Apostolic Antiquity

1. Genesis 19:24

“Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire, from the Lord out of heaven;”

Trinitarians have used this verse to show a distinction within Yahweh However if any degree of intellectual honesty was in use they would have to admit that this interpretation is a forced one, and that the natural reading within the framework of presuppositions of plurality would be a plurality of gods not merely persons within a singular deity. Neither readings is grammatically proper to the text nor do they fit the overall consensus of scripture. Now Micheal Servetus in “Christianity Restitutio” gives at least three possible alternative explanations to the language of the verse.

(1). He says:

 “The eighteenth passage is: Then the Lord rained on Sodom. and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven (Genesis 19). Because it says ‘The Lord… from the Lord,’ most take this to mean that there are two equal beings here, the Father and the Son, as if [Scripture had said, ‘the Son [rained fire] from the Father.’ In order for this passage to be readily comprehended, we must first of all be aware that we are dealing with a standard convention of the Hebrew language.”

 He then goes on to list these examples of what he calls “a standard convention of the Hebrew language” in Scripture such as 1 Kings 8, Solomon assembled all the tribes of Israel, 1 Kings 12 and 2 Chronicles 11, Rehoboam assembled his tribes to restore the kingdom to Reboboam, Moses spoke to Hobal, Moses brother-in-law, in Numbers 10 and in Genesis 1, 5, and 9, God created humanity in the image of God and said, “Twittremember the covenant between God” and God told Jacob to make an altar to God in Genesis 35.f  In Exodus 16: “The Lord has heard your murmurings against the Lord”, and God also says in the same chapter: “The Lord has given you the Sabbath?” Also, in Exodus 31 and 35, God filled Bezalel with the Spirit of God. Servetus goes on to explain “It is common in Hebrew for the antecedent noun to be used instead of a pronoun.” Therefore the seeming plurality is simply a product of the unique nature of the Hebrew language not a theological emphasis revealing the Trinity.

(2) I will now quote Servetus’s short second explanation in full:

“The second explanation of this passage is also based on the way Hebrew is commonly used. For instance, a great fire is called fire from the Lord, a deep sleep is called a deep sleep from the Lord; and a mighty wind is called a wind from the Lord. These are all Hebraisms, as we said above. Similarly, we say fire from the Lord out of heaven because this fire is from the empyrean, from which place it is sent, just as we speak of the fire that has been prepared for the demons.”

                        Here Micheal Servetus points out that a particular thing or operation coming from the Lord is often explicitly described as such even if the Lord has already clearly established as the subject of that verse or passage.

(3). I will also give the full quotation for the third and final explanation of the verse:

“The final, mystical explanation of this passage, in which we come to comprehend the mystery of Christ, is that the true Jehovah in the world of human beings was the Word, the person of Christ brought [to Mary] by an angel. At the time of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah) an angel, acting in the name of Jehovah, rained down fire from the boundless and supreme Jehovah, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Here Servetus is suggesting  it could have been an angle acting in the name of Yahweh rather than a distinct Yahweh obeying, submitting to, or acting on behalf of another Yahweh. This is a very possible interpretation. We see the angle of the Lord acting on behalf of Yahweh and often speaking on His behalf throughout the Old Testament, take Exodus 3:2 for example “There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.” The same conversation into chapter four where the angle speaks as if God himself “And the Lord said unto him, Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the Lord?”. Some have suggested that the angle of the Lord was simply a theophany and this could be but since the verse is somewhat ambiguous the claim could reasonably be made that this is simply the angle of the Lord acting on the divine authority of Yahweh by the command of God.