1And there was a famine in the land besides the former famine that was in the days of Abraham, and Isaac went to Abimelech king of the Philistines in Gerar. 2And the LORD appeared unto him and said, “Do not go down to Egypt. Stay in the land that I shall say to you. 3Sojourn in this land so that I may be with you and bless you, for to you and your seed I will give all these lands and I will fulfill the oath that I swore to Abraham your father, 4and I will multiply your seed like the stars in the heavens and I will give to your seed all these lands, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed through your seed 5because Abraham has listened to my voice and has kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My teachings.”
6And Isaac dwelled in Gerar. 7And the men of the place asked of his wife and he said, “She is my sister,” fearing to say, “My wife”—“lest the men of the place kill me over Rebekah, for she is comely to look at.” 8And it happened, as his time there drew on, that Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out the window and saw—and there was Isaac playing with Rebekah his wife. 9And Abimelech summoned Isaac and he said, “Why, look, she is your wife, and how could you say, ‘She is my sister’?” And Isaac said to him, “For I thought, lest I die over her.” 10And Abimelech said, “What is this you have done to us? One of the people might well have lain with your wife and you would have brought guilt upon us.” 11And Abimelech commanded all the people saying, “Whosoever touches this man or his wife is doomed to die.” 12And Isaac sowed in that land and he reaped that year a hundredfold, and the LORD blessed him. 13And the man became ever greater until he was very great. 14And he had possessions of flocks and of herds and many slaves, and the Philistines envied him. 15And all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines blocked up, filling them with earth. 16And Abimelech said to Isaac, “Go away from us, for you have grown far too powerful for us.” 17And Isaac went off from there and encamped in the Wadi of Gerar, and he dwelled there. 18And Isaac dug anew the wells of water that had been dug in the days of Abraham his father, which the Philistines had blocked up after Abraham’s death, and he gave them names, like the names his father had called them. 19And Isaac’s servants dug in the wadi and they found there a well of fresh water. 20And the shepherds of Gerar quarreled with Isaac’s shepherds, saying, “The water is ours.” And he called the name of the well Esek, for they had contended with him. 21And they dug another well and they quarreled over it, too, and he called its name Sitnah. 22And he pulled up stakes from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it, and he called its name Rehoboth, and he said, “For now the LORD has given us space that we may be fruitful in the land.”
23And he went up from there to Beersheba. 24And the LORD appeared unto him on that night and said, “I am the God of Abraham your father. Fear not, for I am with you, and I will bless you and I will multiply your seed for the sake of Abraham My servant.” 25And he built an altar there and he invoked the name of the LORD, and he pitched his tent there, and Isaac’s servants began digging a well there. 26And Abimelech came to him from Gerar, with Ahuzzath his councillor and Phicol captain of his troops. 27And Isaac said to them, “Why have you come to me when you have been hostile toward me and have sent me away from you?” 28And they said, “We have clearly seen that the LORD is with you, and we thought—Let there be an oath between our two sides, between you and us, and let us seal a pact with you, 29that you will do no harm to us, just as we have not touched you, and just as we have done toward you only good, sending you away in peace. Be you hence blessed of the LORD!” 30And he made them a feast and they ate and drank. 31And they rose early in the morning and swore to each other, and Isaac sent them away, and they went from him in peace. 32And it happened on that day that Isaac’s servants came and told him of the well they had dug and they said to him, “We have found water.” 33And he called it Shibah, therefore the name of the town is Beersheba to this day.
34And Esau was forty years old and he took as wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite and Basemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite. 35And they were a provocation to Isaac and to Rebekah.
CHAPTER 26 NOTES
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This chapter is the only one in which Isaac figures as an active protagonist. Before, he was a bound victim; after, he will be seen as a bamboozled blind old man. His only other initiated act is his brief moment as intercessor on behalf of his wife in 25:21. Textual critics disagree about whether this chapter is a “mosaic” of Isaac traditions or an integral literary unit, and about whether it is early or late. What is clear is that the architectonics of the larger story require a buffer of material on Isaac between Jacob’s purchase of the birthright and his stealing of the blessing—a buffer that focuses attention on Isaac’s right to the land and on his success in flourishing in the land. All of the actions reported here, however, merely delineate him as a typological heir to Abraham. Like Abraham he goes through the sister-wife experience, is vouchsafed a covenantal promise by God, prospers in flock and field, and is involved in a quarrel over wells. He remains the pale and schematic patriarch among the three forefathers, preceded by the exemplary founder, followed by the vivid struggler.
1. besides the former famine. The writer (some would say, the editor) signals at the outset that this story comes after, and explicitly reenacts, what happened before to Abraham.
king of the Philistines. In this version, the anachronistic identification of Gerar as a Philistine city, not strictly intrinsic to the Abimelech story in chapter 20, is insisted on. There is no obvious literary purpose for this difference; one suspects it simply reflects the historical context in which this version was formulated, in which the western Negeb would have been naturally thought of as Philistine country.
2. Do not go down to Egypt. That is, emulate the pattern of Abraham’s second sister-wife episode, not the first. Following a coastal route, Isaac could well have used Gerar as a way station to Egypt, and Abraham’s pact with Abimelech (chapter 21) would have provided some assurance that the Gerarites would grant him safe transit.
4. all these lands. “lands” occurs in the plural in this version of the promise because Isaac is in the land of the Philistines.
7. the men of the place. The sexual threat against the matriarch is displaced in this final version from the monarch to the local male populace. The likely reference of “one of the people” in verse 10 is what it seems to say, any male Gerarite, despite an exegetical tradition (influenced by the earlier Abimelech story) that construes it as an epithet for the king.
she is comely to look at. Isaac’s interior monologue uses the identical epithet invoked by the narrator in introducing Rebekah in chapter 24.
8. as his time there drew on. Rashi, with his characteristic acuteness of response to nuances of phrasing, construes this as a suggestion that Isaac became complacent with the passage of time (“From now on I don’t have to worry since they haven’t raped her so far”) and so allowed himself to be publicly demonstrative with Rebekah.
looked out the window. This is the most naturalistic of the three versions of the story. The matriarch’s marital status is conveyed not by divine plagues, nor by a dream-vision from God, but by ocular evidence.
playing. The meaning of the verb here is clearly sexual, implying either fondling or actual sexual “play.” It immediately follows the name “Isaac,” in which the same verbal root is transparently inscribed. Thus Isaac-the-laugher’s birth is preceded by the incredulous laughter of each of his parents; Sarah laughs after his birth; Ishmael laughs-mocks at the child Isaac; and now Isaac laughs-plays with the wife he loves. Perhaps there is some suggestion that the generally passive Isaac is a man of strong physical appetites: he loves Esau because of his own fondness for venison; here he rather recklessly disports himself in public with the woman he has proclaimed to be his sister.
10. One of the people might well have lain with your wife. Though Abimelech’s words approximately mirror those of the indignant king in chapter 20, this version is pointedly devised to put the woman first announced as Isaac’s beautiful, strictly virgin bride in less danger than Sarah was in chapters 12 and 20: Rebekah is never taken into the harem; it is merely a supposition that one of the local men might seize her for sexual exploitation.
12. And Isaac sowed. In keeping with the emphasis of this version on human action, the bounty that comes to the patriarch after the deflection of the sexual danger to his wife is not a gift from the monarch but the fruit of his own industry as agriculturalist and pastoralist. There is a continuity between his sojourning in the western Negeb near Gerar and his movement somewhat to the east, to Beersheba, where his father had long encamped. All this creates a direct connection between the sister-wife episode and the theme of Isaac inheriting and growing prosperous in the land.
14. and the Philistines envied him. The jealousy over Isaac’s spectacular prosperity and the contention over precious water resources that follows lay the ground for the story of the two brothers struggling over the blessing of land and inheritance in the next episode. Isaac’s being “sent away” by the Philistines adumbrates Jacob’s banishment to the east after having procured the blessing by stealth.
17. wadi. The Arabic term, current in modern English and Hebrew usage, designates, as does the biblical naḥal, a dry riverbed that would be filled with water only during the flash floods of the rainy season. But the floor of a wadi might conceal, as here, an underground source of water.
20. Esek. Roughly, “contention,” as in the verb that follows in the etiological explanation of the name.
21. Sitnah. The transparent meaning is “accusation” or “hostility,” though the sentence lacks an etiological clause.
22. another well. The struggle over wells, which replays an episode in the Abraham stories but is given more elaborate emphasis, works nicely as part of the preparation for the next round of the Jacob–Esau conflict: a water source is not easily divisible; the spiteful act of the Philistines in blocking up the wells expresses a feeling that if we can’t have the water, nobody should; at the end, Isaac’s workers discover a new, undisputed well and call it Rehoboth, which means “open spaces.” We are being prepared for the story in which only one of the two brothers can get the real blessing, in which there will be bitter jealousy and resentment; and which in the long run will end with room enough for the two brothers to live peaceably in the same land.
27. sent me away from you. It is a mistake to render the verb, as several modern translations do, as “drive away.” The verb Isaac chooses is a neutral one, even though the context of the sentence strongly indicates hostile intention. Abimelech in his response (verse 29) uses exactly the same word, adding the qualifier “in peace” in order to put a different face on the action: this was no banishment, we sent you off as a reasonable act of goodwill. The narrator then uses the same verb and qualifier—which might conceivably be a formula for parting after the completion of a treaty—in verse 31, “and Isaac sent them away, and they went from him in peace.” (Compare David and Abner in 2 Samuel 3.)
33. Shibah. Though the word in this form means “seven,” the etymology of the name intimated by the narrative context obviously relates it to shevuʿah, “oath,” whereas the earlier story about Beersheba (chapter 21) appears to link the name with both “seven” and “oath.”
34. And Esau . . . took as wife. This brief notice about Esau’s exogamous unions obviously is distinct from the preceding stories about Isaac. It is probably placed here to remind us of his unworthiness to be the true heir (thus forming a kind of envelope structure with the spurning of the birthright in the last verse of chapter 25), and in this way serves to offer some sort of justification in advance for Jacob’s stealing the blessing in the next episode. It also lays the ground for the end of the next episode in which Rebekah will invoke the need for Jacob to find a wife from his own kin as an excuse for his hasty departure for Mesopotamia.
35. provocation. Some commentators construe the first component of the compound noun morat-ruaḥ as a derivative of the root m-r-r, “bitter”—hence the term “bitterness” favored by many translations. But the morphology of the word points to a more likely derivation from m-r-h, “to rebel” or “to defy,” and thus an equivalent such as “provocation” is more precise.