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Updated: June 16, 2025
The wells of the desert go back to a great antiquity: where water is scarce its discovery is not easily forgotten, and the Beduin come with their flocks year after year to drink of it. The old wells are constantly renewed, or new ones dug by their side. Gerar was in that south-western corner of Palestine which in the age of the Exodus was inhabited by the Philistines. But they had been new-comers.
I spake to Abraham, 'Unto thee will I give the land, but when he was about to bury Sarah, he had to pay out silver and buy a resting-place for her body; and yet he did not find fault with Me. I spake to Isaac, 'Unto thee, and unto thy seed, I will give all these lands, but when he desired water to drink, he had to strive with the herdsmen of Gerar; and yet he did not find fault with Me.
Isaac was not a wanderer like his father. Lahai-roi in the desert, "the valley of Gerar," Beer-sheba and Hebron, were the places round which his life revolved, and they were all close to one another. Isaac died eventually at Hebron, and was buried in the family tomb of Machpelah. But long before this happened Jacob had fled from the well-deserved wrath of his brother to his uncle Laban at Harran.
Now, it happened when David, on his flight before Saul, came to Achish, the king of the Philistines, who lived in Gath, that the brothers of Goliath formed the heathen king's body-guard, and they demanded that their brother's murderer be executed. Achish, though a heathen, was pious, for which reason he is called Abimelech in the Psalms, after the king of Gerar, who also was noted for piety.
Then Abimelech went to him from Gerar, and Ahuzzath one of his friends, and Phichol the chief captain of his army. And Isaac said unto them, Wherefore come ye to me, seeing ye hate me, and have sent me away from you? And they said, We saw certainly that the LORD was with thee: and we said, Let there be now an oath betwixt us, even betwixt us and thee, and let us make a covenant with thee;
Thus they broke their covenant with Abraham and were faithless, and they have only themselves to blame if they were exterminated later on by the Israelites. Isaac departed from Gerar, and began to dig again the wells of water which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father, and which the Philistines had stopped.
To the north of the hill on which the castle stands there are several wells, which, it is said, were dug by the patriarch Isaac, and became the cause of contention between his herdsmen and those of Gerar; but, says Pococke, they have much mistaken the place, the Valley of Gerar being at a great distance on the other side of Jerusalem.
"Surely thou knowest that Abraham their father acted thus, who made the armies of Nimrod king of Babel and of Abimelech king of Gerar to stumble, and he possessed himself of the land of the children of Heth and the whole realm of Canaan. Their father Abraham went down into Egypt, and said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister, in order to make Egypt and its king to stumble.
But Abraham was so little ashamed of himself that he did the same thing again, many years afterwards, and Abimelech King of Gerar, behaved to him as nobly as did King Pharaoh on the former occasion. The story of Lot is too disgusting to repeat. But what are we to think of his offering his daughters to the mob, and of his subsequent conduct?
Abraham, in his wanderings, found the God of his fathers known and honored in Salem, in Gerar, and in Memphis; while at a later day Jethro, in Midian, and Balaam, in Mesopotamia, were witnesses that the knowledge of Jehovah was not yet extinct in those countries."
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