Genesis 19:4

Summary

The verse describes the moment before the household went to sleep, when the men of the city of Sodom surrounded the house, identified as encompassing everyone "from young to old," the whole population "from every quarter." The Hebrew builds this through repetition and a merism expressing totality.

Key words

• terem ("before", H2962) — a temporal particle introducing a clause of anteriority; the action that follows (surrounding) happens prior to the action named in the terem-clause (lying down).
• yishkavu ("they lay down", H7901G) — qal imperfect, here used with terem to denote an action not yet completed at the reference point, hence "before they had lain down."
• nasabu ("they surrounded", H5437H) — niphal perfect. Though niphal often marks passive or reflexive voice, here it functions with an active resultative sense ("they surrounded/gathered around"), and the perfect aspect marks the action as completed.
• na'ar ("young man", H5288) and zaken ("old [man]", H2205H) — paired with the prepositions min ("from") and 'ad ("unto"), they form a merism, a figure using two extremes to indicate the whole range in between.
• miqqatzeh ("from the end", H7097A) — literally "from the extremity/end," modifying kol-ha'am ("all the people"), reinforcing totality by pointing to the outer boundary of the group.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with a temporal subordinate clause using terem ("before") plus the imperfect verb yishkavu ("they lay down"), establishing that what follows precedes bedtime. The main clause then names the subject twice in apposition: 'anshei ha'ir ("the men of the city") followed immediately by 'anshei sedom ("the men of Sodom") — both nouns in construct form (H0582), which specifies and re-specifies the same group, first geographically ("of the city") then by proper name ("of Sodom"). The verb nasabu (niphal perfect of H5437) carries an active-resultative meaning, "they surrounded," acting upon habayit ("the house").

The final portion of the verse builds a description of the crowd's extent using two overlapping totality expressions: the merism minna'ar ve'ad-zaken ("from young to old") specifies age range, while kol-ha'am miqqatzeh ("all the people from the end/extremity") uses the construct kol ("all of," H3605) governing ha'am ("the people," H5971A) followed by miqqatzeh, literally "from the end," an idiom conveying that the gathering came from every part of the population without exception.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew closes with miqqatzeh ("from the end/extremity"), an idiom of totality. The LXX instead ends with ἅμα ("together, at once"), and the Vulgate similarly renders simul ("together"). Both Greek and Latin versions shift the sense from "from every quarter" to "all at the same time," a divergence in how the final phrase's completeness is expressed.