When Abraham begins his famous bargain in Genesis 18:24, the Hebrew simply says "perhaps there are fifty righteous within the city." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan turns this into a detailed audit.
"Perhaps there are fifty innocent persons within the city, who pray before Thee — ten for every city, of all the five cities of Sedom, Amorah, Admah, Zeboim, and Zoar."
Abraham is not asking in round numbers. He is doing civic arithmetic. Five cities lie in the plain. He proposes ten righteous per city — the exact minyan that, in later Jewish law, constitutes a praying community capable of calling down the Divine Presence.
Then Abraham sharpens the moral claim to a knife-edge: "Unholy would it be before Thee to do according to this word, to slay the innocent with the guilty, and to make the innocent to be as the guilty!"
The word the Targum uses for "unholy" is staggering. A human being is telling God that a certain action would be beneath Him. And God does not strike Abraham down. He listens. He negotiates. He agrees to each successive reduction.
This is the Jewish model of prayer in its purest form — not flattery, not grovelling, but an argument grounded in God's own character. You can bargain with Heaven, the Targum insists, but only if your bargain rests on justice.
The takeaway: ten praying people can save a city. That is not metaphor. That is the arithmetic of the covenant.