Genesis 19:28: Abraham's own verse in the chapter, and he is thirty miles away in it
Read it →"And he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley, and he looked and, behold, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace." Abraham does not appear in Genesis 19 until it is over. He argued for the city on this ridge at the end of the previous chapter, went to bed, and got up early to go back to the place where he had stood before the LORD — which is a small and human detail: he wanted to see, and he went to the same spot to see it from. The verb is the same one as Genesis 18:16, when he walked his guests out and they looked down toward Sodom, and this map is that map with the country burnt. Nothing has moved. He is standing at three thousand feet on the Hebron ridge, the rift floor is thirteen hundred feet below the sea about thirty miles east, and on a clear morning the whole of the southern basin and the Moabite wall behind it is in one view. He does not go down. He never goes down; the last thing the chapter says about him is this look. "All the land of the valley" widens the sentence past the two cities to the whole floor of the rift, which is what Lot chose in Genesis 13 for being well watered everywhere like the garden of the LORD. The gazetteer's own point for the Jordan Valley is seventy-five miles north of what Abraham can see from here, up near Beth-shan, and this map keeps it there rather than moving it — it is the sources' anchor for the region and the region is what the verse names. The simile is a furnace: not a fire, a kiln. What he is looking at is a country that has been fired.
Regions on this map
He went back to the same spot in the morning. Three thousand feet up on the Hebron watershed, with thirty miles of falling ground between him and what he had spent the previous evening arguing about.
The two cities and the whole rift floor behind them — the country Lot chose for being green whatever the weather, going up like the smoke of a kiln.
Named with Sodom, as always. Its leading identification is the point Sodom already stands on, so it is drawn as an open ring rather than a second dot on one spot.
415 votes put it on the plain south of the Lisan, which is Sodom's point; the next candidates are north of the Dead Sea (78) and Numeira (52)
"All the land of the valley" — the whole rift floor, which is how the chapter refers to the country it has just destroyed and how Genesis 13 described the country Lot chose. The gazetteer anchors the region seventy-five miles north of the southern basin, near Beth-shan, and this map leaves the point where the sources put it and says so.
Today: the Jordan rift, anchored near Beth-shan (representative point)
Looked at, for the second time in three chapters, from the same ridge and by the same man. The pin is on water because the leading identification puts the city on the plain south of the Lisan, which the shallow end of the Dead Sea has since covered; 112 votes put it north of the sea and 109 at Bab edh-Dhra.
Today: disputed; most often the plain south of the Lisan, now under the Dead Sea (representative point)
Genesis 19:28 in full
- Genesis 19:28And he looked down toward and and toward all the land of the , and he looked and, behold, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.