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, 5because 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. 13So 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 servants, and the Philistines envied him. 15The Philistines had blocked every well that his father’s servants 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 servants 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 servants 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 servants 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. 35These wives made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah.