Genesis 18:22 contains one of the most famous scribal corrections in the Hebrew Bible. Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Bereshit 4:6 brings it out into the open.
R. Simon read the verse aloud: "And the men turned from there and went to Sodom, but Abraham was still standing before the Lord." Then he asked the question that scribes had been avoiding for generations. "Should it not rather have said, 'And God was still standing before Abraham'?"
The tiqqun soferim tradition
The rabbis preserved a list of places in the Torah where scribes made small adjustments — not corruptions, but reverential softenings. The technical term is tiqqun soferim, "a scribal emendation," and there are eighteen of them traditionally catalogued. The idea is that the original text implied something so startling about God that the scribes reworded it to avoid the appearance of irreverence.
Genesis 18:22 is one of those places. The original reading, the rabbis believed, said that God was standing before Abraham — waiting while the patriarch prepared to argue about Sodom. That sounded too much like God deferring to a human, so the scribes flipped the subject and object. Now Abraham stands before God, which is the safer phrasing.
What the original meant
Imagine the scene R. Simon is recovering. Three visitors had arrived at Abraham's tent. Two of them — the angels — set off toward Sodom to investigate its wickedness. The third — the Holy One — remained behind. And the original text said the Holy One was standing there, waiting on Abraham. Waiting for the old man to find the courage to say what was on his heart.
What came next was the great haggling over Sodom (Genesis 18:23-33). Abraham bargained God down from fifty righteous men to ten. Would the Holy One really have stood patiently while a human negotiated the fate of a city? The scribal tradition said yes — but softened the wording so the theological scandal did not leap off the page.
Why preserve the note at all?
The midrash could have left the emendation silent. Instead, R. Simon exposes it, citing the same Psalm 18:36 refrain that runs through Bereshit 4: "Your humility has magnified me." The scribes hid God's humility. The rabbis recovered it. Because the whole point of the story is that the Holy One is humble enough to stand waiting for Abraham.
The takeaway: the Jewish tradition sometimes covers its own most audacious claims out of reverence, and then uncovers them again out of a deeper reverence. God stood waiting for a ninety-nine-year-old man to speak. That is the real theology, and the scribal pen only proves it.