Genesis 19:2

Summary

Lot addresses the two visitors, urging them with repeated politeness formulas to turn aside to his house, wash their feet, and spend the night, promising they can rise early and continue their journey. The visitors initially refuse, stating they will spend the night in the town square instead.

Key words

• hinneh ("here!", H2009) + na ("please", H4994) — an interjection pair opening the speech; hinneh draws attention to the moment, na softens the following imperatives into a polite request.
• 'adonai ("O lords", H0113) — masculine plural construct with the 1st-person suffix -i ("my"), literally "my lords"; the plural construct form addresses both visitors together.
• suru ("turn aside", H5493I) — qal imperative masculine plural, the first in a chain of direct commands (suru, linu, rachatzu) addressed to the two men.
• hishkamtem ("you will rise early", H7925) — hiphil (causative stem) in the sequential perfect (vav-consecutive perfect), continuing the imperative chain as a resulting action rather than a separate command.
• na ("please", H4994) — repeated a second time before suru, reinforcing the courteous tone of the invitation within the same sentence.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence structure moves from direct imperatives (suru, "turn aside"; linu, "stay the night"; rachatzu, "wash") to two verbs in the sequential perfect (hishkamtem, "you will rise early"; halakhtem, "you will go"), a common Biblical Hebrew construction where a chain of commands shifts into perfect-tense forms linked by the narrative vav (H9001) to express the intended sequence or result of the preceding imperatives — essentially "do these things, so that afterward you may rise early and go your way." This grammatical shift is not a separate command but a continuation logically dependent on the imperatives.

The double use of na ("please", H4994) — once after hinneh and once after suru — marks the speech as deferential, a feature that reinforces the tone of urgent politeness in Lot's invitation, though this repetition is not always rendered twice in translation.

The visitors' reply uses lo ("not", H3808) followed by ki (H3588A), a particle glossed here as introducing a contrastive or explanatory clause ("if/that"), functioning adversatively: "No, rather/but we will spend the night in the rechov ('open place', H7339)," i.e., the town square.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the opening as "ἰδού, κύριοι" ("behold, lords") without a separate word for the first na, and translates suru na simply as "ἐκκλίνατε" (imperative alone), omitting an explicit rendering of the second na. The Vulgate similarly uses a single "Obsecro" ("I beg you") for the opening hinneh na, and gives "declinate in domum" without repeating a politeness marker for the second na. Where the Hebrew ki introduces the visitors' refusal, the LXX uses "ἀλλ'" ("but") and the Vulgate "sed" ("but"), both treating it as adversative rather than causal ("because").