What Does Genesis 18:20 Mean?
And the LORD said, Because the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their falling short is very heavy.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the LORD said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous;THE KEY
The verse places a great outcry beside a heavy missing, letting suffering and wrongdoing testify together.
THE MEANING
A great cry and weighty wrongdoing occupy the same field of vision. Harm is both something people voice and something that carries consequence; neither is lost in the surrounding noise. The verse speaks now wherever a community’s distress and its conduct are being weighed together.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that shared wrongdoing becomes harmless or invisible just because a whole community participates in it.
THE ROOT
כָבְדָה
kavedah
GROWS FROM
כבד
kabad
To be heavy; to carry weight.
The Hebrew pictures their missing as heavy. The same root gives כָּבוֹד (kavod), weight, so the verse uses the language of weight for wrongdoing that carries consequence.
ALSO GROWS
kaved: Heavy, weighty.
כָּבֵד
This is the plain sense beneath “grievous”: the wrongdoing bears weight.
kavod: Weight, presence.
כָּבוֹד
The shared root links grievous heaviness with weight: what happens here is not a weightless abstraction.
זַעֲקַת
za'aqat
GROWS FROM
זעק
za'aq
To cry out; to make an urgent call.
The word is an outcry, not merely sound. Its root recurs when distress is voiced and reaches the one who can respond.
ALSO GROWS
za'aq: To cry out.
זָעַק
The verb shows the cry as an act of calling from distress.
ze'aqah: An outcry.
זְעָקָה
This noun is the same cry-word that returns in the next verse, where the outcry is said to have come to the LORD.
חַטָּאתָם
chatta'tam
GROWS FROM
חטא
chata
To miss; to err.
“falling short” in this verse is chatta'tam. The word rendered “sin” belongs to the missing family. Here that missing is called heavy, tying failure to weight-bearing consequence rather than leaving it as a floating label.
ALSO GROWS
chata: To miss, to err.
חָטָא
The verb supplies the root sense behind their “sin”: a missing or failure.
chatta't: A missing, an offense; also an offering for missing in ritual contexts.
חַטָּאת
This noun keeps the idea of missing visible in the word translated “sin.”
THE PATTERN
A cry produced by harm is heard, while the harm itself is brought into view.
And the LORD said, I have surely seen the bending low of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their drivers. For I know their pains.The aligned cry out, and the LORD hears, and snatches them out of all their narrow places.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
I will go down now, and see whether they have done it wholly, according to the outcry which has come to me. And if not, I will perceive it.The noun for “cry,” זְעָקָה (ze’aqah), from זעק (za’aq), repeats in both verses. The next verse says this same outcry has “come unto me,” revealing it as a received signal that is about to be examined.
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