Biblion Bible Commentary
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Digging his father's wells again
Genesis 26:12-25
12 Isaac sowed in that land, and reaped in the same year one hundred times what he planted. Yahweh blessed him. · WEB
Isaac prospers, is envied, and gives way three times over water — and at the end God tells him not to be afraid.
Isaac sowed in that land, and reaped in the same year one hundred times what he planted. Yahweh blessed him. A hundredfold in a famine year, from a man farming land he does not own, and the writer names the cause in three words.
The growth is described with a stack of verbs — he grew great, and grew more and more until he became very great — and then the consequence: The Philistines envied him. Prosperity in a foreign country attracts resentment, and the resentment takes a specific form.
They stop the wells. All the wells which his father's servants had dug in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines had stopped, and filled with earth. It is an act of pure spite; a filled well benefits nobody, and in that country water is the difference between a herd living and dying. Someone went to considerable trouble to destroy something they could not use.
Abimelech's request is honest about the reason: Go away from us, for you are much mightier than we. He is being asked to leave for succeeding.
What Isaac does is the substance of the passage, and it is the least dramatic conduct in Genesis. He moves. He digs his father's wells again — and called their names after the names by which his father had called them, restoring the old names rather than claiming the work as his own.
Then a new well, and the herdsmen of Gerar claim it. He names it Contention and moves on. Another well, and they argue over that too. He names it Enmity and moves on. A third, and nobody quarrels over it: He called it Rehoboth. He said, "For now Yahweh has made room for us, and we will be fruitful in the land."
Three wells given up without a fight by a man the local king has just described as mightier than his own people. Isaac could have contested any of them and probably won. The names he leaves behind record the quarrels honestly — he does not pretend they did not happen — and each time he withdraws further into worse country.
It is the least assertive claim to a promised land imaginable, and the narrative does not present it as weakness. The man who yields three wells ends up with room, and says so by naming the fourth for the space God made.
He goes up to Beersheba, and God appears the same night. The word he receives has three parts: I am the God of Abraham your father. Don't be afraid, for I am with you, and will bless you, and multiply your offspring for my servant Abraham's sake.
The don't be afraid is the interesting part, because nothing in the chapter has said Isaac was afraid. He has been pushed off land three times, evicted by a king, and is camping at the southern edge of the country — and God addresses the fear he has not mentioned.
And his response is his father's exactly: He built an altar there, and called on Yahweh's name, and pitched his tent there. Altar first, then tent, then a well. Worship, shelter, water — in that order.
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