Genesis 19:6

Summary

Genesis 19:6 narrates that Lot went out from his house to the men waiting at his door, then shut the door behind him. The verse marks a transition from inside the house to the threshold, setting up the confrontation with the crowd outside.

Key words

• yetze ("he went out", H3318G) — qal verb in narrative sequence (introduced by the narrative va), presenting this as the next event in the story.
• ha-petcha ("the entrance", H6607 + H9011) — the noun "entrance" carries a directional he suffix, indicating motion toward that location ("toward the entrance"), not just static position.
• ha-delet ("the door", H1817C) — feminine singular noun with definite article, referring to a single specific door.
• sagar ("he closed", H5462) — qal perfect, marking a completed action; grammatically this clause is set off from the main narrative chain (it does not carry the narrative va), giving it a slightly different syntactic weight than the verb yetze.
• acharav ("behind him", H0310A + H9033) — the base form is marked in the data as construct with a pronominal suffix, functioning to locate the closing action spatially relative to Lot ("behind him").

What the text says

The sentence has two main verbal actions: Lot's going out (yetze) and the closing of the door (sagar). The first verb is bound into the narrative chain with the va-prefix, showing it as the next link in the story sequence. The second verb, sagar, is a plain qal perfect without that narrative prefix, which in Hebrew narrative style often signals a slightly backgrounded or explanatory action attached to the main event — here, the shutting of the door accompanies Lot's exit rather than standing as an independent plot beat.

The phrase ha-petcha uses the directional he ending, a suffix that in Biblical Hebrew indicates movement toward a place. This nuance — "toward the entrance" — is present in the Hebrew morphology itself but is not distinguished in translations that simply render it as "to them" or "outside," since Greek and Latin lack an equivalent directional suffix.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew ha-delet ("the door", singular) is matched by the LXX's singular thura ("door") and the Vulgate's singular ostium, but RV1909 renders it as plural "las puertas" ("the doors"), a divergence from the singular form in the Hebrew, LXX, and Vulgate. The Vulgate also adds ait ("he said"), a verb of speech not present in the Hebrew text of this verse, anticipating the direct speech that follows in the next verse.