14:8 Then the king of Sodom, the king of Gomorrah, the king of Admah, the king of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela (that is, Zoar) went out and prepared for battle. In the Valley of Siddim they met 5
14:17 After Abram 10 returned from defeating Kedorlaomer and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet Abram 11 in the Valley of Shaveh (known as the King’s Valley). 12
19:1 The two angels came to Sodom in the evening while 13 Lot was sitting in the city’s gateway. 14 When Lot saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face toward the ground.
1 tn Heb “were.”
2 map For location see Map1-A1; JP3-F3; JP4-F3.
3 tn Heb “as you go.”
4 tn Heb “as you go.”
5 tn Heb “against.”
6 tn Heb “Now the Valley of Siddim [was] pits, pits of tar.” This parenthetical disjunctive clause emphasizes the abundance of tar pits in the area through repetition of the noun “pits.”
sn The word for “tar” (or “bitumen”) occurs earlier in the story of the building of the tower in Babylon (see Gen 11:3).
7 tn Or “they were defeated there.” After a verb of motion the Hebrew particle שָׁם (sham) with the directional heh (שָׁמָּה, shammah) can mean “into it, therein” (BDB 1027 s.v. שָׁם).
8 tn Heb “the rest.”
9 sn The reference to the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah must mean the kings along with their armies. Most of them were defeated in the valley, but some of them escaped to the hills.
10 tn Heb “he”; the referent (Abram) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
11 tn Heb “him”; the referent (Abram) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
12 sn The King’s Valley is possibly a reference to what came to be known later as the Kidron Valley.
13 tn The disjunctive clause is temporal here, indicating what Lot was doing at the time of their arrival.
14 tn Heb “sitting in the gate of Sodom.” The phrase “the gate of Sodom” has been translated “the city’s gateway” for stylistic reasons.
sn The expression sitting in the city’s gateway may mean that Lot was exercising some type of judicial function (see the use of the idiom in 2 Sam 19:8; Jer 26:10; 38:7; 39:3).
15 tn Heb “upon the face of.”
16 tn Or “all the land of the plain”; Heb “and all the face of the land of the circle,” referring to the “circle” or oval area of the Jordan Valley.
17 tn Heb “And he saw, and look, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.”
sn It is hard to imagine what was going on in Abraham’s mind, but this brief section in the narrative enables the reader to think about the human response to the judgment. Abraham had family in that area. He had rescued those people from the invasion. That was why he interceded. Yet he surely knew how wicked they were. That was why he got the number down to ten when he negotiated with God to save the city. But now he must have wondered, “What was the point?”