Genesis18chapter 18

Genesis 18:1-2

The text says the LORD appeared, and what Abraham sees is three men standing by him in the worst heat of the day. Clarke reads the Hebrew to mean they stood at a distance over against him, which is why a man of ninety-nine has to run to reach them. Nothing in the scene announces who they are, and the older commentators read the line in Hebrews about entertaining angels unawares back to this visit and to Lot's in the next chapter.

Genesis 18:3-5

Abraham addresses him as Adonai and not by the covenant name, which Clarke takes as a sign that he did not yet know whom he was speaking to. Everything he offers is understated, a little water and a morsel of bread, and every item of it is exceeded in the verses that follow. He also puts the obligation on his own side, saying that this is the very reason they have come to their servant.

Genesis 18:6-8

Three measures of fine meal comes to something near a bushel of flour, and a calf is the highest reach of that table, so the morsel he promised arrives as a feast. Sarah is set to the hearth, a young man to the calf, and Abraham himself runs twice in three verses. When the food is down he does not sit with them; he stands under the tree while they eat, which is where a servant stands.

Genesis 18:9-10

They ask for Sarah by name, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take that as the moment Abraham knew he had more than ordinary travellers at his table, since strangers do not know a wife's name. The promise is fastened to her rather than to Hagar, so Ishmael, already thirteen years old by 17:25, is passed over for a son not yet conceived. The word is spoken aloud where she can hear it from the tent door behind him, because she is the one who has to believe it. Genesis says it twice inside five verses, and states its own rule for that at 41:32, where a thing doubled is established by God and will shortly be brought to pass.

Genesis 18:11-12

The narrator stops the story to state the physical fact, that it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women, so the reader knows a son can come only one way. Her barrenness was announced back in 11:30, just before the promise of a great nation in 12:2, and twenty-five years stand between that promise and the birth in 21:2. Rebekah waits twenty years at 25:21 and Rachel longer still at 30:22, so the closed womb stands in front of the promise three times in one book. Sarah's own words here, my lord being old also, are the words Peter picks up in 1 Peter 3:6.

Genesis 18:13-14

She laughed inside herself and said nothing aloud, and the visitor repeats her thought back to her husband, which is how she learns who is at the door. Abraham had laughed at the same promise in 17:17, and the son they are talking about will be called Isaac, which is laughter, so the boy carries his parents' doubt in his name for life. The question put to them, whether any thing is too hard for the LORD, is asked again by Jeremiah at 32:27 and stands behind the angel's word to Mary in Luke 1:37.

Genesis 18:15

She denies it because she is afraid, and the answer she gets is four words that neither accept the denial nor punish it. Henry observes that it is a shame to do wrong and a greater shame to deny it, since the denial adds to the fault rather than covering it. The same woman is named in the roll of faith at Hebrews 11:11, where she is said to have judged him faithful who had promised, which is how the New Testament finally reads her.

Genesis 18:16-17

The meal ends with the three looking toward Sodom, and Abraham walks out with them, which Clarke counts as hospitality of its own in a country with no roads to follow. Then God asks whether he shall hide from Abraham the thing he is about to do, and Amos later puts the same thing as a standing rule at 3:7, that the Lord GOD reveals his secret to his servants the prophets. The word prophet lands on Abraham at 20:7, its only appearance in Genesis, and it lands while he is passing his wife off as his sister to a king who is then told to ask his prayers.

Genesis 18:18-19

The first reason God gives for telling him is the promise itself, the clause Paul quotes at Galatians 3:8 and calls the gospel preached beforehand to Abraham. The second reason is what Abraham will do with his household, that he will command his children after him to keep the way of the LORD and do justice and judgment. The next chapter sets Lot beside that sentence, a man whose sons in law take his warning for a joke and who leaves the city with two daughters and no sons.

Genesis 18:20-21

A cry has come up from the city, and it is the same kind of word Genesis used of Abel's blood crying from the ground in 4:10. God then says he will go down and see, which is the language the reader last met at Babel, where the LORD came down to see the city and the tower in 11:5. Clarke passes on the older reading that this is a pattern set for magistrates, that a case is examined before it is decided rather than judged on report.

Genesis 18:22-23

Two of them go on toward Sodom and one stays behind, and the text says Abraham stood yet before the LORD. Clarke reads the two who leave as the angels who reach Lot's gate in the next chapter, with the one called Jehovah remaining with Abraham. What Abraham then asks for is a city he had already rescued once in chapter 14 and had refused to take so much as a shoe latchet from.

Genesis 18:24-26

He opens at fifty and grounds the plea on a principle rather than on feeling, asking whether the Judge of all the earth will do right. The case he makes rests on justice, that a righteous Judge spares a place for the sake of the righteous inside it. God grants the whole number in a single sentence, and every step from here on is Abraham lowering it while God keeps agreeing.

Genesis 18:27-29

He drops from fifty to forty five and then to forty, and at each step he says again what he is, dust and ashes. Clarke pairs the two words as the lightest particles of earth and what is left when a thing has burned, and the man using them of himself is the man Genesis 2:7 says was formed of the dust of the ground. He asks for more at every turn and claims less every time he asks.

Genesis 18:30-32

Thirty, then twenty, then ten, and God concedes at every number without once naming a figure of his own. Jerome notes that the Hebrew of the last plea is plainer than the Greek, a straight request that the Lord not be angry at his speaking. Wesley asked the question the passage leaves open, why Abraham left off asking when he had prevailed so far, and the text records the stopping without accounting for it.

Genesis 18:33

The conversation ends when Abraham stops, and Henry notes that God did not go until Abraham had said all he had to say. There were not ten righteous in Sodom, so the terms he settled on were never met. What happens instead is recorded at 19:29, that God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the overthrow, using the same verb Genesis uses of Noah at 8:1 and of Rachel at 30:22, which marks God acting on a promise rather than calling something to mind.