinking/being and has also gone extinct outside of literature, so norms that may have appeared self-evident to the original audience might not come through to modern readers so easily, or at all.
I think they're saying that an honest man doesn't cover for anything, so there were no honest people left in Sodom. They couldn't even find 10 honest people.
Similarly, an honest journalist doesn't cover for their newspaper, so there are no honest journalists left in the NYT.
It's a flawed premise when you look back on the past 100 years where the concept of 'honesty' really meant 'loyalty to your government'. Hitler, Stalin, McCarthy, Nixon...
Why would god save Sodom if there were LESS honest people?