Genesis 19:1-29
Two angels arrive at Sodom's gate at evening; Lot welcomes them with the same hospitality verbs Abraham used at Mamre — prostration, foot-washing, unleavened bread — and the city replies with a sentence Judges 19 will quote back word-for-word. Fire and brimstone fall from Yahweh from Yahweh out of the heavens, coining the canonical vocabulary the Psalter abstracts, Ezekiel projects, Jesus quotes, and Revelation deploys six times for the lake of fire. The chapter closes with the formula that closed the Flood: God remembered Abraham, and Lot was sent out from the midst of the Overthrow.
Genesis 18:1-15
Yahweh comes to the door of Abraham's tent at midday and eats a meal of fine flour cakes and curds under a tree. The Hebrew names the visitor singular; the eyes see three men; the speaker is Yahweh; two leave for Sodom as angels. Sarah laughs inside the tent and the divine voice draws the laugh into the open. The vocabulary of her cakes is the vocabulary of the altar that does not yet exist; the formula of her birth-promise is the formula Elisha will speak to the Shunammite; her inner question about pleasure (ednah) is preserved by the Hebrew and erased by the Greek. At Mamre God comes to a domestic table and names the time of Isaac's life.