1. And the LORD appeared. The narrator at once apprises us of the divine character of Abraham’s guests, but when Abraham peers out through the shimmering heat waves of the desert noon (verse 2), what he sees from his human perspective is three “men.” The whole scene seems to be a monotheistic adaptation to the seminomadic early Hebrew setting of an episode from the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat (tablet V: 6–7) in which the childless Danʾel is visited by the craftsman-god Kothar. As Moshe Weinfeld has observed, there are several verbal links between the two texts: Danʾel also is sitting by an entrance, overshadowed by a tree; he also “lifts up his eyes” to behold the divine visitor; and similarly enjoins his wife to prepare a meal from the choice of the flock.

3. My lord. The Masoretic Text vocalizes this term of courtly address (not YHWH) to read “my lords,” in consonance with the appearance of three visitors. But the vocative terms that follow in this verse are in the singular, and it is only in verse 4 that Abraham switches to plural verbs. Rashi, plausibly, suggests that Abraham initially addresses himself to “the greatest” of the three. As verses 10 and 13–15 make clear, that greatest one is God Himself, who will tarry to speak with Abraham while the two human-seeming angels of destruction who accompany Him head down to the cities of the plain.

4. Let a little water be fetched. With good reason, the Jewish exegetical tradition makes Abraham figure as the exemplary dispenser of hospitality. Extending hospitality, as the subsequent contrasting episode in Sodom indicates, is the primary act of civilized intercourse. The early Midrash (Abot di Rabbi Nathan) aptly noted that Abraham promises modestly, a little water and a morsel of bread, while hastening to prepare a sumptuous feast. “Fetch” appears four times in rapid succession, “hurry” three times, as indices of the flurry of hospitable activity.

9. Where is Sarah. The fact that the visitors know her name without prompting is the first indication to Abraham (unless one assumes a narrative ellipsis) that they are not ordinary humans.

10. he said, “I will surely return.” Evidently, one of the three visitors, unless the text reflects a fusion of two traditions, one in which there were three visitors, another in which there was one (which would then explain the switch from singular to plural early in the story).

at this very season. This phrase, or its equivalent, recurs in the various annunciation type-scenes, of which this is the first instance. The narrative motifs of the annunciation type-scene, in sequence, are: the fact of barrenness, the promise of a son by God or angel or holy man, and the fulfillment of the promise in conception and birth. But only here is the emphatically matriarchal annunciation displaced from wife to husband, with the woman merely eavesdropping on the promise; only here is the barren woman actually postmenopausal; and only here is there a long postponement, filled in with seemingly unrelated episodes, until the fulfillment of the promise (chapter 21). Thus the patriarch takes over the center-stage location of the matriarch, and the difficult—indeed, miraculous—nature of the fulfillment is underscored.

11–13. This sequence of three utterances is a brilliant example of how much fine definition of position and character can be achieved in biblical narrative through variation in repetition. First the narrator informs us, objectively and neutrally, of Abraham’s and Sarah’s advanced age, stating the fact, repeating it with the emphasis of a synonym, and reserving for last Sarah’s postmenopausal condition, which would appear to make conception a biological impossibility. When Sarah repeats this information in her interior monologue, it is given new meaning from her bodily perspective as an old and barren woman: her flesh is shriveled, she cannot imagine having pleasure again (the term ʿednah is cognate with Eden and probably suggests sexual pleasure, or perhaps even sexual moistness), and besides—her husband is old. The dangling third clause hangs on the verge of a conjugal complaint: How could she expect pleasure, or a child, when her husband is so old? Then the LORD, having exercised the divine faculty of listening to Sarah’s unspoken words, her silent laughter of disbelief, reports them to Abraham, tactfully editing out (as Rashi saw) the reference to the patriarch’s old age and also suppressing both the narrator’s mention of the vanished menses and Sarah’s allusion to her withered flesh—after all, nothing anaphrodisiac is to be communicated to old Abraham at a moment when he is expected to cohabit with his wife in order at last to beget a son.

15. I did not laugh . . . Yes, you did laugh. Sarah’s fearful denial and God’s rejection of it afford an opportunity to foreground the verb of laughter, tsaḥaq, already stressed through Abraham’s laughter in chapter 17, which will become the name of her son. After the birth, Sarah will laugh again, not in bitter disbelief but in joy, though perhaps not simply in joy, as we shall have occasion to see in chapter 21.

17. And the LORD had thought. The verb ʾamar, “say,” is sometimes used elliptically for ʾamar belibo, “said to himself,” and that seems clearly the case here. With the two divine messengers about to be sent off on their mission of destruction, God will be left alone with Abraham, and before addressing him, He reflects for a moment on the nature of His covenantal relationship with the patriarch and what that dictates as to revealing divine intention to a human partner. Abraham is in this fashion thrust into the role of prophet, and God will so designate him in chapter 20.

19. to do righteousness and justice. This is the first time that the fulfillment of the covenantal promise is explicitly made contingent on moral performance. The two crucial Hebrew nouns, tsedeq and mishpat, will continue to reverberate literally and in cognate forms through Abraham’s pleas to God on behalf of the doomed cities, through the Sodom story itself, and through the story of Abraham and Abimelech that follows it.

20. outcry. The Hebrew noun, or the verb from which it is derived, tsaʿaq or zaʿaq, is often associated in the Prophets and Psalms with the shrieks of torment of the oppressed.

21. Let Me go down. The locution indicating God’s descent from on high echoes the one in the story of the Tower of Babel.

dealt destruction. Some construe the Hebrew noun as an adverb and render this as “done altogether.” But the verb “to do” (ʿasah) with the noun kalah as direct object occurs a number of times in the Prophets in the clear sense of “deal destruction.”

22. while the LORD was still standing before Abraham. The Masoretic Text has Abraham standing before the LORD, but this reading is avowedly a scribal euphemism, what the Talmud calls a tiqun sofrim, introduced because the original formulation smacked of lèse-majesté.

23. And Abraham stepped forward. The verb, often used for someone about to deliver a legal plea, introduces an Abraham who is surprisingly audacious in the cause of justice, a stance that could scarcely have been predicted from the obedient and pious Abraham of the preceding episodes.

the innocent. The term tsadiq has a legal usage—the party judged not guilty in a court of law, though it also has the moral meaning of “righteous.” Similarly, the term here for guilty, rashaʿ, also means “wicked.” Tsadiq is derived from the same root as tsedaqah, “righteousness,” the very term God has just used in His interior monologue reflecting on what it is the people of Abraham must do.

25. the Judge of all the earth. The term for “judge,” shofet, is derived from the same root as mishpat, “justice,” which equally occurs in God’s interior monologue about the ethical legacy of the seed of Abraham.

27. Here, pray, I have presumed to speak to my LORD when I am but dust and ashes. Like the previous verbal exchange with the three divine visitors, this whole scene is a remarkable instance of the use of contrastive dialogue in biblical narrative. In the preceding scene, Abraham is voluble in his protestations of hospitable intention, whereas the three visitors answer only impassively and tersely, “Do as you have spoken.” Here, Abraham, aware that he is walking a dangerous tight rope in reminding the Judge of all the earth of the necessity to exercise justice, deploys a whole panoply of the abundant rhetorical devices of ancient Hebrew for expressing self-abasement before a powerful figure. At each turn of the dialogue, God responds only by stating flatly that He will not destroy for the sake of the number of innocent just stipulated. The dialogue is cast very much as a bargaining exchange—it is not the last time we shall see Abraham bargaining. After Abraham’s second bid of forty-five, each time he ratchets down the number he holds back the new, smaller number, in good bargaining fashion, to the very end of this statement.

32. just this time . . . ten. Abraham realizes he dare not go any lower than ten, the minimal administrative unit for communal organization in later Israelite life. In the event, Lot’s family, less than the requisite ten, will be the only innocent souls in Sodom.

33. and Abraham returned to his place. The report of a character’s returning to his place or home is a formal convention for marking the end of an episode in biblical narrative. But this minimal indication has a thematic implication here—the contrast between Abraham’s “place” in the nomadic, uncorrupted existence in the land of promise and Lot’s location in one of the doomed cities of the plain.