¹⁷ When they had brought them outside, they^[a] 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.”^{(A) 18} And Lot said to them, “Oh, no, my lords; ¹⁹ your 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. ²⁰ Look, 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!” ²¹ He said to him, “Very well, I grant you this favor too and will not overthrow the city of which you have spoken.^{(B) 22} Hurry, escape there, for I can do nothing until you arrive there.” Therefore the city was called Zoar.^{[b] 23} The sun had risen on the earth when Lot came to Zoar.

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

²⁷ Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord,^{(F) 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.^(G)

²⁹ So 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.^(H)

⁸ So we passed by our kin, the descendants of Esau who live in Seir, leaving behind the route of the Arabah and leaving behind Elath and Ezion-geber.

“When we had headed out along the route of the wilderness of Moab,^(A)

⁸ And the pig, because it divides the hoof but does not chew the cud, is unclean for you. You shall not eat their meat, and you shall not touch their carcasses.^(A)