The door is about to break. The mob is surging forward. And then Genesis 19:11, in the Targum's rendering, becomes the moment the heavens intervene directly.
"But the men who were at the gate of the house they struck with a suffusion of the eyes, from the young to the old, and they wearied themselves to find the gate."
The Aramaic word for "suffusion of the eyes" — sanwerin — became a technical term in rabbinic literature for a kind of bewildered blindness. It is not the loss of eyesight exactly. It is the loss of the ability to locate what you are looking for. The Sodomites could still see. They simply could no longer see the one thing they wanted — the door.
This is a characteristically precise divine punishment. The mob had come to violate a specific threshold. Heaven's response was to remove the threshold from their perception. They stood in front of the very thing they were hunting, and they could not find it.
The same Aramaic word sanwerin appears again in 2 Kings 6:18, where the prophet Elisha strikes an Aramean army with the same kind of dazzled blindness and leads them harmlessly into Samaria. The rabbis loved the parallel: the enemies of the righteous are rarely destroyed by force; they are usually just made unable to see what they want.
"From the young to the old" — the same phrase Targum Pseudo-Jonathan used in Genesis 19:4 to describe the mob — now describes the punishment. Every age group came; every age group is struck. Measure for measure.
The takeaway: sometimes Heaven does not remove the evildoer from the world. It simply removes the door.