Why Isaac Could Not Leave the Holy Land

The famine came. Isaac looked toward Egypt the way his father had looked toward it a generation before, as the obvious solution, the well-fed kingdom to the south where the Nile never failed. But God appeared to him and said: do not go down to Egypt.

The reason God gave was startling. You are a perfect sacrifice, without blemish. As a burnt offering becomes invalid if it is taken outside the sanctuary, you would be profaned if you left the Holy Land. Isaac was told, in effect, that his entire life had made him too sacred to export.

This is the framing given by the Legends of the Jews, drawing on the rich tradition of midrashic commentary that surrounds the brief Genesis narrative of Isaac's time in Gerar. The Philistines had already stopped every well that Abraham's servants had dug. After Abraham's death, they filled them with earth. The Book of Jubilees, composed in Hebrew in the second century BCE, records the bare fact: the Philistines envied him, and Abimelech sent him away, and Isaac departed in the first year of the seventh week and sojourned in the valleys of Gerar. He dug the wells again. He called them by the same names his father had given them. It was an act of filial respect so complete that God, as a reward, left Isaac's own name unchanged, while both his father and his son received new names at critical moments in their lives.

In Gerar, Isaac noticed that the inhabitants were developing designs on Rebekah. He followed his father's precedent and introduced her as his sister. It worked for a while. After three months, Abimelech, who had survived a similar embarrassment with Abraham and Sarah, observed the way Isaac acted toward Rebekah and called him to account. He arranged for their public recognition as husband and wife, had it proclaimed before them as they rode through the city in royal vestments, and assigned them fields and vineyards for cultivation, the best the land afforded.

Isaac gave a tenth of everything he received to the poor of Gerar. He was, the tradition says, the first to introduce the tithe for the poor, as Abraham had been the first to separate the priests' portion. His harvests were extraordinary, the land yielding a hundred times what was expected in a barren year. His wealth became so great that people said they would rather have the dung from Isaac's she-mules than Abimelech's gold and silver. This is the kind of detail the tradition preserves with perfect economy: it tells you everything about the scale of envy without needing to describe it further.

The Philistines stopped his wells. He moved. He dug four times before finding water. On the fourth attempt he found the well that had followed the patriarchs through the wilderness, the same well Abraham had obtained after three diggings. Beer-sheba, seven wells, is how the name is explained here: seven diggings total for the two patriarchs combined. The tradition adds: this is the same well that will supply water to Jerusalem and its environs in the Messianic time.

Abimelech came to make peace and Isaac received him coolly. He pointed out that the Philistines had driven him away and then filled his father's wells, and now they wanted a covenant. The Philistines took credit for never having harmed him, which shows, the text notes dryly, that they had in fact wanted to harm him and were simply blocked. They swore an oath at a place called Shib'ah, which means both sworn and seven, to commemorate that even the nations of the earth are bound by the seven Noachian laws that God gave to all humanity.

But all of Isaac's blessings in the present, the tradition is careful to say, were earned by the merits of his father. His own reward is deferred to the future. On the great day of judgment, when God comes to Abraham and says your children have sinned and Abraham answers let them be wiped out for the sanctification of your Name, and God turns to Jacob and receives the same answer, it will be Isaac who intercedes. Isaac will say: are they my children or yours? You called them your firstborn at Sinai. He will calculate the years of a human life, subtract those under twenty from accountability, subtract the nights of sleep, subtract the hours of prayer and eating and ordinary need, and arrive at twelve years and a half of actual culpable time. He will offer to split that with God. The descendants of Isaac will say: you are our true father. And he will point upward and say: no. Give your praise to God alone.

That future act of intercession is the reward for the present life of service. Isaac could not leave the land. He could not be profaned by the ordinary world. He had been consecrated by the knife at Moriah, and the consecration held.