1And the two messengers came into Sodom at evening, when Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. And Lot saw, and he rose to greet them and bowed, with his face to the ground. 2And he said, “O please, my lords, turn aside to your servant’s house to spend the night, and bathe your feet, and you can set off early on your way.” And they said, “No. We will spend the night in the square.” 3And he pressed them hard, and they turned aside to him and came into his house, and he prepared them a feast and baked flatbread, and they ate. 4They had not yet lain down when the men of the city, the men of Sodom, drew round the house, from lads to elders, every last man of them. 5And they called out to Lot and said, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we may know them!” 6And Lot went out to them at the entrance, closing the door behind him, 7and he said, “Please, my brothers, do no harm. 8Look, I have two daughters who have known no man. Let me bring them out to you and do to them whatever you want. Only to these men do nothing, for have they not come under the shadow of my roof-beam?” 9And they said, “Step aside.” And they said, “This person came as a sojourner and he sets himself up to judge! Now we’ll do more harm to you than to them,” and they pressed hard against the man Lot and moved forward to break down the door. 10And the men reached out their hands and drew Lot to them into the house and closed the door. 11And the men at the entrance of the house they struck with blinding light, from the smallest to the biggest, and they could not find the entrance. 12And the men said to Lot, “Whom do you still have here? Your sons and your daughters and whomever you have in the city take out of the place. 13For we are about to destroy this place because the outcry against them has grown great before the LORD and the LORD has sent us to destroy it.” 14And Lot went out and spoke to his sons-in-law who had married his daughters and he said, “Rise, get out of this place, for the LORD is about to destroy the city.” And he seemed to his sons-in-law to be joking. 15And as dawn was breaking the messengers urged Lot, saying, “Rise, take your wife and your two daughters who remain with you, lest you be wiped out in the punishment of the city.” 16And he lingered, and the men seized his hand and his wife’s hand and the hands of his two daughters in the LORD’s compassion for him and led him outside the city. 17And as they were bringing them out, he said, “Flee for your life. Don’t look behind you and don’t stop anywhere on the plain. Flee to the high country lest you be wiped out.” 18And Lot said to them, “Oh, no, my lord. 19Look, pray, your servant has found favor in your eyes, and you have shown such great kindness in what you have done for me in saving my life, but I cannot flee to the high country, lest evil overtake me and I die. 20Here, pray, this town is nearby to escape there, and it is a small place. Let me flee there, for it is but a small place, and my life will be saved.” 21And he said, “I grant you a favor in this matter as well, and I will not overthrow the town of which you spoke. 22Hurry, flee there, for I can do nothing before you arrive there.” Therefore is the name of the town called Zoar. 23The sun had just come out over the earth when Lot arrived at Zoar. 24And the LORD rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD from the heavens. 25And He overthrew all those cities and all the plain and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew in the soil. 26And his wife looked back and she became a pillar of salt. 27And Abraham hastened early in the morning to the place where he had stood in the presence of the LORD. 28And he looked out over Sodom and Gomorrah and over all the land of the plain, and he saw and, look, smoke was rising like the smoke from a kiln.
29And it happened when God destroyed the cities of the plain that God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the upheaval as the cities in which Lot dwelled were overthrown. 30And Lot came up from Zoar and settled in the high country, his two daughters together with him, for he was afraid to dwell in Zoar, and he dwelled in a certain cave, he and his two daughters. 31And the elder said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man on earth to come to bed with us like the way of all the earth. 32Come, let us give our father wine to drink and let us lie with him, so that we may keep alive seed from our father.” 33And they gave their father wine to drink that night, and the elder came and lay with her father, and he knew not when she lay down or when she arose. 34And on the next day the elder said to the younger, “Look, last night I lay with my father. Let us give him wine to drink tonight as well, and come, lie with him, so that we may keep alive seed from our father.” 35And on that night as well they gave their father wine to drink, and the younger arose and lay with him, and he knew not when she lay down or when she arose. 36And the two daughters of Lot conceived by their father. 37And the elder bore a son and called his name Moab; he is the father of the Moab to this day. 38And the younger as well bore a son and called his name Ben-Ammi; he is the father of the Ammonites of our days.
CHAPTER 19 NOTES
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1. came into Sodom at evening, when Lot was sitting in the gate. The whole episode is framed in an elegant series of parallels and antitheses to Abraham’s hospitality scene at the beginning of chapter 18. Both men are sitting at an entrance—the identical participial clause with the same verb—when the visitors appear. Lot’s entrance is the city gate: he can sit “in” it because Canaanite cities had what amounted to a large chamber at the gateway; here people gathered to gossip, to do business, and above all, to conduct justice; the gate would have given on the town square, the area referred to by the messengers in verse 2. There is an antipodal thematic distance from tent flap to city gate, as the narrative quickly makes clear. Abraham’s visitors, moreover, arrive at midday, whereas Lot’s visitors come as darkness falls—a time when it is as dangerous to be out in the streets of Sodom as in those of some modern cities.
2. turn aside. Lot resembles his uncle in the gesture of hospitality. He uses the verb “turn aside” (sur) instead of Abraham’s “go on past” (ʿavar) because, unlike the solitary tent in the desert, there are many habitations here, in addition to the public space of the square.
set off early. This may merely be to emphasize that he will not delay them unduly, but it could hint that they can depart at daybreak before running into trouble with any of the townsfolk.
3. a feast . . . flatbread. Perhaps an ellipsis is to be inferred, but this is a scanty-looking “feast.” In contrast to Abraham’s sumptuous menu, the only item mentioned is the lowly unleavened bread (matsot) of everyday fare, not even the loaves from fine flour that Sarah prepares.
4–5. the men of the city, the men of Sodom. . . . Where are the men. Throughout this sequence there is an ironic interplay between the “men” of Sodom, whose manliness is expressed in the universal impulse to homosexual gang-rape, and the divine visitors who only seem to be “men.”
7. brothers. Or “kinsmen,” an appellation the Sodomites will vehemently reject in verse 9.
8. I have two daughters who have known no man. Lot’s shocking offer, about which the narrator, characteristically, makes no explicit judgment, is too patly explained as the reflex of an ancient Near Eastern code in which the sacredness of the host-guest bond took precedence over all other obligations. Lot surely is inciting the lust of the would-be rapists in using the same verb of sexual “knowledge” they had applied to the visitors in order to proffer the virginity of his daughters for their pleasure. The concluding episode of this chapter, in which the drunken Lot unwittingly takes the virginity of both his daughters, suggests measure-for-measure justice meted out for his rash offer.
for have they not come under the shadow of my roof-beam? This looks like a proverbial expression for entering into someone’s home and so into the bonds of the host-guest relationship. But “roof-beam” implies a fixed structure and so accords with the urban setting of Lot’s effort at hospitality; Abraham, living in a tent, in the parallel expression in his hospitality scene, merely says, “for have you not come by your servant?”
9. came as a sojourner . . . sets himself up to judge! The verb “to sojourn” is the one technically used for resident aliens. “Judge,” emphatically repeated in an infinitive absolute (wayishpot shafot), picks up the thematic words of judge and justice from God’s monologue and His dialogue with Abraham in chapter 18.
12. Your sons and your daughters. The Masoretic Text prefaces these words with “son-in-law” (in the singular); but as numerous critics have observed, this makes no grammatical sense, and this particular term would not belong at the head of the list, before sons and daughters. It seems quite likely that the word was erroneously transcribed from verse 14 and was not part of the original text.
13. the outcry. This term is a pointed repetition of the word God uses twice in His initial speech about Sodom.
14. his sons-in-law who had married his daughters. Especially because of the reference to the two virgin daughters in the next verse as ones “who remain with you” (literally, “are found with you”), it appears that Lot had other daughters already married, and not that the two in the house were betrothed but still unmarried.
he seemed to his sons-in-law to be joking. The verb, though in a different conjugation, is the same as the one used for Sarah’s and Abraham’s “laughter.” It is, of course, a wry echo—the laughter of disbelief of those about to be divinely blessed, the false perception of mocking laughter by those about to be destroyed. The common denominator in the antithetical usages is skepticism about divine intentions, for good and for evil.
17. he said. The reader is meant to infer: one of the two of them.
19. I cannot flee to the high country. Lot seems a weak character—he has to be led out by the hand from the city—and his zigzagging determinations of flight make psychological sense. Accustomed to an urban setting, he is terrified at the idea of trying to survive in the forbidding landscape of cliffs and caves to the south and east of the Dead Sea. But once having settled in the little town of Zoar (verse 30), he has understandable premonitions of another cataclysm and so decides that, after all, the rocky wilderness is the lesser of two evils.
20. a small place. The Hebrew mizʿar plays on the name Zoar and for once this could be a correct etymology. Lot’s point is that it is, after all, only a piddling town and so it would not be asking a great deal to spare it from destruction.
21. overthrow. This is the physical image presented by the Hebrew verb, though the obvious sense of the word throughout the story (and in later biblical references to Sodom) is something like “destroy by sudden cataclysm.”
24. rained . . . brimstone and fire from the LORD from the heavens. The slightly awkward repetition of “from the LORD” with the added phrase “from the heavens,” taken together with the verb “to rain” (himtir), underscores the connection with the Deluge story: the first time the Flood, the fire next time. Moshe Weinfeld has aptly observed a whole series of parallels between the two stories. In each case, God wipes out a whole population because of epidemic moral perversion, marking one family for survival. In each case, the idiom “to keep alive seed” is used for survival. In each case, the male survivor becomes drunk and is somehow sexually violated by his offspring, though only Lot is unambiguously represented as the object of an incestuous advance. One might add that the phrase used by the elder sister, “there is no man on earth [or, “in the land,” baʾarets] to come to bed with us” (verse 31), equally reinforces the connection with the global cataclysm of the Flood story: she looks out upon the desolate landscape after the destruction of the cities of the plain and imagines that she, her sister, and their father are the sole survivors of humankind.
26. And his wife looked back and she became a pillar of salt. As has often been observed, this tale looks doubly archaic, incorporating both an etiological story about a gynemorphic rock formation in the Dead Sea region and an old mythic motif (as in the story of Orpheus and Euridyce) of a taboo against looking back in fleeing from a place of doom. But the blighted looking of Lot’s wife is antithetically integrated with the “looking out” (a different verb) of Abraham in the next two verses over the scene of destruction from his safe vantage on the heights of Hebron.
27. early in the morning. There is a nice temporal dovetailing of the two scenes. Down in the plain, just as the sun rises, the LORD rains brimstone and fire. A few minutes later, still early in the morning, Abraham hurries to take in the awful panorama.
28. he saw and, look, smoke was rising. The visual setup also represents the tight closing of an envelope structure. The Sodom episode began with Abraham’s dialogue with God on the heights of Hebron. Now at the end, in a definition of visual perspective unusual for biblical narrative, Abraham, standing in the same place, makes out from a distance of forty or more miles the cloud of smoke rising from the incinerated cities.
30–38. The narrator withholds all comment on the incestuous enterprise of the two virgin sisters. Perhaps the story may draw on old—pre-Israelite?—traditions in which the supposed origins of these two peoples in incest were understood as evidence of their purity, or their vitality. (One recalls that Tamar, the progenitrix of the future kings of Judah, became pregnant by her father-in-law through pretending to be a whore.) But from the Israelite perspective, this story might well have cast a shadow of ambiguity over these two enemy peoples. Both names are etymologized to refer to incest: Moab (which probably means “desired place”) is construed as me-ʾab, “from the father,” and Ben-Ammi (yielding the gentilic benei-ʿammon) is construed as “my own kinsman’s son.”
32. let us lie with him. Although “lie with” is a somewhat euphemistic reference to coitus in English, its uses in Scripture suggest it is a rather coarse (though not obscene) verb for sexual intercourse in biblical Hebrew. Two linked sexual assailants, the Egyptian woman in Genesis 39 and Amnon in 2 Samuel 13, use it in urging the objects of their lust to submit to them. When the verb is followed by a direct object in sexual contexts, the meaning seems close to “rape.” Ironically, the more decorous verb “to know” is used twice here asexually (verses 33 and 35) to indicate the drunken Lot’s unconscious state as he deflowers each of his daughters.