After receiving visitors near the oaks of Mamre, Abraham watches as the men turn toward Sodom. The narrative then discloses that a grave outcry has risen against Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham remains before the LORD and begins an extraordinary exchange: what if righteous people live within the city? He asks whether the righteous will be swept away with the wicked and appeals to the justice of the Judge of all the earth.

Abraham moves from fifty righteous people down to ten. At each stage he speaks cautiously, and at each stage the answer is that the city would be spared for the sake of the specified number. The conversation ends without the text reporting that even ten have been found.

Two messengers arrive in Sodom in the evening, where Lot is sitting at the city gate. He urges them to stay in his house. Before the night is over, men of the city surround the house and demand that the visitors be brought out to them. The scene portrays a community in which strangers are threatened rather than protected. Lot attempts to intervene, and the visitors pull him back inside and strike the men outside with blindness.

Lot is told that the city is about to be destroyed and that he must gather his family. His warning sounds like a joke to his sons-in-law. At dawn the messengers urge Lot, his wife, and his two daughters to leave. When Lot hesitates, they take the family by the hand and lead them outside, an action the text explicitly associates with the LORD’s mercy.

The family is told to flee and not look back. Lot asks to escape to the small town of Zoar. Judgment then falls on Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot’s wife looks back and becomes a pillar of salt. Abraham later looks toward the plain and sees smoke rising from the land.

Genesis closes the destruction scene by saying that when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham and brought Lot out of the catastrophe. The account therefore places judgment, Abraham’s intercession, Lot’s rescue, and the moral collapse of Sodom within the same narrative.