Genesis 26

¹Famine came to the land again, a second one after the famine of Abraham’s time, and Isaac went to Gerar, to Abimelech king of the Philistines. ²There the LORD appeared to Isaac and said, “Do not go down to Egypt. Settle in whatever land I name to you. ³Stay on in this land as a resident foreigner, and I will be with you and bless you. It is to you and your descendants that I will give all these territories, and I will make good the oath I swore to your father Abraham. ⁴I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and give them all these lands, and through your descendants every nation on earth will find blessing,^{a 5}because Abraham did as I told him and guarded all I gave him to keep: my commands, my statutes and my teachings.” ⁶So Isaac settled in Gerar. ⁷When the local men asked about his wife, he answered, “She is my sister.” He was afraid to say she was his wife, thinking, “They might kill me here for Rebekah’s sake,” for she was a lovely woman. ⁸After Isaac had lived there for some time, Abimelech king of the Philistines happened to look down from a window, and there was Isaac, embracing his wife Rebekah. ⁹Abimelech sent for Isaac. “So she is your wife after all!” he said. “Why did you tell us she was your sister?” Isaac replied, “I was afraid someone would kill me for her.” ¹⁰“What a thing to do to us!” Abimelech said. “It would have taken very little for one of the people to sleep with your wife, and you would have made us all guilty.” ¹¹So Abimelech warned all his people, “Whoever touches this man or his wife must die.” ¹²Isaac sowed grain in that land, and that year it gave him a hundred times as much as he sowed. The LORD blessed him.^{b 13}So Isaac grew great. He went on growing greater and greater until he was a man of enormous wealth. ¹⁴He came to own flocks and herds and a large household of slaves, and the Philistines envied him. ¹⁵The Philistines had blocked every well that his father’s slaves dug in Abraham’s lifetime, filling them in with dirt. ¹⁶Then Abimelech told Isaac, “Go and live somewhere away from us; you have grown much stronger than we are.” ¹⁷So Isaac moved away and pitched his camp in the Gerar valley, and he settled there. ¹⁸Isaac dug out once more the water wells from his father Abraham’s day, which the Philistines had choked up after Abraham’s death, and he called them by the same names his father had used. ¹⁹Isaac’s slaves dug in the valley and struck a well of fresh, flowing water. ²⁰But the herdsmen of Gerar argued with Isaac’s herdsmen, insisting, “This water belongs to us.” So he named the well Esek, “Dispute”, because of the dispute they had raised with him. ²¹They dug a second well, and there was a quarrel over that one too, so he named it Sitnah, “Hostility”. ²²He moved on from there and dug yet another well, and this time no one quarreled over it. He named it Rehoboth, “Open Spaces”, saying, “Now at last the LORD has made space for us, and we will be fruitful in the land.” ²³From there he went up to Beersheba. ²⁴That night the LORD appeared to Isaac. “I am your father Abraham’s God,” he said. “You have nothing to fear, because I am with you. For the sake of Abraham my servant I will bless you and make your descendants many.” ²⁵Isaac built an altar there and called on the name of the LORD. He set up his tent there, and his slaves started digging a well. ²⁶Then Abimelech came out from Gerar to see him, together with his counselor Ahuzzath and Phicol, his army commander. ²⁷Isaac asked them, “Why have you come to me? You hated me and drove me away.” ²⁸They replied, “It is plain to us that the LORD has been with you. So we thought, ‘Let the two sides, we and you, be bound by an oath.’ We want to make a covenant with you, ²⁹that you will not harm us, since we did not touch you; we did you nothing but good and sent you off in peace. You are the one whom the LORD has blessed now.” ³⁰Isaac prepared a banquet for them, and they ate and drank. ³¹They were up early the next morning and bound themselves by oath to each other. Isaac then sent them on their way, and they parted from him in peace. ³²That same day Isaac’s slaves came to report on the well they had been digging. “We have struck water!” they told him. ³³He named it Shibah, “Oath”, and that is why the town is called Beersheba to this day.

³⁴At forty, Esau took two wives, both of them Hittites: Judith, daughter of Beeri, and Basemath, daughter of Elon.^{c 35}These wives made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah.