Lot Lingered, God Remembered: How Israel First Heard Genesis 19

The Hebrew verb for Lot's hesitation repeats itself. In Genesis 19:16 it is vayitmahmah, from mahah (H4102), and the form doubles part of the root, mah-mah, so that a listener hears the delay in the sound of the word. Scripture uses the verb only a handful of times, and three of them change how this verse reads.

What does Lot's hesitation mean in Hebrew?

The first is Israel's own night of leaving. On the night of the Passover the people baked flat loaves from dough with no leaven, "For when they had been driven out of Egypt, they could not delay" (Exodus 12:39). Could not delay is the same verb in the same doubled form. Egypt pushed Israel out as the angels pushed Lot out of Sodom, and one word covers the man who dragged his feet and the nation that had no time to.

The second is a promise. "I hurried without hesitating to keep Your commandments" (Psalms 119:60). The psalmist uses Lot's word to describe the thing he refuses to do.

The third turns the verb around. Habakkuk had waited on his watchtower to hear what God would say, and the answer came with an instruction: "Write down this vision and clearly inscribe it on tablets, so that a herald may run with it" (Habakkuk 2:2). Then, "Though it lingers, wait for it, since it will surely come and will not delay" (Habakkuk 2:3). Lingers is mahah again, and this time the one lingering is the promise. God's answer to that kind of delay is a tablet: write what He said, and wait.

Set those three beside Genesis 19:16 and a pattern shows. When God says go, His people hurry, as Israel did and as the psalmist vowed to. When what He has promised seems slow, His people write it down and wait. Lot had both halves the wrong way round. The word he carried would come true before the sun was fully up, and he stood in his house.

Why did Israel see Sinai in the smoke over Sodom?

When Abraham looked toward the plain he saw smoke "like smoke from a furnace" (Genesis 19:28). The furnace is kibshan (H3536), a kiln, the kind used to burn lime or fire pottery. The Old Testament uses the word four times, and all four sit in the story Israel told about itself. Twice in Egypt, Moses takes "soot from the furnace" (Exodus 9:10) and throws it into the air before Pharaoh to bring the plague of boils. The fourth is the mountain: "Mount Sinai was completely enveloped in smoke, because the LORD had descended on it in fire. And the smoke rose like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked violently" (Exodus 19:18).

Genesis was first read aloud to the people who had stood at the foot of that mountain, or to their children. When they heard that Abraham got up early and went to "the place where he had stood before the LORD" (Genesis 19:27) and saw furnace smoke, they had seen that smoke themselves. At Sinai God came down in it to speak to them. And they had said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen," and then, "But do not let God speak to us, or we will die" (Exodus 20:19).

Moses told them why the fire had come: "God has come to test you, so that the fear of Him may be before you, to keep you from sinning" (Exodus 20:20). Over Sodom the furnace smoke was the end of a city that had stopped listening. Over Sinai it was God arriving to be heard. Israel heard Genesis 19:28 and knew that the same fire hung over both, and that what they did with His voice decided which it would be for them.

They also knew the ground. The south end of the Dead Sea is a waste of salt and sulfur, with a ridge of solid rock salt several miles long on its western shore, still called Mount Sodom, and salt columns standing along its face. Josephus, in the first century, claimed to have seen the pillar of Lot's wife. Moses used that landscape as a warning to Israel about their own land if they forgot the covenant: "All its soil will be a burning waste of sulfur and salt, unsown and unproductive, with no plant growing on it, just like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the LORD overthrew in His fierce anger" (Deuteronomy 29:23). The first hearers heard Genesis 19 as their own possible future, told in a view they could walk to.

Why does Genesis say God remembered Abraham?

The chapter ends by explaining itself. "So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, He remembered Abraham, and He brought Lot out of the catastrophe that destroyed the cities where he had lived" (Genesis 19:29). The verb is zakar (H2142). When God is its subject, remembering leads straight into action. "But God remembered Noah" (Genesis 8:1), and the waters began to go down. Here He remembers Abraham, and the name is Abraham's. Lot is rescued on account of the man who had stood before the LORD and pleaded for him.

Israel's own history turned on the same sentence. In Egypt, "God heard their groaning, and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" (Exodus 2:24). At Sinai, after the golden calf, Moses stood where Abraham had stood, between the LORD and a people who deserved the fire, and he prayed God's own promise back to Him: "Remember Your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, to whom You swore by Your very self" (Exodus 32:13). "So the LORD relented from the calamity He had threatened to bring on His people" (Exodus 32:14). Every Israelite who sat listening to Genesis 19:29 was alive because God remembered Abraham. They were Lot, brought out of a catastrophe by a promise made to someone else.

The pattern is complete in Jesus, who "is able to save completely those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to intercede for them" (Hebrews 7:25). Abraham stood before the LORD one afternoon. Jesus always lives to do it, and God remembers His people because He knows them in the One who prays for them.

Moses could pray that way because he knew God and knew what He had sworn, word for word, and could say it back. Being known by Him looks like that from both sides: God keeps hold of the people He has spoken with, and they keep hold of what He said. Habakkuk was told to put it on a tablet. So when God speaks to you, hurry to do what He says, and write down what He has promised, so that when it seems slow you still have His words to read back to Him while you wait.