“And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant’s house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on your ways. And they said, Nay; but we will abide in the street all night.”
Lot urges the visitors to come to his house for the night, offering to wash their feet and leave in the morning. The visitors initially decline, saying they will spend the night in the square. The offer to spend the night in the square is either a test of Lot's hospitality or a genuine preference — either way, the city square at night in Sodom is a place of danger that the visitors know about and that Lot knows about too. His urging — the Hebrew implies strong insistence — reflects a man who understands that his city's streets are unsafe after dark. The application: when the environment you live in makes it dangerous for strangers to move through it without a protector, you have lived too long in that environment. Lot has normalized a level of urban danger that Abraham's household, in the open land of Mamre, would not have recognized.
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