Genesis 18

## Summary Genesis 18 narrates Yahweh's appearance to Abraham at Mamre with two companions, the meal Abraham prepares for them, the announcement of Sarah's future son and her laughter, and the extended dialogue between Abraham and Yahweh in which Abraham negotiates the threshold number of righteous people needed to spare Sodom (from fifty down to ten). ## Key words - *va-yera* ("and he appeared", H7200) — niphal narrative form of the root for "see"; the passive/reflexive niphal stem signals that Yahweh is the one who becomes visible, not merely seen by chance. - *shelosha anashim* ("three men", H7969/H0582) — cardinal number plus plural noun; the text calls the visitors "men" (*anashim*) throughout the visual description, while the narration also identifies one of them with *YHWH* directly (v.1, v.13). - *titzchak* ("she laughed", H6711) — qal narrative (*va-*) imperfect, third feminine singular; the same root *tz-ch-q* recurs in vv.12,13,15, forming a verbal thread around Sarah's reaction and its denial. - *chalilah lekha* ("far be it from you", H2486) — interjection with second-person suffix, used twice in v.25 to frame Abraham's rhetorical question about the "Judge of all the earth" (*shofet kol ha-aretz*, H8199/H3605/H0776). - *im-emtza* ("if I will find", H0518/H4672) — conditional particle + qal imperfect, repeated with descending numbers (50, 45, 40, 30, 20, 10) in vv.26–32, structuring the bargaining dialogue as a fixed formula with variable numerals. ## What the text says The chapter opens with a narrative vav-chain (*va-yera*, *va-yisa*, *va-yar*) typical of Hebrew narrative sequence, moving quickly from Yahweh's appearing to Abraham's noticing "three men" (*shelosha anashim*, H7969/H0582) standing before him. The Hebrew grammar creates ambiguity about identity: the subject of v.1 is *YHWH* (H3068), but the object of Abraham's sight in v.2 is described only as "men" (*anashim*), and the plural verbs of address continue through the meal scene (vv.3–9, "they said," *va-yomeru*). Only in v.10 does a singular verb (*va-yomer*, "he said") resume, followed in v.13 by the explicit subject *YHWH*, suggesting a narrative shift from plural to singular interlocutor without the text marking a transition explicitly. The dialogue in vv.23–32 is built on a repeated syntactic pattern: a conditional clause with *im* ("if", H0518A) plus the verb *emtza* ("I will find", H4672) in the qal imperfect, paired with Yahweh's reply using *lo asheh* / *lo ashchit* ("I will not do it" / "I will not destroy", H6213A/H7843) in the same verbal stem. Each round preserves the identical grammatical frame while only the numeral changes (*chamishim*, "fifty" H2572; *arba'im*, "forty" H0705; *sheloshim*, "thirty" H7970; *esrim*, "twenty" H6242; *asarah*, "ten" H6235), a structural feature visible in the Hebrew that the English versions preserve mostly through repeated phrasing but without reproducing the exact morphological parallelism of stem and person. ## Differences between versions In v.1, the LXX renders *YHWH* (H3068) as *ho theos* ("God"), where the Hebrew and Vulgate (*Dominus*) preserve the personal name/title. In v.2, the LXX describes the three visitors as *treis andres* ("three men") without variation, matching the Hebrew *anashim*, while the BSB explicitly identifies Abraham as the one who "looked up," an addition not present as a separate clause in the Hebrew verb chain. In v.20–21, the Hebrew *zaqat sedom* ("outcry of Sodom", H2201) is rendered by the LXX as *kraugē* ("cry"), and the Vulgate as *clamor*, both matching closely; no substantive divergence appears in the numeral sequence of vv.24–32 across Hebrew, LXX, and Vulgate.