I was watching a show on Sodom and Gomorra on the History Channel last night and this sparked something in my brain:

To my knowledge there are two major instances in the Bible when God tells somebody that he is planning on destroying a city. They are Sodom and Gomorra (in Genesis) and Nineveh (in the Book of Jonah). In case you've forgotten the stories:

One day God tells Abraham that he plans to destroy Sodom and Gomorra because they are "sinful." Abraham realizes his cousin Lot lives in Sodom and tries to get God to spare the city. God agrees if he can find 10 virtuous men there. He can't and sends angels to tell Lot and his family to get out of Sodom. They flee and Sodom and Gomorra are wasted. The message: Be good or else.

As for Nineveh, God tells Jonah to tell the people of Nineveh that their city will be destroyed because it is "sinful." After Jonah has his encounter with the leviathan, he goes to Nineveh and tells everybody, for three days that the're all going to die. The king of the city decides to call a day of national repentance, and they try to get on God's good side. Much to Jonah's disappointment, God relents and spares the city. The message: No matter how bad you are, you can always get back on God's good side, even at the last minute, provided you repent and work to correct your wrongdoings.

Why the difference? Why does God relent for Nineveh, but not for Sodom? Does this indicate a more evolved way by God or a more evolve way of thinking about God, or what?

P.S. If you're going to flame this post, save us our time and server space and just ignore.

The answer, I think, will lie in a detailed study of the timeframes in which those passages were originally written and the social and political climates of those times.

If you notice, god does ever less smiting the closer you get to modern times. He goes from petty and vengeful, smacking people around, blowing up cities, raining frogs on Egypt, and so forth in the beginning but visibly mellows out nearly completely, certainly by the time Jesus enters the picture.

The image of god goes from He who will kick your ass to this intangible, nebulous thing that nobody can quite identify that we have today.

I mean, come on - Forget about blowing up a couple of cities. You can't even get the guy to tell you the time of day in this age.

The point is, as the author's perception of how things should work gradually changed, so did the nature of the god they created.