What Does Genesis 18:26 Mean in the King James?
And the LORD said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.
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 Hebrew pictures the city’s reprieve as the LORD carrying the whole place for the sake of fifty lives aligned within it.
THE MEANING
This verse holds the reader’s community in view: the lives aligned within it matter to the fate of the whole. The LORD says that finding fifty righteous people within the city means the whole place is carried for their sake.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It dissolves the belief that a community’s brokenness makes the presence of its aligned people irrelevant.
THE ROOT
וְנָשָׂאתִי
ve-nasa'ti
GROWS FROM
נשא
lift, carry, bear
The word translated “spare” is built on lifting and carrying: the whole place is borne for the sake of the fifty. The same root can name a burden and the LORD as one who bears crookedness, so mercy here has the texture of weight being carried.
ALSO GROWS
massa: burden, load
מַשָּׂא
The same root names what is lifted; the city’s reprieve is pictured as weight carried.
nōśēʾ ʿāwōn: bearing crookedness; forgiving iniquity
נֹשֵׂא עָוֹן
Exodus 34:7 uses this phrase for the LORD bearing iniquity, giving the city’s reprieve the image of carried weight.
צַדִּיק
tsaddiq
GROWS FROM
צדק
rightness, justice, alignment with what is right
The same root names both the aligned person and rightness or justice. The verse places that alignment within the city: the lives of the righteous are part of the community’s condition, not separate from it.
ALSO GROWS
tsedeq: justice, rightness
צֶדֶק
This branch names the right order reflected in the people called righteous.
tzedakah: justice, righteousness
צְדָקָה
The shared root joins a person’s alignment to justice expressed in the world around them.
THE PATTERN
The fate of a whole community can turn on the presence of the aligned within it.
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.Therefore he said that he would destroy them, had not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach, to turn away his wrath, lest he should destroy them.Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.THE THREAD
Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.Exodus names the LORD as “nōśēʾ ʿāwōn”, the one who bears crookedness, rendered “forgiving iniquity.” Genesis uses the same נשא root for the city’s reprieve, so sparing is pictured as carrying what would otherwise weigh upon the whole place.
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