What Does Genesis 19:24 Mean?
Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of the heavens.
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
Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;THE KEY
The Hebrew keeps the word for rain while changing what rain delivers: sulfur and fire descend from heaven.
THE MEANING
This verse makes destruction impossible to soften into abstraction: sulfur and fire fall over Sodom and Gomorrah as rain. The repeated naming of the LORD places this devastation under divine agency, with its source stated as the heavens.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the assumption that rain language always signals nourishment: here the rain carries sulfur and fire.
THE ROOT
הִמְטִיר
himṭîr
GROWS FROM
מטר
To rain; in its causative form, to make rain fall.
“rained” in this verse is himṭîr. The verb הִמְטִיר (himṭîr, to cause rain to fall) keeps its ordinary rain identity even as sulfur and fire replace water as what it delivers. The root holds the familiar descent of rain together with this devastating downpour.
ALSO GROWS
māṭār: Rain
מָטָר
The noun shares the root and names rain itself; the verse uses that same rain-root for the falling of sulfur and fire.
himṭîr: To cause rain to fall
הִמְטִיר
This causative form is the verb used here, making rain the shape of the destruction’s descent.
THE PATTERN
What descends from heaven can provision the living or destroy it; what it carries gives the descent its force.
For yet seven days, and I will rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights, and every standing thing that I made I will wipe out from the face of the ground.And Moses stretched out his rod toward heaven, and the LORD gave thunder and hail, and fire walked along the ground, and the LORD rained hail upon the land of Egypt.So that you may become children of your Father in the heavens, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the aligned and on the crooked.THE THREAD
For yet seven days, and I will rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights, and every standing thing that I made I will wipe out from the face of the ground.The phrase “cause it to rain” uses the same root מָטַר (māṭar, rain) as הִמְטִיר (himṭîr, to cause rain to fall) here. Both passages let that rain-word carry destruction, making the familiar form of rainfall the shape of what falls.
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