NOTES for Gen 18:20-33

Abraham’s relationship with God is truly remarkable and astonishing: consider only his bargaining with God’s messengers—and in fact with God Himself! But what does Abraham ask of Him? It would seem to be something very simple: justice when an entire people and an entire city are concerned. Yet in practice everything proves less simple. If a city is full of sin but still retains a handful of righteous people, what is God to do with such a city? Continue to preserve it, or leave it to its fate and doom it to catastrophe? How many righteous people are needed to avert that catastrophe? Once, in Noah’s time, his righteousness was not enough to save the world. How many are enough—not for the world, but for a city? Abraham’s conversation with God breaks off at ten. If ten righteous people are found, the city will stand; if not, it will perish. But why exactly ten? Why not five, or three? To understand the meaning of the parable—and what lies before us is clearly a parable—we must recall when the Book of Genesis acquired its present form. This happened relatively late, during the Babylonian exile, when the Synagogue already existed and the relevant rules governing community life were in force. According to these rules, the minimum size of a community is ten people. The meaning of the parable then becomes clear: a city can survive only if at least one community of righteous people is found within it. Not merely isolated individuals, but a community. The existence of a community allows its members not merely to survive in spiritually and morally hostile surroundings, but actively to influence those surroundings, provided, of course, that the community itself lives a full spiritual life. If no such community exists, the city is doomed. If a few individual righteous people are nevertheless found there, God will probably help them escape—them, but not the city that rejects both their righteousness and the righteous themselves.