What Does Genesis 19:12 Mean?
And the men said to Lot, Do you have anyone else here? A son-in-law, and your sons, and your daughters, and whatever you have in the city, bring them out of this place.
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 men said unto Lot, Hast thou here any besides? son in law, and thy sons, and thy daughters, and whatsoever thou hast in the city, bring them out of this place:THE KEY
Rescue here reaches beyond one person: everyone still within reach is to be brought out of the threatened place.
THE MEANING
The verse holds the reader at the threshold of danger, where the question is who else remains within reach. It names relatives, then widens to everyone Lot has in the city; rescue takes the concrete form of bringing them out of the place about to be struck.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The warning concerns only securing your own escape. The verse widens the count to those still connected to you inside the city.
THE ROOT
הוֹצֵא
hōṣēʾ
GROWS FROM
יצא
Go out, emerge, come forth.
“bring them out” in this verse is hōṣēʾ. הוֹצֵא is a causative command: Lot is to cause them to go out. The shared root holds going out, bringing out, and exit together, making rescue a passage enacted for those still in the threatened place.
ALSO GROWS
yatsa: Go out, emerge, come forth.
יָצָא
This is the root action beneath the command to bring Lot’s people out.
motsa: Exit, outlet, point of departure.
מוֹצָא
This noun makes the root’s movement visible as a way out of the place that threatens them.
THE PATTERN
Deliverance takes shape as being led out from what confines people into a wider place of life.
He brings them out of darkness and the valley of deepest darkness, and tears their bonds apart.To him the gatekeeper opens, and the sheep hear and respond to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name, and leads them out.THE THREAD
And it came to be at the end of four hundred and thirty years, and on this very bone of the day it came to be, that all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt.Genesis uses the causative form of יצא, “go out,” while Exodus uses the same root for Israel’s going out from Egypt. The shared root joins Lot’s household escape to the larger movement from constriction into freedom.
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