In brief#

Peter tells his readers that God made Sodom and Gomorrah an example of what is coming for the ungodly. He then names two things about the cities. They were turned to ashes, and they were condemned to extinction. Neither of those belongs to a picture of unending conscious existence in torment.

The argument of this page is about selection. Peter had a great deal he could have drawn from the account in Genesis. What he chose tells us what he took the example to be. The eternal conscious torment (ECT) reading of the verse is stated below in full before it is answered, because a good deal turns on whether the example is the visible event or something invisible that followed it.

The primary passage#

and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly;
2 Peter 2:6WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Jude describes the same event.

Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities around them, having, in the same way as these, given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are shown as an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire.
Jude 7WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

What Peter selects#

Two features, and only two.

  1. Turned to ashes. The cities were reduced. What was there ceased to be there.
  2. Condemned to extinction. The word is not one of confinement or of ongoing suffering. It names an overthrow, a ruin, an end.

The second phrase is worth a moment. The English Standard Version, which the source document follows here, renders it "condemned them to extinction". Other translations, including the World English Bible displayed above, render the same word as destruction or ruin. The senses are close, and none of them describes a state that continues. The argument here does not depend on the sharpest of the available renderings.

On the ECT view neither of these ever describes the ungodly. They are not reduced to ashes and they do not become extinct. Whatever else the traditional reading says about the passage, it has to say that the two things Peter singles out are not, in the end, what happens.

What Peter could have selected and did not#

Genesis supplies material that would have served an ECT reading directly.

Fire and sulphur. God destroyed the cities with fire and sulphur. Interpreters holding ECT frequently read the fire of Sodom as a foreshadowing of the eternal fire of the lake of fire, and the connection is not strained. Yet Peter does not mention the fire at all. Continuous burning is the central feature of the traditional picture of hell, and it is absent from the one verse that calls Sodom an example. There is a further oddity: the fire at Sodom destroyed what it burned, which is precisely what the eternal fire of the traditional reading is said not to do.

Torment. There was certainly suffering. Fire and sulphur falling on a city inflicts severe pain, and this site does not pretend otherwise. But the suffering of the inhabitants is never the focus of any passage that mentions Sodom, in either Testament. The focus is always the completeness of the destruction. Suffering is the central feature of ECT, and Peter does not raise it.

What should have been visible if this were a picture of unending torment#

Two further things are missing.

A ruined state that persists. ECT describes people reduced to ruin who nevertheless continue as persons capable of experiencing pain. If Sodom were the example of that, the cities should have been left half destroyed and somehow surviving. They were not. The destruction was complete and it was finished within a single day.

Ongoing fire. Something like repeated rebuilding met by repeated burning would fit. Instead, when Abraham looked toward the plain the next morning, what he saw was smoke. The fire had finished its work. Genesis 19:27-28 records the morning after, not a fire still burning. And the cities were destroyed so thoroughly that they were never rebuilt.

Then Yahweh rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from Yahweh out of the sky. He overthrew those cities, all the plain, all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew on the ground. But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt. Abraham got up early in the morning to the place where he had stood before Yahweh. He looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and looked, and saw that the smoke of the land went up as the smoke of a furnace.
Genesis 19:24-28WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Taken together, the two things Peter names, the two he passes over, and the two that are missing from the history all point the same way. As an example of what awaits the ungodly, Sodom fits a final and complete destruction closely, and fits unending conscious torment poorly.

The ECT reading of "the example"#

The strongest reply runs as follows. Peter is not pointing at the rubble. He is pointing at the people. The physical overthrow of the cities was a visible sign of an invisible and far more serious judgment, and the example Peter holds up is the fate of the inhabitants themselves, who passed at death into a conscious punishment that continues. Jude supports the reading by calling the fire eternal, which cannot be a description of a fire that went out in a morning and must therefore reach beyond the historical event. On this account the ashes are the sign and the endless punishment is the thing signified, and Peter's readers, who knew Genesis well, would have understood him that way.

Four difficulties with that reading#

First, it sets aside the physical event entirely. The two features Peter actually names, ashes and extinction, both belong to the cities. If the example is something other than what happened to the cities, the terms of the verse do no work.

Second, the example cannot be what the inhabitants will experience after the last judgment. That judgment has not happened. Peter and Jude both speak of Sodom in the past tense, as something God did and set forth. Further, on the ECT view nobody is turned to ashes or made extinct after the last judgment, so the description would not fit even then. And Jesus says that it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for the town that rejects his messengers, which places the judgment of Sodom's inhabitants still in the future and admits of degrees.

Most certainly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.
Matthew 10:15WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Third, the example is unlikely to be what the inhabitants are experiencing now. Suppose the reference is to their present condition in Hades, the intermediate state described in the account of the rich man. Three problems follow. That condition is entirely unobservable, which makes it a poor example to hold up to anyone living. It would also be exactly the same condition as every other unrighteous person who has ever died, which leaves no reason to single out these two cities; what singled them out was the scale of the visible judgment. And the intermediate state does not resemble what happened at Sodom in any of the respects set out above.

Fourth, Ezekiel points the reader back to the visible event. Ezekiel names the sin of Sodom and then says that God did away with them.

Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. They were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away when I saw it.
Ezekiel 16:49-50WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Elsewhere the pattern is consistent. Sodom and Gomorrah appear as a byword for desolation and overthrow, not for ongoing suffering: Deuteronomy 29:23, Isaiah 13:19-22, Jeremiah 49:18, Lamentations 4:6 and Zephaniah 2:9. Jesus himself sets the flood and Sodom side by side as pictures of the destruction that comes on the day he is revealed, at Luke 17:26-30.

Eternal fire in Jude 7#

Jude's phrase deserves a direct answer rather than avoidance. He sets the cities out as an example, and calls the fire they underwent eternal. The fire that fell on Sodom did not continue burning; Abraham saw smoke the following morning. So "eternal" in Jude cannot mean that the flames are still alight over the Dead Sea. What it can mean, and what the history bears out, is that the effect of that fire is permanent. Ordinary fires destroy cities and the cities are rebuilt. These were not, and have not been. On this reading the adjective describes the permanence of the result rather than the duration of the burning, which is the same sense discussed at What Does "Eternal Punishment" Mean?.

What this argument establishes#

  • Peter selects being turned to ashes and being condemned to extinction as the example of what is coming for the ungodly.
  • Neither torment nor continuing fire is mentioned in any passage that treats Sodom as a pattern of judgment.
  • The destruction was complete, finished quickly, and never reversed.
  • Eternal fire in Jude describes a permanent effect, not a fire of unending duration.

What it does not establish by itself#

  • That the inhabitants of Sodom suffered nothing. They plainly did, and Scripture does not treat their suffering as trivial. It simply does not make it the point.
  • What the inhabitants of Sodom are experiencing now, in advance of the final judgment. Matthew 10:15 shows that judgment still lies ahead of them.
  • That every detail of a temporal judgment maps onto the final one. The example is a pattern offered by an apostle, not a diagram.

Sources and notes#

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The selection argument, that what Peter names and what he passes over are both significant, is the source document's. Scripture passages are displayed in the World English Bible. Two short phrases are quoted from other translations because the source document's argument turns on them: "condemned them to extinction" from the English Standard Version and "as you have seen" from the New International Version. The differences between renderings are described in prose rather than reproduced at length.