Genesis19chapter 19

Genesis 19:1-2

Three men came to Abraham in the previous chapter and only two go on to Sodom, and Lot meets them where the city's business was done, since the gate is where elders sat and cases were judged. Genesis has tracked his drift in three steps across three chapters: he pitched his tent toward Sodom, then he dwelt in Sodom, and now he sits in its gate. He offers the same hospitality his uncle had offered, and the visitors refuse it and say they will stay the night in the street.

Genesis 19:3

Lot presses them until they come in, and what he bakes is unleavened bread, the first time unleavened bread appears in Scripture. The night that follows carries the marks Israel will keep every year at Passover: unleavened bread eaten inside a house, one household spared while judgment falls on a city, and a family pushed out in haste before the morning is over. Nothing of that is explained here, and on the surface the feast is a host's ordinary provision made quickly for men who arrived at evening.

Genesis 19:4-5

Abraham had bargained the LORD down to ten righteous men and stopped asking there, and this verse answers why ten were never found, since it is both old and young, all the people from every quarter. The demand made at the door is what the outcry reported in chapter 18 had been about. The whole city surrounds the one house in it that had taken a stranger in.

Genesis 19:6-8

He goes outside and shuts the door behind him, which takes courage, and then he makes an offer that is indefensible and the text does not defend it. Genesis records what he said and adds no comment, the way it will record the rest of his story. The same scene runs again at Gibeah in the book of Judges, where an old man offers a daughter and a concubine to a mob at his door, and that night ends with Israel nearly wiping out one of its own tribes.

Genesis 19:9-11

After years in the city, a seat in its gate and daughters married to its men, the mob still calls him the outsider who came to sojourn. His guests then put out their hand, pull him inside and shut the door, so the man who went out to protect them is the one who has to be rescued. They strike the crowd with a blindness the Hebrew names by a rare word, used once more in the whole Bible, when Elisha prays it down on the army of Syria at Dothan.

Genesis 19:12-14

The rescue is offered wider than the family that will take it, since the angels ask for sons, daughters, sons in law and whatsoever he has in the city. Lot warns his sons in law and they hear him as a man making a joke, and the Hebrew behind that mocking is built on the root that stands behind the name Isaac, which the chapter before had just used of Sarah laughing. Living in Sodom had cost him the weight to be believed by his own household.

Genesis 19:15-17

Morning comes, the angels hurry him, and he lingers anyway, so they take him by the hand along with his wife and both daughters and set the four of them outside the city. The reason the verse gives is not anything in Lot but that the LORD was merciful unto him. Peter still calls him just Lot, a righteous man vexed day after day by what he saw and heard, and Scripture holds that beside everything this chapter records.

Genesis 19:18-22

Told to escape to the mountain, Lot argues for a nearer town and is given it, and the name Zoar comes straight out of his own plea that it is a little one. Abraham had interceded for a whole city and the city fell; Lot intercedes for himself and gets the one place he asks for. The angel says he can do nothing until Lot is safely there, which holds the entire judgment back until one man is out of reach of it. Zoar had been in his eye from the start, since the plain he chose in chapter 13 is described as running out as far as Zoar.

Genesis 19:23-24

The fire falls in full daylight with the sun already up, so nothing about it is done in the dark. Brimstone enters the Bible in this verse, and from here it becomes the standard word for judgment right through to the last book of Scripture. The verse names the LORD twice, raining from the LORD out of heaven, and older Christian writers read the doubling as a distinction within God himself, while others take it as the Hebrew way of saying a name again for weight.

Genesis 19:25-26

The overthrow becomes a fixed byword afterwards, so that Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Zephaniah can name it and be understood without explaining it. Peter calls the ashes an ensample to those who would live ungodly after, and Jude says the cities are set forth for an example. Lot's wife is given one sentence in the whole account, and Jesus reduces it to three words when he tells his hearers to remember her.

Genesis 19:27-28

Abraham goes back to the exact spot where he had stood before the LORD and pleaded, and from there he watches the answer come. The smoke of the country goes up as the smoke of a furnace, and Exodus uses that same phrase of Sinai when the LORD came down on it in fire. He is given the sight and not one word of explanation with it.

Genesis 19:29

The verse that explains the rescue gives Lot no part in it, because God remembered Abraham and on that account sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow. Genesis uses this remembering for God acting on a promise rather than recalling something he had let slip, as when he remembered Noah in the ark and when he remembered Rachel and opened her womb. The intercession of chapter 18 is answered here, though not in the terms Abraham had asked for.

Genesis 19:30

He abandons the town he begged for and goes up to the mountain he had refused, so the bargain bought him nothing in the end. The man who once chose the well watered plain of Jordan finishes in a cave with two daughters and no household left. Genesis reports the move and the fear behind it and leaves both without comment.

Genesis 19:31-33

Our father is old: The daughters reason that no man is left in the earth for them, which some read as a fear born of watching a whole plain burn and others as a decision made about a father who would never have agreed to it. Wine after a world has been destroyed, a father shamed by his own children, and nations born out of that shame is the shape of Noah's story after the flood as well. Genesis sets the account down flat and passes no sentence on any part of it, exactly as it did with Noah.

Genesis 19:34-36

The second night is planned in daylight by a sister who has already done it once, so nothing here happens in a moment's confusion. What they say they want is to preserve seed of their father, and one chapter earlier God had promised seed to a barren woman past age who laughed at the thought of it. One seed is taken by wine in a cave and the other is given by promise at the LORD's own appointed time, and Genesis puts the two within a few verses of each other.

Genesis 19:37-38

Moab and Ammon begin here, and both will fight Israel for centuries, with the law later shutting an Ammonite or a Moabite out of the congregation of the LORD to the tenth generation. The older commentators read Moab as meaning from the father and Ben-ammi as son of my kindred, so the names carry the night that made them. Out of Moab comes Ruth, who is grafted into the line of David and stands in Matthew's genealogy of Christ, so the line that reaches the Messiah runs back through this chapter.