Genesis 18:16: The one view in Abraham's life that decides something

"Then the men set out from there, and they looked down toward Sodom. And Abraham went with them to set them on their way." They have eaten under the oaks — a calf, curds, milk and cakes made in a hurry — and Sarah has laughed behind the tent door at being told she will have a son. Now they get up to go, and the verse does two things at once: it turns the visit into a journey, and it points that journey at a city thirty miles away that nobody in the scene has mentioned. "Looked down" is exact. Mamre is on the Hebron ridge at about three thousand feet; the plain at the south end of the Dead Sea is thirteen hundred feet below sea level. In twelve miles of walking east the ground falls the better part of a mile, and from the last rise before it drops you are looking across the whole rift at the Moabite wall on the far side. Whatever the sources cannot settle about where Sodom stood, everyone puts it down there, in a hole you can see into from up here. Abraham walking them out is the ordinary courtesy owed a guest, and it is also what puts him in the right place for the rest of the chapter. The moment the group stops on the ridge, the LORD asks whether he should hide what he is about to do, and Abraham begins arguing — fifty righteous, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, ten — over a city he can see from where he is standing and has no reason to care about, except that his nephew lives in it. So the solid line is the courtesy: a mile or two out from the oaks with his guests. The faded one is the road they are on and he is not, down off the ridge and across the rift floor. Two of the three arrive at nightfall, which is the next map in this walk.