Genesis 19:9 presents an interesting semantic conundrum. In this familiar scene, the men of Sodom have gathered outside of Lot’s house to demand that he bring out to them his two visitors. When Lot himself comes out instead and interposes himself between the rapacious mob and the closed door behind him, the narrator reports, “They said,
! They said, ‘This one came to live as a stranger, and he keeps on playing the judge! Now we will do worse to you than to them.’ They pressed very hard against the man, against Lot, and they drew near to break down the door.” The curious phrase
rarely draws explicit comment from interpreters and translators, although it admits of two virtually opposite translations. Since
has the sense “to approach, to draw near,” and respected lexicographers regard
as an adverb meaning something like “yonder,” most translators and commentators render
using some variation on “Stand back!”1 A very few interpreters, however, have rendered
as something like “ Come closer!”2 They very fact that scholars have translated the phrase in precisely [End Page 95] opposite ways attracts sufficient interest to invite a more careful examination of this intriguing phrase.
1. The Semantics and Syntax of
Because the verb
generally has the sense “to draw near, to approach,” some readers might consider it unusual to find a speaker using the verb to mean “move away.” Thus one line of argument in favor of translating
as “come here” concerns the semantics of the verb itself. In two separate studies, Lyn Bechtel has argued for translating
along these lines, but her two treatments differ somewhat from one another.
In a 1998 essay, Bechtel translated
as “Draw near!” In doing so, she appealed to the use of
in the judicial context of Deut 25:1. Bechtel contends that the mob’s use of the verb
invites readers to hear judicial overtones in the mob’s speech. In making this argument, however, Bechtel seems to have construed
as a statement made by the men of Sodom to each other; according to her, “The townsmen are to ‘draw near’ in judgment of Lot.” However, the grammar speaks against this idea. In saying “
,” the mob uses a masculine singular imperative, but in Gen 19:9 the mob speaks with one voice as “we,” using the first person plural form
(“we will do harm”), and the narrator describes the mob’s speech using plural verb forms (as
‘they said’). It seems unlikely that in the midst of all these plurals, the mob would address itself (or the men of the mob each other) using a singular imperative rather than, say, a plural cohortative.
surely stands as a command that the crowd barks at Lot, not at itself.
Bechtel takes a different tack in a 1999 essay. Again invoking the mob’s use of
to view the scene judicially, and again cross-referencing Deut 25:1 and Isa 50:8, Bechtel this time translates
as “Present yourself.” The crowd thus demands that Lot present himself for judgment, as at the conclusion of a court case. Although Bechtel’s attempts to interpret this scene with a jurisprudential spin carry some prima facie plausibility, her interpretation really stands or falls with the adequacy of its treatment of
. [End Page 96]
The intriguing verb
appears 125 times in the Tanak, making it wellattested though not exceptionally common. In some verses, writers use both Qal and Niphal forms of
to refer to the same event, demonstrating clearly that no significant semantic difference obtains for
between these two binyanim. For example, Gen 33:7 reads, “Leah also drew near [
, Qal] with her children, and they bowed down, and afterward Joseph drew near [
, Niphal] with Rachel, and they bowed down.”3 The verb implies movement, “drawing near” toward some destination, but writers may indicate such destinations in various ways. When they specify the destination, biblical writers usually use the preposition
to mark it, but they can also use a variety of other prepositions, such as
,
,
,
,
, and
.4 In a handful of cases, the adverb
or the adverb
, both meaning “here,” appear alongside
. In about ten cases, the destination goes unspecified, but the purpose of the “drawing near,” usually indicated using
(or, once,
), imply the direction of motion. Over forty appearances of the verb
lack any preposition or adverb marking the direction or purpose. In many of these instances, the clause that follows
opens with a wayyiqtol form potentially indicating purpose. Table 1 summarizes these data.
This information funds an assessment of Bechtel’s treatment of
in Gen 19:9. Bechtel bases her jurisprudential interpretation of the scene almost entirely on the appearance of
later in the verse. If one defines a “judicial context” quite loosely as one in which “judicial language,” broadly construed, appears, then
arguably appears in nine (other) “judicial contexts.” 5 Bechtel’s parade examples, Deut 25:1 and Isa 50:8, do not provide close conceptual or syntactical parallels to Gen 19:9. In Deut 25:1, two disputing parties “draw near for judgment” (
), appearing before [End Page 97] a third party who renders a judicial decision. Nothing of this kind happens in Gen 19:9, nor does the mob tell Lot to
. In Isa 50:8, the speaker invites any would-be-accusers to “approach me” (
) in the manner of a plaintiff accusing a defendant. Here too only the weakest of analogies obtains with Gen 19:9; the mob does not tell Lot to
, as though inviting Lot to sue them. None of the other occurrences of
in “judicial contexts” resemble Gen 19:9 any better than these conceptually, much less syntactically. Indeed, the fact that the mob self-professedly intends to “do harm” (
) suggests that “justice” lies far from their top priority.
Most importantly, however, Bechtel simply ignores the adverb
. If one accepts Bechtel’s claim that Gen 19:9 constitutes a “judicial context” that influences the sense of
therein, one must still take the adverb into account. In the nine other arguably judicial contexts where
appears, it either stands alongside
plus a term naming or evoking a recognized judiciary (twice: Exod 24:14; Deut 25:1), stands alongside
joined to a noun or pronoun naming the defendant (twice: Deut 25:9; Isa 50:8), or stands alone, without any preposition or adverb providing additional specification (the remaining five cases). Syntactically, none of these instances strongly resemble
in Gen 19:9. One must therefore judge Bechtel’s rendering of “present yourself”—based on the nuances of
in judicial contexts— as insufficiently warranted.
2. The Semantics and Syntax of
David Gunn’s translation of
depends not on the nuances of
, but on the semantic function of
. Gunn himself does not go into much detail, but posits that “the Hebrew means not ‘draw back out of the way’ as most translations have it but ‘get close and them some more!’”6
Although Gunn does not document or otherwise attempt to justify his claim about the sense of
, his claim finds some measure of support in Gershon Brin’s study of the formulae
and
. Brin suggests that both the “positional” and “temporal” uses of these phrases “convey the idea of an unlimited continuation of the thing described.”7 Brin’s study deals mainly with the term
in phrases describing someone’s age, particularly in census texts, and he does not treat
constructions in detail. Brin himself cites
in Gen 19:9 as an example of a [End Page 98] typical positional use of
, translating the entire phrase as “stand back.”8 Yet Brin’s translation of
arguably fails to follow through on his conclusion that
formulae “convey the idea of an unlimited continuation of the thing described,” since the unlimited continuation of
would seem (at first glance, at least) to involve drawing ever nearer, not moving farther away. This reasoning seems to elucidate the substance of Gunn’s implicit argument.
Further examination of the actual uses of
, uncommon as they are, seems to confirm Brin’s general characterization of the adverb’s semantic value and, in so doing, lends support to Gunn’s understanding of
. In eleven of its sixteen occurrences in the Tanak,
appears in the construction [NP]
, where “NP” stands for a noun or noun phrase (the
usually stands prefixed to the noun rather than joined by maqqeph, but this makes no semantic difference). Five of those eleven instances involve temporal references, such as “from the eighth day
” (Lev 22:27). Most English translations render
as “on,” “onward,” “forward,” or “thereafter” in these verses, acknowledging the basic dynamic that Brin says
denotes: continued movement in a specified direction. In its temporal usage, the directional aspect of
conforms to the linear flow of time. The phrases cited here never imply a backward recollection of past time, but always refer to a forward temporal trajectory.
Six verses in the Tanak exhibit a geographical use of
in the construction [P]
, where “P” stands for a place name or geographically specific phrase. When such phrases concern personal motion,
rather clearly denotes moving along a trajectory already underway (1 Sam 10:3). In Num 32:19 and 1 Sam 20:22, 37—where this construction stands in direct discourse—speakers use this construction to verbally locate objects or places that lie beyond the addressee or point of reference along a trajectory away from the speaker, such that the addressee must follow that trajectory away from the speaker to locate the objects or reach the location envisioned. Curiously, the three instances where
is attached to
itself attest a similar sense. If one glosses
as “yonder,” as the standard lexicons suggest, then one might suspect that the construction [P]
would mean something like “from over there toward P,” but in fact the opposite case obtains. Amos 5:27 amply illustrates this point:
clearly does not mean that Amos thinks his Israelite audience will start out somewhere on the far side of Damascus (with respect to Bethel) and move [End Page 99] toward Damascus, but rather that his audience will begin from its own land and move in the direction of Damascus and then continue beyond that point. Thus, even the construction [P]
denotes movement in a trajectory away from the place designated. The very interesting fact that phrases constructed as [P]
have virtually the same semantic value as those constructed as [P]
suggests that the
affixed to
functions partitively, and the
affixed to the toponym functions ablatively, such that one could justly render
as “I will exile you to one of the places that is reached by going onward from Damascus.” A wooden substitution of “yonder” for
does not fit these circumstances, and this casts doubt on whether readers should regard
as having any absolute spatial sense at all.
Isaiah 18:2, 7 present a more complicated picture. Both verses describe a people as being
. English translations render
variously as “near and far” (NRSV), “far and away” (NJPS), “far and wide” (NIV), and so on. All of these renderings imply that
functions chiefly to denote distance. Structurally, though,
perfectly matches the other four occurrences of
[P]
, and its content differs only in the use of
instead of a place name or a noun phrase denoting a place. In the other such instances, however,
seems to denote continued motion rather than a specific position. One may thus plausibly suggest that
bears the sense “from this [place] and onward” (or “outward”), in whatever direction and however far one might be going.
In sum, the majority of the Tanak’s uses of
commend the view that the word normally functions adverbially to extend a temporal or geographical trajectory along a particular path to some indeterminate extent. Thus far, Gunn’s glossing of
in Gen 19:9 as “get close and then some more” apparently stands on solid semantic ground with respect to the sense of
.
3. Parallel Constructions
Though Biblical Hebrew exhibits stable semantics and syntax, individual writers do employ creative variations (never mind simple grammatical mistakes). Therefore, one might do well to examine the closest verbal parallels to
before reaching a conclusion about the phrase’s sense in Gen 19:9. With regard to the use of the adverb
, Num 17:2 (16:37 in most [End Page 100] English versions) offers the closest parallel phrase,
.9 Among all sixteen biblical uses of
, only the phrases in Gen 19:9 and Num 17:2 lack the usual syntactical framework of prepositions and conjunctions that clarifies the adverbial function of
. English translations of Num 17:2 variously render the
in
as “far and wide” (NRSV), “abroad” (JPS, NASB), “some distance away” (NAB, NET, NIV), “far away” (HCSB; cf. NJB), and so on, apparently taking
as “yonder,” as in the usual translation of Gen 19:9. However, these translations seem to absolutize the spatial result of the more frequent
constructions rather than indicating the semantic function of
as appropriate to this particular passage. An outward trajectory already seems to inhere in the verb
‘to scatter’ (an antonym of
‘to gather’ as in Jer 31:10). In Num 17:2, then, the verb
indicates that the ashes will initially move away from the censers, and the adverb
indicates that the ashes will continue to follow that path until they come to rest.
With regard to the verb
, the closest parallels stand in the three examples of direct discourse where an imperative form of
, followed by an adverb, appears. In all three cases, an adverb meaning “here” follows an imperative form of
(specifically,
in Ruth 2:14 and 1 Sam 14:38, and
in Josh 3:9). While these instances cannot, of course, demonstrate that
in Gen 19:9 means anything like “get close and then some more,” neither do they give any support to the idea that characters speaking in biblical narrative might use an imperatival form of
to tell someone to move farther away from the speaker. Readers must resist the temptation to assume that
functions more or less as an antonym of
and
, for (as discussed above) such an inference would not really fit the attested sense of
.
4. Contextual Considerations
The typical biblical uses of both
and
support the minority translation of
as “come here” a bit better than the traditional translation, “stand back.” Before drawing a conclusion from this data, however, readers would do well to examine the phrase in its immediate context to see whether that context demands one translation or the other. [End Page 101]
By the moment when the mob tells Lot to “
,” the narrator has drawn for readers a picture of Lot standing outside of his house, facing the crowd, with the door closed behind him. The verb
frames the verse. At the beginning of the verse, the mob tells Lot to “
”; at the end of the verse, the narrator informs readers that the men of Sodom “drew near to break down the door” (
). Syntactically, the use of
in Gen 19:9b fits the reasonably well-attested pattern in which
is followed by the preposition
attached to a noun or infinitive verb that reveals the purpose of the motion denoted by
, and in so doing implicitly supplies also the direction of that motion. In this case, Gen 19:9b indicates that the crowd wants to break down or breach the door of Lot’s house. If Lot himself stands between the crowd and the door, then translating
as “stand back” makes good contextual sense: the mob wants him out of the way so that it might more easily invade his home.
Yet the other element of purpose in Gen 19:9b complicates this apparently straightforward reading, as the mob announces its intention to “do more harm to you [Lot] than to them [the visitors].” If the mob intends to harm Lot in some way, then it seems counterproductive to tell him to “stand back” out of the way. In this case, “come closer and then some more” would seem to fit the context better: the mob wants Lot to get closer so they can inflict physical harm upon him.
The immediate narrative context, therefore, seems to point in both directions. “Stand back” makes better sense if one emphasizes the crowd’s narrated action at the end of the verse, while “come closer” makes better sense if one emphasizes the crowd’s stated intention immediately following their command of “
.” One could perhaps try to reconcile this tension by explaining that “we will do more harm to you than to them” does not contemplate harm against Lot’s person, but rather against his household. But this explanation strains against the narrative facts. The mob appears to have intended physical harm to Lot’s houseguests, so readers most naturally assume that they now state their intention to treat Lot himself more savagely. Moreover, the crowd’s anger flares in response to Lot’s offer of his daughters in place of his houseguests, though the daughters would provide exactly the opportunity to inflict harm on Lot’s household instead of on Lot himself. No easy way to escape this contextual dilemma presents itself. The mob states one intention—to harm Lot—and acts on a different purpose—to break down the door. Depending on which of these actions one emphasizes, each of the two proposed senses of
in its turn better fits the passage in which the enigmatic command stands. [End Page 102]
Christopher Heard
Pepperdine University
