The morning after. Lot has escaped. The cities are destroyed. Fire and brimstone fell from heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah (19:24). And Abraham — who was not there, who was in Mamre, who had stood before YHWH and pleaded for the righteous within Sodom — rises early and goes to the place where he had stood.
The phrase וַיַּשְׁכֵּם אַבְרָהָם בַּבֹּקֶר, “Abraham rose early in the morning,” marks three pivotal mornings in Genesis: here, after Sodom (19:27); the morning he sends Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness (21:14); and the morning he departs for the Akedah (22:3). Each early rising carries the weight of something irrevocable. You don’t sleep through these mornings.
He does not go to Sodom. He goes back to the place of intercession — the place where he had stood before YHWH in chapter 18, where he bargained from fifty down to ten. From that same place he now looks out. The verb is וַיַּשְׁקֵף (vayashkef), to gaze down from a height, to peer intently. Earlier in this same chapter, Lot’s wife looked back (וַתַּבֵּט) and became a pillar of salt. Abraham looks out, not back — from where he has always stood, toward what is now smoke.
What he sees: קִיטֹר הָאָרֶץ כְּקִיטֹר הַכִּבְשָׁן — “the smoke of the land, like the smoke of a furnace.” The word כִּבְשָׁן, furnace or kiln, appeared once before in Genesis: in 15:17, when a smoking furnace (תַּנּוּר עָשָׁן) passed between the halved animals at the covenant between the pieces. The fire that sealed Abraham’s covenant is now the fire of Sodom’s end. The text does not explain the echo. It places it.
