Isaac Dug Wells the Herdsmen of Gerar Kept Taking

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His Father's Wells Were Full of Dirt

Isaac stood over a hole that had been a well when he was a boy. Somebody had filled it in. Not collapsed, not silted over. Filled, on purpose, with earth carried and tipped down the shaft until the water was under a plug of dry ground.

Every one of them was like that. His father's men had opened those wells a generation earlier and the Philistines had gone along the line after Abraham died and stopped them all.

There had been a famine, and Isaac had come to Gerar to wait it out, and God had told him not to go down to Egypt. So he stayed and sowed a crop in a hungry year and took a hundredfold out of it. He grew, and kept growing, until he had flocks and herds and a household big enough to make the men of Gerar count it. Then Abimelech sent for him.

"Go away from us. You have become far too strong for us."

The Herdsmen Said the Water Was Theirs

He pitched his tent down in the valley of Gerar and put his men to work reopening his father's wells, and as each one came clear he gave it back the name Abraham had called it. He did not invent new ones.

Then his servants cut a fresh shaft in the valley floor and hit living water, the kind that moves and keeps coming, and the herdsmen of Gerar were standing at the rim before the mud was off the ropes.

"The water is ours."

He could have counted his men and theirs and settled it in an afternoon. Instead he named the well Esek, which is what you call a thing men quarrel over, and moved his tents.

They dug again. The same herdsmen came, and this time it was worse, and he named that one Sitnah, which is the word for a grudge, and moved again.

The Third Well Nobody Came For

He dug a third time. The ropes went down, the water came up, and the day passed, and nobody walked over the rise to claim it. Then another day passed the same way.

He called that well Rehoboth. "Now the LORD has made room for us," he said, "and we will bear fruit in the land."

Two wells behind him with other men's animals drinking out of them. One under his own hand, and no argument.

A Voice at Beersheba the First Night

From there he went up to Beersheba, and God came to him that same night, before the tent pegs were properly in.

"I am the God of your father Abraham. Do not be afraid. I am with you, and I will bless you and make your offspring many, for the sake of Abraham My servant."

Isaac built an altar there in the morning and called on the name of the LORD. He set up the tent. Then he sent his men out with the ropes and the baskets, and they started another shaft in the ground at Beersheba, because that is what the man did wherever he stopped.

The King Came to Swear an Oath

Abimelech rode out from Gerar to find him, and brought Ahuzzath his adviser and Phicol the commander of his army.

Isaac watched the three of them get down off their animals and did not pretend to be glad. "Why have you come to me? You hate me. You sent me away from your country."

"We have seen plainly that the LORD is with you," they said. "Let there be an oath between us. Swear you will do us no harm, the way we did not lay a hand on you and sent you off in peace."

He made them a feast. They ate and drank, and got up early, and swore to one another there in the morning, and Isaac walked them out and they went home in peace.

That same day his servants came in from the field wet to the elbows and told him about the shaft they had been sinking.

"We have found water."

He called that well Shivah, for the oath sworn over it. The town that grew there is called Beersheba to this day, and men still lower buckets into a hole a man dug on the morning he made peace with the king who had thrown him out.