What Does Genesis 18:24 Mean in the King James?
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 analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
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.
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.
“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.
Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh the truth; and I will pardon it.Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy.THE THREAD
Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.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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