Genesis 19:17–29

¹⁷When they had brought them outside, they^k said, “Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the plain; flee to the hills, or else you will be consumed.”^{* 18}And Lot said to them, “Oh, no, my lords; ¹⁹your servant has found favor with you, and you have shown me great kindness in saving my life, but I cannot flee to the hills, for fear the disaster will overtake me and I die. ²⁰Look, that city is near enough to flee to, and it is a little one. Let me escape there—is it not a little one?—and my life will be saved!” ²¹He said to him, “Very well, I grant you this favor too and will not overthrow the city of which you have spoken.^{* 22}Hurry, escape there, for I can do nothing until you arrive there.” Therefore the city was called Zoar.^{l 23}The sun had risen on the earth when Lot came to Zoar.

²⁴Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven,^{* 25}and he overthrew those cities and all the plain and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on the ground.^{* 26}But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.^*

²⁷Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord,^{* 28}and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the plain and saw the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace.^*

²⁹So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had settled.^*