What Does Genesis 18:24 Mean?
Perhaps there are fifty aligned ones in the midst of the city. Will you also sweep it away, and not lift the place for the sake of the fifty aligned ones who are in it?
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
Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?THE KEY
The city’s fate turns on whether it can be carried for the sake of the aligned people within it, because “spare” here is the language of carrying.
THE MEANING
You see a whole community held in the balance, with the aligned within it named as a reason to carry rather than sweep it away. The question does not deny what is wrong in the city; it asks whether the place is more than its wrong, because lives ordered toward justice remain within it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that a whole community can be judged without regard for the lives of the aligned people within it.
THE ROOT
תִּשָּׂא
tissāʾ
GROWS FROM
נשא
To lift, carry, or bear; in some phrases, to bear with or forgive.
“lift” in this verse is tissāʾ. The question translated “not spare” uses the language of bearing: will you carry the place for the sake of the righteous within it? English “spare” hides the image of the whole city being borne rather than swept away.
ALSO GROWS
nasaʾ: Lift, carry, or bear.
נָשָׂא
This is the root behind the question about whether the city itself can be carried.
noseʾ ʿavon: Bearing crookedness; rendered “forgiving iniquity” in Exodus 34:7.
נֹשֵׂא עָוֹן
The same root links carrying a place with bearing what is crooked within it.
צַדִּיקִים
tsaddiqim
GROWS FROM
צדק
To be just or right; alignment with what is right.
“aligned” in this verse is tsaddiqim. “Righteous” carries the sense of alignment with justice. The people named in the question are not an abstract tally: they are lives of alignment within the city, part of what the city contains.
ALSO GROWS
tsedeq: Justice or rightness.
צֶדֶק
This branch shows the just order the righteous are aligned with.
tsedaqah: Righteousness or acts of justice.
צְדָקָה
It extends the root from an inner alignment into justice expressed in life.
THE PATTERN
The presence of people aligned with what is right can change how a larger community is held.
Roam the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and perceive, and seek in her broad places. If you can find a man, if there is any who executes judgment and seeks steadiness, then I will release her.You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt has gone dull, with what shall it be salted? It has no strength left for anything, except to be thrown outside and trampled underfoot by humankind.For the husband who does not trust has been set apart through the wife, and the wife who does not trust has been set apart through the husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are set apart.THE THREAD
Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the plunder with the strong, because he poured out his living soul to death, and was counted with the rebels. He carried the falling short of many, and for the rebels he stepped in.Isaiah uses the same root, נשא (nasaʾ), for the one who “bare the sin of many.” The shared image makes Abraham’s question sharper: whether the place can be carried for the sake of those within it.
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