The Famine and God's Instructions, 26:1-5
Now there was a famine in the land, besides the former famine that had occurred in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went to Gerar, to King Abimelech of the Philistines. 2 The LORD appeared to Isaac and said, “Do not go down to Egypt; settle in the land that I shall show you. 3 Reside in this land as an alien, and I will be with you, and will bless you; for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfill the oath that I swore to your father Abraham. 4 I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and will give to your offspring all these lands; and all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing for themselves through your offspring, 5 because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.”
26:1
When God promises you a good land, it is disappointing if, before you even get it, you find it undependable. Famines occurred periodically during Abraham's and Isaac's lifetimes because of irregular rainfall, causing drought. Is this the land that Moses would later be told was a "land flowing with milk and honey"?
26:2a
Egypt was a dependable refuge, whose water supply was the dependable Nile flooding. But although God permitted Abraham to go there during a famine (12:10-20), and much later Jacob's sons will go there to buy grain during a famine (42:1-5), here he expressly forbids Isaac from going there.
It has been observed that of the three patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) only Isaac is never allowed to leave the land. We saw in ch. 24 that this was one reason why the search for his bride Rebekah had to be carried out by a servant.
26:2b-3
Semi-nomadic types like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob could move about with relative ease, because they kept all their assets in movable form. They acquired no real estate, and their livestock did not consist of pigs or chickens, but sheep, goats and cattle. They could seek out the better areas for grazing in a relatively dry land suffering from drought. Here God promises Isaac that he will guide him to those parts of the land where he and his livestock can survive the drought. He is to remain in the land as a non-resident sojourner (גּוּר בָּאָ֣רֶץ הַזֹּ֔את), a gēr (Greek πάροικος [WikiLXX lnk] [TDNT5weblnk])
Although the situation was different at this earlier date, the promise God gave through Moses to Joshua as he was about to lead Israel into Canaan to conquer it still applies: "Wherever your foot shall tread, that I will give to you" (Deut 11:24; 14:9; Josh 1:3). When Isaac moved about at God's guidance, each place he visited he could say to himself, "God has promised to give my descendants this spot." And since at each location God showed him how to survive against the odds of drought, famine, and occasionally hostile kings, it must have been a very good faith-building experience.
26:4-5
God repeats to Isaac his promise to Abraham (15:5, see p. ? ) that he will make his descendants extremely numerous and a means of God bringing blessing on all the nations. Ironically, we are about to see how Isaac was almost the very opposite of blessing on the nation of the Philistines and their king Abimelech, and through no fault of theirs, but of Isaac's. Verse 5 gives a clue why this is: because like the Abraham, when he did not obey God's commandment to be truthful, Isaac repeated his father's failure instead of following the example of his father's faith.
A.2. Isaac' Faith Fails through False Fear, 26:6-11
So Isaac settled in Gerar. 7 When the men of the place asked him about his wife, he said, “She is my sister”; for he was afraid to say, “My wife,” thinking, “or else the men of the place might kill me for the sake of Rebekah, because she is attractive in appearance.” 8 When Isaac had been there a long time, King Abimelech of the Philistines looked out of a window and saw him fondling his wife Rebekah. 9 So Abimelech called for Isaac, and said, “So she is your wife! Why then did you say, ‘She is my sister’?” Isaac said to him, “Because I thought I might die because of her.” 10 Abimelech said, “What is this you have done to us? One of the people might easily have lain with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us.” 11 So Abimelech warned all the people, saying, “Whoever touches this man or his wife shall be put to death.”
26:6-7
Isaac's faith failed because he did not rely on God to keep him and Rebekah safe. Ironically, he also underestimated the morality of the Philistines among whom he was living temporarily. He thought there was no "fear of God" among them, meaning no morality. Pagan peoples feared their gods, but generally made little or no connection between "religion" (meaning sacrifice and prayer) and "ethics" meaning honest and upright conduct. But there were some exceptions: pagan societies did have laws against theft, adultery, murder and personal injury. Isaac either didn't know this, or ignored it in his irrational fears for his own safety. It never entered his mind that by misleading the local people he made it much easier for them to unknowingly commit adultery with Rebekah, thinking she was single and available for marriage to them (26:10).
It is no secret to us today either that individuals who have no faith in God can still be decent, honest and generous people. This is part of God's common grace to humanity. They are still sinners, since everyone sins, but they do not necessarily need to be feared and suspected of all sorts of vile and life-threatening acts.
26:8-11
It was only through God's grace that Rebekah was untouched before Isaac's lie was discovered by the king, who saw him fondling her as only a husband would to a wife, not a brother to a sister. We might wonder why Isaac would do this in public, where he could be seen doing it, but that is what the scripture says. Maybe they were just being lovingly playful, not actually caressing in a sexual way. But something didn't look right for a brother-sister relationship to exist. Clearly, Isaac was not the consummate deceiver that Rebekah was, but it ran in Rebekah's family, because Laban deceived Jacob on his wedding night (29:25), and Rachel deceived her father by hiding the stolen household gods under her camel's saddle (31:29-35).
A.3. Isaac and his servants struggle to control their wells, 26:12–16
Isaac sowed seed in that land, and in the same year reaped a hundredfold. The LORD blessed him, 13 and the man became rich; he prospered more and more until he became very wealthy. 14 He had possessions of flocks and herds, and a great household, so that the Philistines envied him. 15 (Now the Philistines had stopped up and filled with earth all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the days of his father Abraham.) 16 And Abimelech said to Isaac, “Go away from us; you have become too powerful for us.”
26:12-16
This section illustrates how God prospered Isaac in agriculture. He was living in the southwestern lowlands of what later became the land of Israel. [For maps showing Gerar, see weblnk.] Unlike the high country to the east, this area was good land for crops, but even so, the remarkable size of Isaac's harvests amazed the men of Gerar and made them envious. What is surprising here is that we are not told that the patriarchs owned real estate, except for the one case of Abraham's purchase of land to bury Sarah (Gen 23:3-20). They were supposedly semi-nomadic, raising livestock and moving about. Later, Jacob also purchased (or leased) land on the outskirts of Shechem on which to pitch his tents and set up his livestock enterprise (33:19). Isaac's activity here as a farmer suggests that he actually owned or at least leased land on which to grow crops. Sarna has an explanation:
“The patriarch's venture into agriculture should not be viewed as a stage of transition from the nomadic to the sedentary mode of life. The pastoral nomads of Mari and elsewhere similarly engaged in small-scale agriculture from time to time. This practice is well documented. In the case of Isaac, there is no evidence that his sedentary experience was other than exceptional; it was probably occasioned by the famine and encouraged by the favorable agricultural conditions in the low-lying plains of the region of Gerar, which is situated between the settled country and the grazing land of the nomads. The nature of the crop is not specified. Most likely it was wheat, which was a winter cereal widely cultivated in the land. It would be planted in October-November and harvested in May-June” (Sarna, JPS Genesis on 26:12).
On the wells of Isaac, Sarna writes:
The digging of wells or cisterns, usually in the dry beds of rivers, streams, and brooks, was essential to the pastoralist's survival. Because the winter floods would silt them up and obliterate them, the wells were frequently lined with stone, or the cisterns were actually hewn out of rock. They would have to be cleaned out after the floods subsided. The Philistines spitefully and deliberately refilled them with dirt.
26:17-22
So Isaac departed from there and camped in the valley of Gerar and settled there. 18 Isaac dug again the wells of water that had been dug in the days of his father Abraham; for the Philistines had stopped them up after the death of Abraham; and he gave them the names that his father had given them. 19 But when Isaac’s servants dug in the valley and found there a well of spring water, 20 the herders of Gerar quarreled with Isaac’s herders, saying, “The water is ours.” So he called the well Esek, because they contended with him. 21 Then they dug another well, and they quarreled over that one also; so he called it Sitnah. 22 He moved from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it; so he called it Rehoboth, saying, “Now the LORD has made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.”
After moving away from Gerar, Isaac reclaims some of his father's wells. Abraham's sojourn could not have been accomplished without the digging and maintenance of several wells. In order to establish clear proprietary rights, each well would be given an identifying name. Since Abraham's death the Philistines had blocked them up. Isaac now restores them and revives their original names so as to make his ownership incontestable. In the course of this work his men unexpectedly uncover an old well fed by a subterranean spring. A well of this type was especially valuable; when originally excavated, it would have been lined with stone. Since a memory of its existence has not been· preserved, it is ownerless and ought to belong to the finder. Nevertheless, the shepherds of Gerar lay claim to it. Significantly, they do not assert this on behalf of the king, which shows that the well was situated in a region beyond the limits of royal domain.
26:23-25
From there he went up to Beer-sheba. 24 And that very night the LORD appeared to him and said, “I am the God of your father Abraham; do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you and make your offspring numerous for my servant Abraham’s sake.” 25 So he built an altar there, called on the name of the LORD, and pitched his tent there. And there Isaac’s servants dug a well.
Pestered by the local inhabitants and living in the land during a prolonged famine, Isaac had much to fear. But God wished to calm those fears. So he appeared to Isaac and reassured him that the blessings promised to his father Abraham and much more awaited him. The words "Do not be afraid" may have prompted Isaac to give to God another name: "the Fear of Isaac".
26:26–33
Then Abimelech went to him from Gerar, with Ahuzzath his adviser and Phicol the commander of his army. 27 Isaac said to them, “Why have you come to me, seeing that you hate me and have sent me away from you?” 28 They said, “We see plainly that the LORD has been with you; so we say, let there be an oath between you and us, and let us make a covenant with you 29 so that you will do us no harm, just as we have not touched you and have done to you nothing but good and have sent you away in peace. You are now the blessed of the LORD.” 30 So he made them a feast, and they ate and drank. 31 In the morning they rose early and exchanged oaths; and Isaac set them on their way, and they departed from him in peace. 32 That same day Isaac’s servants came and told him about the well that they had dug, and said to him, “We have found water!” 33 He called it Shibah; therefore the name of the city is Beer-sheba to this day.
Abimelech's treaty with Isaac has the same reticent note as that of Laban with Jacob (31:44-55). Both parties recognize the hand of Yahweh in blessing the patriarch, and wish to protect themselves from his growing power. This is an adumbration of the way in which the promise to Abraham that his seed would bless the nations will find fulfillment.
26:34–35
When Esau was forty years old, he married Judith daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite; 35 and they made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah.
These verses set the stage for the next episode, for Esau's intermarriage with the local pagan women further antagonizes Rebekah and leads to her scheme to steal the blessing Isaac intends for Esau for her own favorite son, Jacob. These two women are from the Hethite ethnic group, a local subdivision of the Canaanites, descended from Heth the son of Canaan (Gen 10).
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