There is a quiet line in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 18:17 that changes how you read the whole Sodom episode. God speaks, as the Targum puts it, bememra — with His Word — and says: "I cannot hide from Abraham what I am about to do. It is right that before I act, I should make it known to him."
Think about the claim. The Creator of heaven and earth is saying, in effect, that a human being has earned the right to be consulted before a divine judgment is executed. Not because God needs permission. Because Abraham's relationship with Him has become the kind of covenant in which secrets are unfitting.
The rabbis who shaped the Aramaic expansions of the Targum — composed over centuries and finalized sometime between the 4th and 8th centuries CE — were careful to use the phrase "the Word of the Lord" (Memra) as a way of speaking about God's active presence without flattening His transcendence. The Memra talks. The Memra decides. And here the Memra decides that friendship with Abraham obligates disclosure.
This is the seed of everything Abraham will do next in the chapter: the bargaining, the pleading, the refusal to let fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, or ten righteous people die with the guilty. God disclosed the plan precisely because Abraham was the kind of partner who would argue.
The takeaway: true covenant is not silent obedience. It is the relationship in which even the Judge of all the earth will not move without telling you first.