in the Old Testament and only 12 times does it mean “to have intercourse with.” The intercourse, as a means to personal knowledge, depends on more than copulation. Therefore, the circumstances in Sodom could not fit the sexual connotation of the word “know.” By reasoning from the fact that Lot was a “gur” (Hebrew word), a resident foreigner. As such, Lot had exceeded his rights by receiving two foreigners whose credentials had not been examined.
The first problem is the fact that the meaning of a word in a given passage is not determined solely on the basis of the number of times it is translated that way in the Bible. The context determines how it is to be translated. Of the 12 times the word “yada” occurs in Genesis, 10 times it means “to have intercourse with.”
(a) Statistics are no substitute for contextual evidence (otherwise the rarer sense of the word would never seem probable), and in both these passages the demand to “know” is used in its sexual sense (Gen 19:8; Jdg 19:25). Even apart from this verbal conjunction it would be grotesquely inconsequent that Lot should reply to a demand for credentials by an offer of daughters.
(b) Psychology can suggest how to know acquired its secondary sense; but in fact the use of the word is completely flexible. No one suggests that in Judges 19:25 the men of Gibeah were gaining knowledge of their victim in the sense of personal relationship, yet know is the word used of them.
(c) Conjecture here has the marks of special pleading for it substitutes a trivial reason (“commotion . . . inhospitality”) for a serious one for the angels’ decision. Apart from this, it is silenced by Jude 7, a pronouncement which Dr. Bailey has to discount as belonging to a late stage of