name a wish; and he, being widowed and childless, asks for a son. 'Pudor est ulteriora loqui'; but at the end of ten months Orion is miraculously born. The resemblance to Gn. 18 is manifest; and since direct borrowing of the Bœotian legend from Jewish sources is improbable, there is a presumption that we have to do with variations of the same tale. The theory is rendered all the more plausible by the fact that a precisely similar origin is suggested by the leading motives of ch. 19 (see below).—Assuming that some such pagan original is the basis of the narrative before us, we find a clue to that confusion between the sing. and plu. which has been already referred to as a perplexing feature of the chapter. It is most natural to suppose that the threefold manifestation is a remnant of the original polytheism, the heathen deities being reduced to the rank of Yahwe's envoys. The introduction of Yahwe Himself as one of them would thus be a later modification, due to progressive Hebraizing of the conception, but never consistently carried through. An opposite view is taken by Fripp (ZATW, xii. 23 ff.), who restores the sing. throughout, and by Kraetzschmar, who, as we have seen, distinguishes between a sing. and a pl. recension, but regards the former as the older. The substitution of angels for Yahwe might seem a later refinement on the anthropomorphic representation of a bodily appearance of Yahwe; but the resolution of the one Yahwe into three angels would be unaccountable, especially in J, who appears never to speak of angels in the plural (see on 191). See Gu. 171, and Che. EB, iv. 4667 f.
16-22a. The judgement of Sodom revealed.
The soliloquy of Yahwe in 17-19 breaks the connexion between 16 and
20, and is to all appearance a later addition (see p. 298). (a) The
insertion assumes that Yahwe is one of the three strangers; but this
is hardly the intention of the main narrative, which continues to speak
of 'the men' in the pl. (22a). (b) In 17 Yahwe has resolved on the
destruction of Sodom, whereas in 20f. He proposes to abide by the result
of a personal investigation. (c) Both thought and language in 17-19 show
signs of Deuteronomic influence (see Ho. and Gu.). Di.'s assertion
(265), that 20f. have no motive apart from 17-19 and 23ff., is incomprehensible;
the difficulty rather is to assign a reason for the addition of 17ff.. The
idea seems to be that Abraham (as a prophet: cf. Am. 37) must be
initiated into the divine purpose, that he may instruct his descendants in
the ways of Yahwe.
16. and looked out in view of Sodom (cf. 1928)] The Dead
Sea not being visible from Hebron, we must understand
that a part of the journey has been accomplished. Tradition
fixed the spot at a village over 3 m. E of Hebron, called by
Jerome Caphar Barucha, now known as Beni Na'im, but
16. (
Hebrew characters)] G + (Greek characters).
