to flit · verb, qal perfect, 3rd person common plural
mountain
הֶ֥רָהHe.rah
H2022
a mountain or range of hills (sometimes used figurative… · noun, common masculine singular absolute + directional suffix
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Genesis 19:17 And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in…
Genesis 11:3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter…
Genesis 19:30 And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a ca…
Isaiah 24:18 And it shall come to pass, that he who fleeth from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that cometh up out of the midst of…
Jeremiah 48:44 He that fleeth from the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that getteth up out of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for I will bring up…
Joshua 8:24 And it came to pass, when Israel had made an end of slaying all the inhabitants of Ai in the field, in the wilderness wherein they chased th…
Psalms 83:10 Which perished at Endor: they became as dung for the earth.
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Genesis 14:1-12
We have here an account of the first war that ever we read of in scripture, which (though the wars of the nations make the greatest figure in history) we should not have had the history of if Abram and Lot had not been concerned in it. Now, concerning this war, we may observe,
I. The parties engaged in it. The invaders were four kings, two of them no less than kings of Shinar and Elam (that is, Chaldea and Persia), yet probably not the sovereign princes of those great kingdoms in their own persons, but either officers under them, or rather the heads and leaders of some colonies which came out of those great nations, and settled themselves near Sodom, but retained the names of the countries f…
Slime-pits - Places where asphaltus or bitumen sprang out of the ground; this substance abounded in that country.
Fell there - It either signifies they were defeated on this spot, and many of them slain, or that multitudes of them had perished in the bitumen-pits which abounded there; that the place was full of pits we learn from the Hebrew, which reads here בארת בארת beeroth beeroth, pits, pits, i.e., multitudes of pits. A bad place to maintain a fight on, or to be obliged to run through in order to escape.
John Gill on Genesis 14:10
And the vale of Siddim was full of slimepits,.... Or "wells" or "fountains of slime" or bitumen (s); a liquid of a pitchy nature, cast out of fountains, and which was used for a cement in buildings; such fountains were near Babylon; see Gill on Genesis 11:3; so that this place was naturally prepared for what it was designed to be, a bituminous lake; and hence, when turned into one, it was called the lake Asphaltites, from this slime or bitumen, called by the Greeks "asphaltos". Brocardus (t) says, these pits or wells of bitumen are at this day on the shore of the lake, each of them having pyramids erect, which he saw with his own eyes; and such pits casting out bitumen, as fountains do water…
Amraphel — King of Shinar, southern Chaldea, one of the confederates of Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, in a war against Sodom and cities of the plain (Gen. 14:1, 4). It is now found that Amraphel (or Ammirapaltu)…
Lot — (Heb. goral, a “pebble”), a small stone used in casting lots (Num. 33:54; Jonah 1:7). The lot was always resorted to by the Hebrews with strictest reference to the interposition of God, and as a…
Pit — A hole in the ground (Ex. 21:33, 34), a cistern for water (Gen. 37:24; Jer. 14:3), a vault (41:9), a grave (Ps. 30:3). It is used as a figure for mischief (Ps. 9:15), and is the name given to the…
Pitch — (Gen. 6:14), asphalt or bitumen in its soft state, called “slime” (Gen. 11:3; 14:10; Ex. 2:3), found in pits near the Dead Sea (q.v.). It was used for various purposes, as the coating of the outside…
Siddim — (field, plain), The vale of, a place named only in one passage of Genesis— (Genesis 14:3,8,10) It was one of that class of valleys which the Hebrews designated by the word emek . This term appears to…
Siddim, Vale of — Valley of the broad plains, “which is the salt sea” (Gen. 14:3, 8, 10), between Engedi and the cities of the plain, at the south end of the Dead Sea. It was “full of slime-pits” (R.V., “bitumen…
Slime — (Gen. 11:3; LXX., “asphalt;” R.V. marg., “bitumen”). The vale of Siddim was full of slime pits (14:10). Jochebed daubed the “ark of bulrushes” with slime (Ex. 2:3). (See PITCH.)
Sodom — Burning; the walled, a city in the vale of Siddim (Gen. 13:10; 14:1-16). The wickedness of its inhabitants brought down upon it fire from heaven, by which it was destroyed (18:16-33; 19:1-29; Deut.…
Abraham · General references — General references
Birsha · A king of Gomorrah — A king of Gomorrah
Bitumen
on Genesis 14:10-11
And the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled. Some expound that they had fallen into pits: but this is not probable, since they were by no means ignorant of the neighboring places: such an event would rather have happened to foreign enemies. Others say, that they went down into them for the sake of preserving their lives. I, however, understand them to have exchanged one kind of death for another, as is common in the moment of desperation; as if Moses had said, the swords of the enemy were so formidable to them, that, without hesitation, they threw themselves headlong into the pits. For he immediately afterwards subjoins, that they who escaped fled to the mountains. Whence we infer, that they wh…
The war, which furnished Abram with an opportunity, while in the promised land of which as yet he could not really call a single rood his own, to prove himself a valiant warrior, and not only to smite the existing chiefs of the imperial power of Asia, but to bring back to the kings of Canaan the booty that had been carried off, is circumstantially described, not so much in the interests of secular history as on account of its significance in relation to the kingdom of God. It is of importance, however, as a simple historical fact, to see that in the statement in Gen 14:1, the king of Shinar occupies the first place, although the king of Edom, Chedorlaomer, not only took the lead in the exped…
The five cities of the plain were close together at the south end of the Dead Sea. The Mesopotamian kings defeated the frail uprising, looted the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and carried off Lot with the other captives.
Rashi on Genesis 14:10
בארת בארת חמר FULL OF BITUMEN PITS — There were many pits there from which they took earth as clay for building purposes. The Midrashic explanation is that the clay was closely kneaded together in them (was very sticky) so that it was only because a miracle was performed for the king of Sodom that he escaped from them. For amongst those nations there were some who did not believe that Abraham had been delivered from Ur-Kasdim — from the fiery furnace — but as soon as this one escaped from the slime they corrected their past disbelief regarding what had happened to Abraham (literally, they believed retrospectively in Abraham) (Genesis Rabbah 42:7).
הרה נסו means THEY FLED TO A MOUNTAIN. The…
Mountains · Afford refuge in time of danger — Afford refuge in time of danger
Siddim · Scene of the — Scene of the
Slime · The Valley of Siddim affor — The Valley of Siddim affor
Sodom · of Chedorlaomer — of Chedorlaomer
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
