Genesis 19

¹ When the two angels reached Sodom in the evening, Lot was sitting at the gate. As soon as Lot saw them he rose to meet them and bowed to the ground.

² ‘I beg you, my lords,’ he said ‘please come down to your servant’s house to stay the night and wash your feet. Then in the morning you can continue your journey.’ ‘No,’ they replied, ‘We can spend the night in the open street.’

³ But he pressed them so much that they went home with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking unleavened bread, and they ate.

⁴ They had not gone to bed when the house was surrounded by the men of the town, the men of Sodom both young and old, all the people without exception.

⁵ Calling to Lot they said, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Send them out to us so that we may abuse them.'[*a]

⁶ Lot came out to them at the door, and having closed the door behind him said,

⁷ ‘I beg you, my brothers, do no such wicked thing.

⁸ Listen, I have two daughters who are virgins. I am ready to send them out to you, to treat as it pleases you. But as for the men, do nothing to them, for they have come under the shadow of my roof.’

⁹ But they replied, ‘Out of the way! Here is one who came as a foreigner, and would set himself up as a judge. Now we will treat you worse than them.’ Then they forced Lot back and moved forward to break down the door.

¹⁰ But the men reached out, pulled Lot back into the house, and shut the door.

¹¹ And they struck the men who were at the door of the house with blindness, from youngest to oldest, and they never found the doorway.

¹² The men said to Lot, ‘Have you anyone else here? Your sons, your daughters and all your people in the town, take them out of the place.

¹³ We are about to destroy this place, for there is a great outcry against them, and it has reached Yahweh. And Yahweh has sent us to destroy them.’

¹⁴ Lot went to speak to his future sons-in-law who were to marry his daughters. ‘Come,’ he said ‘leave this place, for Yahweh is about to destroy the town.’ But his sons-in-law thought he was joking.

¹⁵ When dawn broke the angels urged Lot, ‘Come, take your wife and these two daughters of yours, or you will be overwhelmed in the punishment of the town’.

¹⁶ And as he hesitated, the men took him by the hand, and his wife and his two daughters, because of the pity Yahweh felt for him. They led him out and left him outside the town.

¹⁷ As they were leading him out he said, ‘Run for your life. Neither look behind you nor stop anywhere on the plain. Make for the hills if you would not be overwhelmed.’

¹⁸ ‘No, I beg you, my lord,’ Lot said to them

¹⁹ ‘your servant has won your favour and you have shown great kindness to me in saving my life. But I could not reach the hills before this calamity overtook me, and death with it.

²⁰ The town over there is near enough to flee to, and is a little one. Let me make for that-is it not little?-and my life will be saved.’

²¹ He answered, ‘I grant you this favour too, and will not destroy the town you speak of.

²² Hurry, escape to it, for I can do nothing until you reach it.’ That is why the town is named Zoar.

²³ As the sun rose over the land and Lot entered Zoar,

²⁴ Yahweh rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Yahweh.

²⁵ He overthrew these towns and the whole plain, with all the inhabitants of the towns, and everything that grew there.[*b]

²⁶ But the wife of Lot looked back, and was turned into a pillar of salt.

²⁷ Rising early in the morning Abraham went to the place where he had stood before Yahweh,

²⁸ and looking towards Sodom and Gomorrah, and across all the plain, he saw the smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.

²⁹ Thus it was that when God destroyed the towns of the plain, he kept Abraham in mind and rescued Lot out of disaster when he overwhelmed the towns where Lot lived.

³⁰ After leaving Zoar Lot settled in the hill country with his two daughters for he dared not stay at Zoar. He made his home in a cave, himself and his two daughters.

³¹ The elder said to the younger, ‘Our father is an old man, and there is not a man in the land to marry us in the way they do the world over.

³² Come let us ply our father with wine and sleep with him. In this way we shall have children by our father.’

³³ That night they made their father drunk, and the elder slept with her father though he was unaware of her coming to bed or of her leaving.

³⁴ The next day the elder said to the younger, ‘Last night I slept with my father. Let us make him drunk again tonight, and you go and sleep with him. In this way we shall have children by our father.’

³⁵ They made their father drunk that night too, and the younger went and slept with him, but he was unaware of her coming to bed or of her leaving.

³⁶ Both Lot’s daughters thus became pregnant by their father.

³⁷ The elder gave birth to a son whom she named Moab; and he is the ancestor of the Moabites of our own times.

³⁸ The younger also gave birth to a son whom she named Ben-ammi and he is the ancestor of the Bene-ammon of our own times.[*c]