The Outcry Against Sodom: Why Israel Heard Their Own Cry (Genesis 18)

When the LORD says He has chosen Abraham, the Hebrew verb is the ordinary word for knowing someone. When He says what He heard from Sodom, the Hebrew noun is the scream of a person being wronged. Between them they explain why God talks to Abraham at all.

What does "I have chosen him" mean in Genesis 18:19?

The verb is yada (H3045), to know. It covers knowing a fact, knowing a person, and the closest knowing there is between a husband and wife. When the LORD says of Abraham "I have chosen him" (Genesis 18:19),

The prophet Amos puts the same two things side by side that verses 17 to 19 hold together. To Israel: "Only you have I known from all the families of the earth" (Amos 3:2), the same yada. Five verses later: "Surely the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing His plan to His servants the prophets" (Amos 3:7). Known, then told. That is exactly the order of the LORD's thinking on the road above Sodom.

Two chapters later God gives Abraham a title no one in Scripture has carried before. He tells Abimelech, "he is a prophet; he will pray for you and you will live" (Genesis 20:7). That is the first time the word navi (H5030) appears in the Bible, and the first thing it says a prophet does is pray. Genesis 18 has already shown us what that looks like. The first prophet is the man God told His plan to, and he spends the conversation praying for a city that is not his own.

What was the outcry against Sodom?

God's reason for going down is "the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah" (Genesis 18:20). Verse 20 uses za'aqah (H2201) and verse 21 its twin tse'aqah (H6818). Both name the scream of someone being wronged who has nobody left to appeal to but God.

Follow the word back. After the first murder, "The voice of your brother's blood cries out to Me from the ground" (Genesis 4:10), with the same root. Follow it forward into Israel's law, where God warns what happens to anyone who mistreats a widow or an orphan: "they cry out to Me in distress, I will surely hear their cry" (Exodus 22:23). So the outcry against Sodom is the voice of Sodom's victims, and it has reached the Judge. The two visitors say as much to Lot the next night: "the outcry to the LORD against its people is so great that He has sent us to destroy it" (Genesis 19:13).

Set this beside the stories Abraham's world told. In the Babylonian Atrahasis epic, the gods send plague, drought and finally the flood because the noise of humanity keeps the god Enlil from sleeping. The racket of ordinary human life is the offence, and the gods simply want it to stop. In Genesis the LORD hears a cry from people being crushed, and He goes down to look for Himself before He acts: "I will go down to see if their actions fully justify the outcry that has reached Me. If not, I will find out" (Genesis 18:21). He investigates like a judge, and then He lets a man question Him about the verdict.

How did Israel first hear the outcry in Genesis 18?

The people who first heard Genesis read aloud had raised that cry themselves. Their own story began with it. "The Israelites groaned and cried out under their burden of slavery, and their cry for deliverance from bondage ascended to God" (Exodus 2:23). Then God spoke to Moses from the bush, and they knew His words by heart: "I have come down to rescue them" (Exodus 3:8), and "the cry of the Israelites has reached Me" (Exodus 3:9).

In Hebrew the match is almost word for word. Genesis 18:21 has God say He will go down, yarad (H3381), about the tse'aqah that has come to Him. Exodus 3 has God say He has come down, yarad, because the tse'aqah of Israel has come to Him. Israel heard Genesis 18 as the same God doing for the victims of Sodom what He had done for them in Egypt. The God who knew Abraham was the God who heard slaves.

Israel heard a warning in it too, and the prophets said it aloud. When Jerusalem grew cruel, Isaiah opened his book by addressing its leaders by the name of this city: "Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom" (Isaiah 1:10). A people who had once cried out could become the reason someone else cried out.

What does Genesis 18 teach about knowing God?

Go back to the word Abraham used. In verse 19 the LORD said He chose Abraham to teach his household tsedaqah (H6666) and mishpat (H4941), "what is right and just" (Genesis 18:19). In verse 25 Abraham asks, "Will not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?" (Genesis 18:25), and the Hebrew behind what is right is mishpat, the word God had just used. The first prophet prayed God's own word back to Him.

Jesus gives His followers the same pattern, known and then told: "I have called you friends, because everything I have learned from My Father I have made known to you" (John 15:15). What He has made known is meant to be kept and prayed back to Him. Keep a record of what God has said about who He is, and when you pray, pray from it.