Later, three men show up in Abraham’s camp. He greets them all as ‘My Lord’ and offers them a ‘morsel of bread’ and bids them sit under a tree while he prepares a meal. As he leaves them, he fetches the best of everything. The choicest flour is used to make bread, a young calf is slaughtered and cooked and all the while the three Gods (or perhaps one God and two Angels, the text doesn’t distinguish between the three) sit under that tree for what must seem like a long time while bread is baking and a whole cow is cooked.
Finally the meal is served and again as in chapter 17, one of the Gods states that Sarah will have a child when he visits again next year. Sarah hears this and laughs [you’ll recall that in Chapter 17 it was Abraham that reacted with skepticism to God’s prophecy of a child] as by this time she is REALLY old and has reached menopause, “had stopped having the periods of women” as the JSB puts it. The Lord, being the Lord and all, turns on her and says, “Is there anything too wonderous for the Lord?” at which point Sarah retorts that she didn’t laugh. God replies grumpily that she did laugh.
That point settled, God(s) set off to wherever God goes and Abraham sees them off. Gods again share their prophecy that Abraham will be the progenitor of a great line of men. With no real transition whatsoever, God blurts out that what’s going on in Sodom and Gomorrah is an outrage. God, in his usual anthropomorphic form (at least when the author the JSB designates as J is writing) says he will go down into the towns and if things are as bad as he’s heard then he’ll smite the whole lot of them back to dust.
Abraham, who you may recall has relatives in Sodom, asks the Lord, “Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? What if there should be fifty innocent within the city?” The Lord backs off a bit and admits that he if finds 50 innocents that he will not destroy the city. After much wheedling, Abraham gets God down to 10. This is actually a very powerful point. Abraham uses some sound logic to save his own family’s skin in this bit and I’ll be interested to see if this standard is applied elsewhere in the text. In today’s society, it also seems to have wide-reaching implications for death penalty cases. God seems to be pretty much saying flatly here that you can’t destroy thousands if even a few innocents get swept up in the process.
Visit tatteredthread.com for the rest of the bible up to this point...
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