Jude 1:7

7. THIRD EXAMPLE. Sodom and Gomorrah.

Even as Rather, how that, to correspond with how that in Jude 1:5, and depend on put you in remembrance.

Like manner Alford and many earlier commentators refer like to the angels of the previous verse, and make the likeness consist in following strange flesh, so that Jude is held to sustain the ancient legend, that the angels contaminated themselves with females of the human race. But unquestionably the like refers to the certain men of Jude 1:4. To this in like manner corresponds the likewise of next verse, containing the reference to the same men.

Strange flesh Literally, other flesh; other than the “natural use” of Romans 1:27, implying the crime which has received its name from Sodom.

Are set forth Literally, lie forth; lie before our eyes, both on the face of the record and on the earth’s surface.

Example Literally, a showing of eternal fire, suffering punishment. The fires of ages on these plains are an illustration of eternal fire; as if the bituminous fires of the Dead Sea were a visible counterpart of the invisible fires of gehenna. The “slime-pits” of “the valley of Siddim” are recorded by successive writers as burning for centuries. In Deuteronomy 29:23, they are described as “brimstone, and salt, and burning.” Zephaniah 2:9, describes them as “the breeding of nettles, and salt-pits, and a perpetual desolation.” And in the Apocrypha, the Book of Wisdom says, that “even to this day the waste land that smoketh is a testimony.” Even so near Jude’s time Philo says, “The memorials of that terrible destruction yet remain; and ruins are shown in Syria mixed with ashes, smoke, sulphur, and slight flames still occasionally playing about, as in the remains of a conflagration. Josephus says, that in his own time “the remains of a fire, sent down from God, are yet visible.” Jude, as we understand him, views the material of a perpetual fire as a visible image of the fires of eternal retribution.