The bargain continues. Abraham has offered fifty — ten righteous in each of the five plain-cities. Now, in Genesis 18:28, he tries a different tactic.
"Perhaps of the fifty innocent persons, five may be wanting," he says. "On account of the five who may be wanting to Zoar, wilt Thou destroy the whole city?"
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan makes Abraham's move surgically precise. He is not just asking for a blanket discount. He is naming a specific city — Zoar, the smallest — and arguing that if Zoar happens to be short by five righteous, the other four cities should still not be destroyed on its account. He is pleading for the guilty city to be carried by the merit of the innocent cities around it.
And God agrees. "I will not destroy it, if I find there forty and five."
What the Targum is teaching in miniature is a principle that the rabbis called zekhut ha-rabbim — the merit of the many. A scarcity of righteousness in one place can sometimes be covered by abundance elsewhere, the way a poor neighborhood might be carried by the tax base of its wealthier neighbor. Communities rise and fall together.
The takeaway: sometimes the righteous person you will never meet, three towns over, is the reason your town is still standing.