Genesis 13:10-13
Well watered every where
Lot lifts up his eyes and picks the better ground. The narrator adds the character of the town in the next sentence, before anything goes wrong.
Places of the Bible
Sodom and Gomorrah
Two cities on good land, argued over by one man who got the number down to ten and still lost.
The plain of Jordan is introduced as well watered every where, even as the garden of the LORD, which is why Lot chooses it. The comparison is deliberate and it is followed immediately by the note that the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the LORD exceedingly. Everything about the place is a contrast between what the ground can grow and what the town has become, and the account keeps both halves of that in view.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah
- 01
- 02
Genesis 18:23-33
Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked
Six times he lowers the number and six times he is answered. He stops at ten, and the LORD went his way as soon as he had left communing.
- 03
Genesis 19:1-11
The men of the city compassed the house
The visitors are received by the one man at the gate and besieged by everyone else. The blindness that ends the scene is a mercy and a verdict at once.
- 04
Genesis 19:15-26
Look not behind thee
The angels take hold of their hands because he lingers. One instruction is given and one member of the party does not keep it.
- 05
Ezekiel 16:49-50
This was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom
The prophets name the charge in full centuries later, and it starts with pride and fulness of bread and ends with the poor.
Why it matters
The long scene is the negotiation. Abraham stands before the LORD and asks whether the judge of all the earth will destroy the righteous with the wicked, and works the number down from fifty to forty five to forty to thirty to twenty to ten, and is never refused once. The conversation simply ends. What the cities are actually charged with is given plainly in Ezekiel: pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
3 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
