What Does Genesis 19:24 Mean?

Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the Lord out of the heavens. The judgment falls with a specific form: burning sulfur (Hebrew: gophrith ve-esh, sulfur and fire, often translated "fire and brimstone") raining from the Lord out of the heavens. The natural-disaster language of the description, sulfur and fire raining from the sky could describe a volcanic or meteoric event, is combined with the explicit theological statement that the Lord was the source. The "from the Lord out of the heavens" is the narrator's insistence that whatever secondary causes may have been involved, the theological agent was God.

The raining of burning sulfur from the heavens is the inverse of the raining of water from the heavens in the flood narrative. Noah's flood brought water from above to cover the earth; Sodom's destruction brings fire from above to consume the cities. The two great post-creation judgments in Genesis come in opposite elemental forms: water and fire. The New Testament picks up this pairing explicitly in 2 Peter 3, where the world that perished by water contrasts with the world that "is reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment." The burning sulfur of Genesis 19 is the first instance of the divine fire judgment that the prophets and apostles consistently reference as the paradigm for final judgment.

The double source formula, "from the Lord out of the heavens," redundantly repeating the divine agency, is the text's insistence that this is specifically a natural disaster in the usual sense. Whatever geological processes may have been involved in the destruction of the cities of the plain, the theological account is that the Judge of all the earth who told Abraham He was going to investigate and act has now acted. Jesus's invocation of Sodom as the reference point of judgment (Luke 17:29, Matthew 10:15) treats the event as precisely what Genesis 19 describes it as: a specific divine judgment on specific cities whose specific wickedness had generated a specific outcry to God.