The plain verse in (Genesis 14:10) is a grim military note: the vale of Siddim was full of tar pits, and the fleeing kings of Sodom and Amorah fell into them. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the scene without embellishment and the plainness itself is the rebuke.
The kings whose names were moral verdicts — evil, wicked, father-hating, corrupt (Genesis 14:2) — run from the battlefield and find no safe ground. The same land whose streams emptied into the sea of salt (Genesis 14:3) now opens beneath them in pits of bitumen. The geography of Sodom is implacable. Every direction is a trap.
And the Aramaic lets the sentence land: the kings of Sedom and Amora fled away, and fell there. Some rabbinic traditions read this to mean the king of Sodom himself survived — to reappear later in the chapter — while his fighters perished in the pits. Others read the whole royal household as drowned in tar. The Targum keeps the ambiguity. It is the pits that matter, not the biography.
This is the Hebrew Bible's way of showing you that wickedness is not just punished from above. It is often punished from below. The land itself refuses to carry a fleeing tyrant. The same tar that will later be used to seal Moses' basket (Exodus 2:3) here becomes the grave of corrupt kings. Bitumen is morally neutral. What swallows or saves depends on the character of the one who steps in it.
The rest of the army flees to the mountains. Lot is taken captive among them (Genesis 14:12). The story is now positioned for the intervention no one expects: an old man in Hebron is about to hear that his nephew has been captured, and the war of the five and the four is about to become the proving ground of the covenant.