For Teaching

Genesis 19: What the Passage Says

145 claims across 38 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Genesis 19 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

Two angels come to Sodom in the evening, and Lot takes them into his house; the men of the city surround it and demand the visitors, and Lot offers his two daughters instead. The angels strike the men with blindness, then lead Lot, his wife, and his two daughters out of the city, and Lot asks to flee to a small town rather than the mountain. The LORD rains burning sulfur and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's wife looks back and becomes a pillar of salt, and Abraham looks out and sees the smoke. Lot then lives in a cave with his daughters, who make him drink wine and sleep with him; their sons are Moab and Ben-ammi, the fathers of the Moabites and the Ammonites.

Claim by Claim

19:1
- Two angels came to Sodom in the evening.
- Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom.
- Lot saw them.
- Lot rose up to meet them.
- Lot bowed himself with his face to the ground.
19:2
- Lot addressed them as his lords.
- Lot asked them to turn aside into his house, calling himself their servant.
- Lot asked them to spend the night.
- Lot asked them to wash their feet.
- Lot said they could rise early and go on their way.
- They refused.
- They said they would spend the night in the open square.
19:3
- Lot urged them strongly.
- They turned aside to him.
- They entered his house.
- Lot made them a feast.
- Lot baked unleavened bread.
- They ate.
19:4
- Before they lay down, the men of the city surrounded the house.
- The men who surrounded the house were the men of Sodom.
- They ranged from young to old.
- All the people, from every quarter, were there.
19:5
- They called to Lot.
- They asked where the men were who had come to him that night.
- They demanded that Lot bring the men out to them.
- They said they wanted to have sexual relations with the men.
19:6
- Lot went out to them at the entrance.
- Lot shut the door behind him.
19:7
- Lot called them his brothers.
- Lot begged them not to act wickedly.
19:8
- Lot said he had two daughters.
- Lot said his daughters had not known a man.
- Lot offered to bring his daughters out to them.
- Lot told them to do to his daughters as was good in their eyes.
- Lot told them to do nothing to these men.
- Lot gave as the reason that the men had come under the shadow of his roof.
19:9
- They told Lot to stand back.
- They said this one came to sojourn as a foreigner.
- They said he keeps acting as a judge.
- They said they would now deal worse with Lot than with the men.
- They pressed hard against the man Lot.
- They came near to break the door.
19:10
- The men put out their hand.
- The men pulled Lot into the house to them.
- The men shut the door.
19:11
- They struck the men at the entrance of the house with blindness.
- The blindness struck them from small to great.
- The struck men wearied themselves trying to find the entrance.
19:12
- The men asked Lot whom else he had there.
- They listed son-in-law, his sons, his daughters, and all he had in the city.
- They told Lot to bring them out of the place.
19:13
- They said they were destroying this place.
- They said the outcry against its people had grown great before the LORD.
- They said the LORD had sent them to destroy it.
19:14
- Lot went out.
- Lot spoke to his sons-in-law, who were to take his daughters.
- Lot told them to get up and get out of this place.
- Lot said the LORD was destroying the city.
- Lot seemed to his sons-in-law like one joking.
19:15
- Dawn came up.
- The angels urged Lot to hurry.
- The angels told Lot to arise and take his wife and his two daughters who were there.
- The angels warned that otherwise he would be swept away in the punishment of the city.
19:16
- Lot lingered.
- The men seized Lot's hand.
- The men seized the hand of Lot's wife.
- The men seized the hands of Lot's two daughters.
- This was because the LORD was merciful to him.
- They brought Lot out.
- They set him outside the city.
19:17
- When they had brought them outside, he spoke.
- He said to escape for his life.
- He said not to look behind him.
- He said not to stop anywhere in the plain.
- He said to escape to the mountain.
- He warned that otherwise Lot would be swept away.
19:18
- Lot spoke to them.
- Lot said, no, not so.
- Lot addressed the one he spoke to as my lord.
19:19
- Lot said his servant had found favor in his sight.
- Lot said he had magnified his kindness shown to him.
- Lot said that kindness consisted in keeping him alive.
- Lot said he could not escape to the mountain.
- Lot said the disaster might overtake him and he would die.
19:20
- Lot said this city was near enough to flee to.
- Lot said the city was a little one.
- Lot asked to escape there.
- Lot asked again whether it was not a little one.
- Lot said that then his soul would live.
19:21
- He said to Lot that he had accepted him in this matter also.
- He said he would not overthrow the city Lot had spoken of.
19:22
- He told Lot to hurry and escape there.
- He said he could not do anything until Lot arrived there.
- For that reason the city was named Zoar.
19:23
- The sun had risen upon the earth.
- Lot came to Zoar.
19:24
- The LORD rained brimstone and fire upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah.
- The brimstone and fire came from the LORD, out of heaven.
19:25
- He overthrew those cities.
- He overthrew all the plain.
- He overthrew all the inhabitants of the cities.
- He overthrew what grew on the ground.
19:26
- Lot's wife looked back from behind him.
- She became a pillar of salt.
19:27
- Abraham rose early in the morning.
- He went to the place where he had stood before the LORD.
19:28
- Abraham looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah.
- Abraham looked toward all the land of the plain.
- Abraham saw smoke going up from the land.
- The smoke was like the smoke of a furnace.
19:29
- God destroyed the cities of the plain.
- God remembered Abraham.
- God sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow.
- This happened when God overthrew the cities in which Lot had dwelt.
19:30
- Lot went up out of Zoar.
- Lot dwelt in the mountain.
- Lot's two daughters were with him.
- Lot feared to dwell in Zoar.
- Lot dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters.
19:31
- The firstborn daughter spoke to the younger.
- She said their father was old.
- She said there was no man in the land to come in to them after the manner of all the earth.
19:32
- She proposed making their father drink wine.
- She proposed lying with him.
- She said the purpose was to preserve offspring from their father.
19:33
- They made their father drink wine that night.
- The firstborn went in and lay with her father.
- He did not know when she lay down.
- He did not know when she arose.
19:34
- On the next day the firstborn spoke to the younger.
- She said she had lain with her father the previous night.
- She proposed making him drink wine that night also.
- She told the younger to go in and lie with him.
- She said the purpose was to preserve offspring from their father.
19:35
- They made their father drink wine that night also.
- The younger daughter arose and lay with him.
- He did not know when she lay down.
- He did not know when she arose.
19:36
- Both of Lot's daughters conceived by their father.
19:37
- The firstborn bore a son.
- She named him Moab.
- He is the father of the Moabites to this day.
19:38
- The younger also bore a son.
- She named him Ben-ammi.
- He is the father of the children of Ammon to this day.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

19:1: "Angels" translates a Hebrew word that simply means "messengers"; these are two of the three visitors who came to Abraham in the previous chapter. The gateway was not just a door but a broad structure with benches where a town's leading men sat to trade, settle disputes and hear cases. Lot sitting there suggests he had taken some place among the men of Sodom, though verse 9 shows they still counted him an outsider.
19:2: Washing a guest's feet was the first courtesy owed to a traveler who had walked dusty roads in open sandals. The "street" the visitors propose is the open square just inside the city gate, where travelers with no host would ordinarily bed down for the night.
19:3: Bread without yeast needs no hours to rise, so it was what a host baked when a meal had to be put together at once. The word behind "feast" is a Hebrew term for a banquet with drinking.
19:4: The detail that every man in the city came, young and old, from every part of town, is deliberate. In the previous chapter Abraham had asked God to spare the city if even ten decent people could be found in it, and this verse is the narrator's answer to that question.
19:5: The King James "that we may know them" is a literal rendering of a Hebrew verb regularly used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. The demand is made by the assembled men of the town against strangers under another man's protection.
19:7: "Brethren" is an old word for brothers. Lot is speaking to his neighbors, hoping they will listen.
19:8: A host who had taken travelers under his roof was bound by the customs of the time to protect them at any cost to himself and his household. "Under the shadow of my roof" is a set phrase for the claim a guest has on his host. The narrator reports Lot's offer without saying whether it was right.
19:9: Lot is a resident alien: a foreigner allowed to live in the city but without a citizen's standing. That is the force of the crowd's complaint, an outsider who came to "sojourn" (stay temporarily) has no right to sit in judgment on them.
19:11: "Small and great" is an idiom for everyone, of every rank and age. The Hebrew word for this blindness is rare (it appears elsewhere only in 2 Kings 6, of an army struck with confused sight) and suggests a dazzled, disorienting blur rather than ordinary loss of vision.
19:13: "The cry" is the Hebrew term for the shout of people who have been wronged and are calling for help; it is the standard word for a victim's appeal for justice. What has reached God is an outcry against the city, not the city's own noise.
19:14: The Hebrew can mean either that these men had already married Lot's daughters or that they were pledged to marry them. Betrothal was legally binding and a betrothed man was already called a son-in-law, which is why translations differ here; only two daughters leave with Lot in verse 15.
19:15: The Hebrew word behind "iniquity" covers both a wrong done and the punishment that follows it, so the phrase can be read as "swept away in the city's guilt" or "swept away in the city's punishment."
19:17: The Hebrew shifts from two speakers to a single "he" here without saying who. Readers have taken the speaker either as one of the two messengers or as the LORD speaking through them; the text leaves it open.
19:18: The word Lot uses is the Hebrew title *adonai*, "my lord" or "my lords", used both for a human superior and for God. The King James prints it in capitals, resolving an ambiguity the Hebrew keeps open.
19:19: "To find grace in your sight" is the ordinary idiom for receiving goodwill from someone with power over you, the way a subject speaks to a king.
19:22: The name Zoar sounds like the Hebrew word for "small" or "trifling", the very word Lot uses twice in verse 20 when he pleads that the town is only a little one.
19:24: "Brimstone" is the older English word for sulfur, which burns with a choking smell. Sodom and Gomorrah are placed in the plain at the southern end of the Dead Sea, a region with surface deposits of sulfur, bitumen and salt. The Hebrew repeats "the LORD" where English would expect "himself"; the doubling is in the original and has been explained in various ways.
19:25: "Overthrew" translates a Hebrew verb meaning to turn a thing upside down. It becomes the fixed word elsewhere in the Bible for what happened to these cities.
19:26: The southern end of the Dead Sea is fringed with salt formations, including a ridge of rock salt still called Mount Sodom, where eroded pillars have long been pointed out to travelers as Lot's wife. The King James "from behind him" may mean she was walking behind Lot, or simply that she looked back the way they had come.
19:27: The place is the spot in the previous chapter where Abraham stood arguing with the LORD over how many righteous people it would take to spare the city.
19:28: A furnace was a very hot oven used for melting metal or baking pottery. It was the hottest, smokiest fire most people had ever seen.
19:29: In Hebrew, for God to "remember" someone does not mean recalling something forgotten; it means acting on that person's behalf. The verse credits Lot's escape to Abraham.
19:31: The King James "come in unto us" is a literal rendering of a Hebrew euphemism for sexual relations. The word translated "earth" also means "land" or "region," so the daughters may mean that no men are left alive anywhere, or only that there are none in the area where they are now hiding.
19:32: "Preserve seed" means keeping the family line alive by producing children. A man with no descendants had no one to inherit his land or carry his name, and women with no husband and no sons had neither standing nor support; the daughters give this as their reason.
19:33: Wine is a strong drink made from grapes. Too much of it makes a person sleepy and confused.
19:37: "Moab" closely resembles the Hebrew phrase meaning "from the father," and the story is told so that the reader hears that echo. The Moabites lived east of the Dead Sea and were near neighbors, and often enemies, of Israel.
19:38: "Ben-ammi" means "son of my kinsman" or "son of my people." The Ammonites lived east of the Jordan, north of Moab; the name of their chief city survives today as Amman.

Read Genesis 19