Genesis 19:1: Thirty miles and four thousand feet, done between a meal and nightfall

"The two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed himself with his face to the earth." Three men ate under the oaks at Mamre in the heat of the day. Two of them arrive at Sodom the same evening, which is thirty miles as the crow goes and rather more on the ground: off the Hebron ridge at three thousand feet, down through the wilderness, and onto a plain thirteen hundred feet below the level of the sea. It is a day's walk for a man in a hurry and the verse gives it half a day. Lot is sitting in the gate. That is not where you sit to watch the road — the gate of a walled town is where the elders sit, where cases are heard and bargains witnessed, and a resident alien sitting there is a man who has made himself somebody in a place he arrived at as an outsider. Six chapters ago he moved his tent as far as Sodom. He is inside it now, and his daughters are engaged to men of the city. He does what Abraham did at the oaks — rises, bows to the ground, presses food and a bed on strangers — and the parallel is deliberate and about to be broken. Abraham's guests were fed under a tree and left in the morning. Lot's have to be barricaded in against the men of the town before the night is over. The map draws the last leg of the road from the ridge, which /maps/genesis-18-16 sets them on, and the pin at the end of it falls on water: the leading identification of Sodom puts it on the plain south of the Lisan, under the shallow southern basin of the Dead Sea.