Start here · day 5 of 14 · One family is called
צֶדֶק
Arguing with God
Genesis 18
First, read it
Genesis 18
Read it before the notes below. They are worth more once you have your own impression of it.
Open Genesis 18Then, the idea
God tells Abraham that Sodom is about to be destroyed. Abraham does not accept it. He starts to bargain: what if there are fifty righteous people there? Forty five? Thirty? Twenty? Ten?
And in the middle of it he says the line that gives every later reader permission: shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?
That is a challenge to God's justice, said to God's face, by the man the whole story is built around. The text does not treat it as rebellion. It treats it as exactly what a decent person does.
One word of Hebrew
צֶדֶק
tzedek — justice, rightness
The related word tzedakah means charity — but in Hebrew, giving to someone in need is filed under justice, not kindness. It is owed, not donated.
And one question
If you were allowed to argue with God about one thing, without it counting against you, what would it be?
Nobody is marking this. Sit with it on the way to work.