פירוש על בראשית 14:21

תן לי הנפש GIVE ME THE PERSONS — Of that which was captured of mine and which you have rescued give me back the people only.

תן לי הנפש והרכוש קח לך. "Give me the persons and take the loot for yourself." We need to understand what was the point of the king of Sodom's offer for Abraham to "take" the loot, seeing that Abraham had possession of it. He himself had captured it, including all the people who had been kept prisoner. How could the king say on the one hand: "give me the persons," and "take yourself the loot," when Abraham possessed both at the time? What did the king offer? Was he not in fact merely asking for something instead of offering something? Why did he make it seem like a trade off?

Give me the people. Initially the King of Sedom thought that Avraham would return everything to him, since his only intention was to save Lot. But when Avram gave a tithe to Malki Zedek he realized that he considered it all the spoils of the four kings.

Perhaps we can best understand all this in light of what the Talmud teaches in Baba Kama 116. A caravan of travellers is attacked by robbers. One of the travellers succeeds in saving the belongings of all the travellers; he is considered as having done so on behalf of all the travellers; each one picks up his original belongings. If the person who undertook the risk of saving all these belongings had declared that he risked his life only in order that the spoils should be his in the event that he would succeed, then he may keep all the chattels he has saved. Rav Ashi elaborates that this is so when the other travellers could have saved their chattels had they only tried hard enough. Rashi explains there that if none of the other travellers offered any comment when the one who set out to recover the goods announced that he would do so but on his own account, they are all considered as having renounced their hope of recovering their belongings. As a result they cannot reclaim their belongings. The king of Sodom did not consider himself as having abandoned hope of escaping his situation. He argued that had it not been for Abraham's intervention, he could have recovered his belongings himself.

As a result, the fact that Abraham had not intervened with the intention of sharing the spoils with the prisoners had no legal basis. After all, the king of Sodom had not overheard Abraham's declaration that he acted on his own behalf. How could he therefore be accused of having remained silent at the crucial moment? This is why he claimed that the spoils should be shared between Abraham and himself. Evidently, the king thought very highly of himself and his abilities. This is why the Torah describes him as: ויצא מלך סדום, "the king of Sodom came forth," he gave himself airs. According to the Midrash he compared his own experience when he fell into the clay pits (14,10) and was saved, with Abraham's having been saved from the furnace of Nimrod. The fact was, of course, that the situation of the king of Sodom who had already fought and lost, was entirely diferent from the situation described in the Talmud by Rav Ashi. When Rav Ashi said that the person rescuing the caravan's property has to declare beforehand that he does so on the understanding that if successful the property will be his, this is only in a situation where the other travellers are able to assist. Since the king of Sodom had certainly not been in a position to assist Abraham, his claim was totally spurious. Rambam and Rosh both rule like this.

When Abraham gave the balance of the loot to the king of Sodom after first having tithed it, this was a generous gesture; it did not imply that Abraham accepted any part of the king's argument.