Genesis 19:25

Summary

Genesis 19:25 reports the destruction: the deity overthrew the named cities, the entire surrounding plain, all their inhabitants, and everything growing from the ground. The verse is a summary statement closing the destruction narrative with four parallel objects, all governed by a single verb.

Key words

• yahafokh ("he overthrew", H2015) — qal narrative form of the verb, continuing the story line with "and then he overthrew."
• 'arim ("cities", H5892B) — masculine plural noun, marked definite by ha and further specified by the demonstrative 'El ("these"), pointing back to the cities named earlier in the narrative.
• kikkar ("valley", H3603H) — feminine singular noun in construct with "all" (kol), designating the whole geographic region, not just the cities themselves.
• yoshvei ("inhabitants of", H3427) — qal participle, masculine plural construct, literally "those dwelling," functioning as a noun meaning "the dwellers of."
• tsemach ("growth of", H6780) — masculine singular noun in construct with 'adamah ("ground", H0127G), denoting what sprouts from the soil.

What the text says

The sentence has one main verb, yahafokh, with four objects marked by the untranslated direct object particle 'et: "the cities," "all the plain," "all the inhabitants of the cities," and "the growth of the ground." Each object is introduced by ve ("and"), producing a cumulative list rather than a single description — the destruction is presented as affecting distinct categories: settlements, territory, population, and vegetation, in that order.

The construct chains are notable: kol-hakikkar ("all of the valley") and kol-yoshvei he'arim ("all the inhabitants of the cities") use kol to stress totality before naming what is destroyed. The participle yoshvei treats "inhabiting" as an ongoing state rather than a completed action, so the phrase names people by their habitual dwelling rather than as a fixed group. The final phrase, tsemach ha'adamah, uses a construct pair where tsemach ("growth, sprout") is grammatically bound to 'adamah ("ground"), so the phrase denotes what the ground produces, without specifying particular plants.

Differences between versions

The LXX inserts a clause absent from the Hebrew: "ἐν αἷς κατῴκει ἐν αὐταῖς Λώτ" ("in which Lot was dwelling"), naming Lot explicitly where the Hebrew has no such reference at this point. The LXX also adds "καὶ περίοικον" ("and the surrounding region"), paralleling the Vulgate's "omnem circa regionem" ("all the surrounding region") — both render kikkar not as "valley/plain" but as a broader circling territory. For tsemach ha'adamah, the LXX has "τὰ ἀνατέλλοντα ἐκ τῆς γῆς" ("the things springing up from the earth"), and the Vulgate has "cuncta terrae virentia" ("all the green things of the earth"), both specifying vegetation more explicitly than the Hebrew construct phrase "growth of the ground."