Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Genesis 26:1

The Lord Blesses Isaac

v. 1. And there was a famine in the land, beside the first famine that was in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went unto Abimelech, king of the Philistines, unto Gerar. The adventures of Isaac, as related in this Chapter, have their parallels in the life of Abraham, and show that human nature does not change, but remains selfish and sinful from one generation to the next. A famine having struck Canaan, Isaac found it advisable to journey down to the land of the Philistines, the hereditary title of whose king was Abimelech.

v. 2. And the Lord appeared unto him, and said, Go not down in to Egypt, that, evidently, having been the intention of Isaac, since Egypt was the granary of all the surrounding countries, especially in lean years. Dwell in the land which I shall tell thee of;

v. 3. sojourn in this land, and I will be with thee, and will bless thee; for unto thee and unto thy seed I will give all these countries, and I will perform the oath which I sware unto Abraham, thy father;

v. 4. and I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed;

v. 5. because that Abraham obeyed My voice, and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws. Isaac was not to move down into Egypt, because the entire land of Canaan, including the land of the Philistines, was included in the blessing of Jehovah, and was eventually to be the possession of the descendants of Isaac, as the Lord had promised to Abraham with an oath, Gen 22:16. But in addition to these temporal blessings, the descendants of Isaac according to the promise should also become the bearers of the Messianic hope, according to which all nations of the earth were to be blessed in that one Seed, in the Messiah. All this was a reward for the obedience of faith which Abraham had shown in keeping the charge of God, the special commission entrusted to him, His commandments or express orders, His statutes, certain prescriptions to cover specific cases, and His Law, the great doctrine of moral obligations as it applies to all men.

Fuente: The Popular Commentary on the Bible by Kretzmann

EXPOSITION

Gen 26:1

And there was a famine in the land (of Canaan), beside the first (i.e. first recorded) famine that was in the days of Abrahamat least a century previous (vide Gen 12:10). And Isaacwho, since his father’s death, had been residing at Hagar’s well in the wilderness of Beersheba (Gen 25:11)went unto Abimelech king of the Philistines unto Gerar (cf. Gen 20:1, Gen 20:2; Gen 21:22). Seventy or eighty years having elapsed since Abraham’s sojourn in Gerar, it is scarcely probable that this was the monarch who then reigned.

Gen 26:2

And the Lord (Jehovah, i.e. the God of the covenant and of the promise) appeared unto him,only two Divine manifestations are mentioned as having been granted to the patriarch. Either the peaceful tenor of Isaac’s life rendered more theophanies in his case unnecessary; or, if others were enjoyed by him, the brief space allotted by the historian to the record of his life may account for their omission from the narrative. Though commonly understood as having occurred in Gerar (Keil, Lange, Murphy), this appearance, is perhaps better regarded as having taken place at Lahai-roi, and as having been the cause of Isaac’s turning aside into the land of the Philistines (Calvin)and said, Go not down into Egyptwhither manifestly he had been purposing to migrate, as his father had done on the occasion of the earlier dearth (Gen 12:10). Jacob in the later famine was instructed to go down to Egypt (Gen 46:3, Gen 46:4); Abraham in the first scarcity was left at liberty to think and act for himself. Dwell in the land which I will tell thee of (i.e. Philistia, as appears from the preceding verse).

Gen 26:3

Sojourn in this land,viz; Philistia (Murphy, Alford), though otherwise regarded as Canaan (Lange, Keil, Calvin)and I will be with thee, and will bless thee. Of this comprehensive promise, the first part was enjoyed by, while the second was distinctly stated to, Abraham (of. Gen 12:2). God’s presence with Isaac of higher significance than his presence with Ishmael (Gen 21:20). For unto thee, and unto thy seed, will I give all these, an archaism for (cf. Gen 19:8, Gen 19:25)countries (i.e. Canaan and the surrounding lands), and I will perform the oath (vide Gen 22:16) which I aware unto Abraham thy father.

Gen 26:4

And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven (vide Gen 15:1-6), and will give unto thy seed all these countries (i.e. the territories occupied by the Canaanitish tribes); and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed (cf. Gen 12:3; Gen 22:18).

Gen 26:5

Because that Abraham obeyed (literally, hearkened to) my voice (a general description of the patriarch’s obedience, which the next clause further particularizes), and kept my charge, custodierit custodiam (Calvin); observed my observances (Kalisch); the charge being that which is intended to be keptmy commandments,i.e. particular injunctions, specific enactments, express or occasional orders (cf. 2Ch 35:16)my statutes,or permanent ordinances, such as the Passover; literally, that which is graven on tables or monuments (compare Exo 12:14)and my lawswhich refer to the great doctrines of moral obligation. The three terms express the contents of the Divine observances which Abraham observed.

Gen 26:6

And Isaac dwelt in Geraras God had shown and enjoined him.

HOMILETICS

Gen 26:1-6

A good man’s perplexity.

I. THE CONTEMPLATED JOURNEY.

1. Its projected destinations. Egypt. Renowned for fertility, the land of the Pharaohs was yet no proper resort for the son of Abraham, the heir of Canaan, and the friend of God. It was outside the land of promise; it had been to Abraham a scene of peril, and it was not a place to which he was directed to turn. Considerations such as these should have operated to deter Isaac from even entertaining the idea of a pilgrimage to Egypt. But the behavior of this Hebrew patriarch is sometimes outdone by that of modern saints, who not simply project, but actually perform, journeys, of pleasure or of business, across the boundary line which separates the Church from the world, into places where their spiritual interests are endangered, and that too not only without the Divine sanction, but sometimes in express violation of that authority.

2. Its ostensible occasion. The famine. A severe trial, especially to a flock-master. It was yet by no means an exceptional trial, but one which had occurred before in the experience of the inhabitants of Canaan, and in particular of his father, and might possibly recur to himself, just as life’s afflictions generally bear a singular resemblance to one another (1Co 10:13; 1Pe 4:12). It was not an accidental trial, but had been appointed and permitted by that Divine wisdom without whose sanction no calamity can fall on either nation or individual, saint or sinner (Deu 32:39; Psa 66:11; Amo 3:6). And just as little was it purposeless, being designed to initiate Isaac in that life discipline from which no child of God can escape (Act 14:22; Heb 12:11; Jas 1:2, Jas 1:3).

3. Its secret inspiration. Unbelief. Jehovah, who had given the land to Isaac, could easily have maintained him in it notwithstanding the dearth, had it been his pleasure not to provide a way of escape. Had Isaac not at this time been walking somewhat by sight, it is probable his thoughts would not have turned to Egypt. Most of the saint’s doubtful transactions and dangerous projects have a secret connection with the spirit of unbelief which causes to err.

II. THE DIVINE INTERPOSITION.

1. Prohibiting. “Go not down into Egypt.” That Jacob subsequently went down to Egypt in obedience to Divine instructions is no proof that Isaac would have been blameless had he gone down without them. Abraham did so, but it is not certain that God approved of his conduct in that matter. Besides, though it could be shown that Abraham incurred no guilt and contracted no hurt by residence in Egypt, it would not follow that his son might venture thither with impunity and without sin. Hence the proposed journey was interdicted. So God in his word debars saints from going down to the unspiritual and unbelieving world to endamage or imperil their souls’ higher interests.

2. Prescribing. “Dwell in the land which I shall tell thee of: sojourn in this land.” It is always safest for the saint in seasons of perplexity to wait for and to follow the light from heaven. Sufficient guidance God has promised, through his Spirit, by his word, and in his providence, to enable gracious ones who wait upon his teaching to detect the path of duty and the place of safety.

3. Promising. For Isaac’s encouragement the various promises of the Abrahamic covenant are repeated, renewed, and confirmed to himself for his father’s sake; embracing promises of the Divine presence”I will be with thee”and the Divine blessing”and will bless thee;” in which latter are comprehended the inheritance,”all these countries,”the seed.”I will make thy seed to multiply,”and the universal salvation”in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed,” which had been promised and guaranteed to Abraham by oath. So has God given to believers “exceeding great and precious promises” for Christ’s sake, because of the covenant made with him, on the ground of the obedience rendered, and for the merit of the sacrifice presented, by him.

III. THE FILIAL OBEDIENCE. “Isaac dwelt in Gerar,” having removed thither in compliance with the Divine instructions. Like Abraham’s, Isaac’s obedience was

1. Minute, exactly following the Divine prescription.

2. Prompt, putting into immediate execution the Divine commandment.

3. Patient, remaining in the land of the Philistines till God in his providence indicated it was time to remove. So should Christ’s followers obey.

HOMILIES BY R.A. REDFORD

Gen 26:1-35

Line upon line, in God’s teaching.

Isaac, like his father, has his time of sojourn among the Philistines. The events of his intercourse with the Abimelech of his day resemble those of the former patriarch, though there are differences which show that the recurrence is historical.

I. GOD REPEATS HIS LESSONS that they may make the deeper impression. The intention of the record is to preserve a certain line of Divine guidance. Isaac trod in the footsteps of Abraham. We have Isaac’s wells, oaths, feast, Shebahall following close upon those of the preceding generation.

II. The SAME PRESERVATION OF THE COVENANT RACE in the midst of heathens confirms that covenant. The same lesson of special providential protection and blessing is thus repeated and enforced. Again the same contrast of man‘s infirmity with God‘s unchangeableness. The perversity of the fleshly-minded man forming a marriage connection with heathen people, and bringing grief of mind to his parents, reveals the distinctness of the world from the kingdom of God.R.

Fuente: The Complete Pulpit Commentary

Gen 26:1. Isaac went unto Abimelech The Abimelech here mentioned, is thought by some to have been the son of him to whom Abraham went, Abimelech being, as we have observed, a common name of the kings of Palestine; but as the same friend (viz. Phichol the chief captain) Gen 26:26 is mentioned as in ch. Gen 21:22. it is not unlikely that it was the same king.

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

THIRD SECTION

Isaac in the region of Abimelech at Gerar. The manifestation of God, and confirmed promise. His imitation of the maxim of his father. The exposure of Rebekah. The living figure of a richly blessed, patient endurance

Gen 26:1-22

1And there was [again] a famine in the land, besides the first [previous] 1famine that was in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went unto Abimelech king of the Philistines unto Gerar. 2And the Lord [Jehovah] appeared unto him, and said, Go not down into 3Egypt; dwell in the land which I shall tell thee of: Sojourn [as a stranger] in this land, and I will be with thee, and will bless thee; for unto thee, and unto thy seed, I will give all these countries, and I will perform [cause to stand] the oath which I sware unto Abraham thy father; 4And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give to thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed [bless themselves]; 5Because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.

6And Isaac dwelt in Gerar: 7And the men of the place asked him of his wife; and he said, She is my sister: for he feared to say, She is my wife; lest, said he [thought he], the men of the place should kill me for Rebekah; because she was fair to look upon. 8And it came to pass, when he had been there a long time,1 that Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out at a window, and saw, and behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife. 9And Abimelech called Isaac, and said, Behold, of a surety [certainly] she is thy wife: and how saidst thou, She is my sister? And Isaac said unto him, Because I said [I thought], Lest I die for her. 10And Abimelech said, What is this that thou hast done unto us? one of the people might lightly2 have lien with thy wife, and thou shouldest have brought guiltiness upon us. 11And Abimelech charged all his people, saying, He that toucheth [injures] this man or his wife shall surely be put to death. 12Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received [found. A. G.] in the same year an hundred fold: and [thus] the Lord blessed him: 13And the man waxed great, and went forward, and grew until he became very great: 14For he had possession of flocks, and possession of herds, and great store of servants: and the Philistines envied him. 15For all the wells which his fathers servants had digged in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines had stopped, them, and filled them with earth. 16And Abimelech said unto Isaac, Go from us; for thou art much mightier than we.

17And Isaac departed thence, and pitched his tent in the valley [(brook) valleywady.A. G.] of Gerar, and dwelt there. 18And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after [like] the names by which his father had called them. 19And Isaacs servants digged in the valley [at the bottom], and found there a well of springing [living] water. 20And the herdmen of Gerar did strive with Isaacs herdmen, saying, The water is ours: and he called the name of the well Ezek [contention]; because they strove with him. 21And they digged another well, and strove for that also: and he called the name of it Sitnah [enmity-adversary, Satan wells]. 22And he removed [brake up] from thence, and digged another well; and for that they strove not: and he called the name of it Rehoboth [wide room]; and he said, For now the Lord hath made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.

GENERAL PRELIMINARY REMARKS

1. The present chapter (Genesis 26) is the only one devoted exclusively to traditions concerning Isaac. The former narratives were, on the one hand, interwoven with Abrahams history, and, on the other, contained the beginnings of the history of Esau and Jacob. The section in the following chapter, but more fully given in the beginning of Genesis 28, forms a conclusion, in which the history of Isaac and that of his sons are considered as one. This is followed by Gen 35:27, like a melancholy echo extending over Isaacs long and isolated life, during which Rebekah disappears from the scene, deeply grieved on account of her sons. We have here a vivid life-picture, taken from the midst of Isaacs pilgrimage, and representing clearly the fact that Isaacs composedness and, tranquillity draw after them pure blessings. This thought, however, pervades his whole history. He submits to suffer upon Moriah, and thus receives a mysterious theocratic consecration as a type of Christ. He waited for his bride until Abrahams and Eliezers care procured one for him without his co-operation, and in this he fared well. During Rebekahs long barrenness he seeks no remedy such as Abraham did in connection with Hagar, but finally resorts to prayer, and is richly compensated in the bestowal of twins. During the famine he does not go to Egypt, but, according to Jehovahs instruction, remains in Canaan, and here, in the country of the Philistines, is most abundantly blessed. He receives in silence the censure of Abimelech for his deceptive statement respecting Rebekah. He is exiled, and departs from Gerar. He yields one well after another to the shepherds of the Philistines, ever receding, further and further; and yet the king of the Philistines applies to him for an alliance, as to a mighty prince. Finally Isaac knows how to reconcile himself to the strong deception prepared for him by Rebekah and Jacob, and even this pliancy of temper is blessed to him, in that he is thereby kept in the right theocratic direction. His passive conduct, too, at the marriage of his sons, renders the difference between the true Esau and the theocratic Jacob more distinct. His composure and endurance seem infirmities; these, however, with all weakness of temperament, are evidently supported by a power of the spirit and of faith. The moral power in it is the self-restraint whereby, in opposition to his own wishes, he gives up his hasty purpose to bless Esau. Isaac learned experimentally upon Moriah, that quietness, tranquillity, and confidence in the Lord have a glorious issue. This experience is stamped upon his whole career. If we judge him from the declarations concerning Rebekah at Gerar, he appears to be the timid imitator of his father; though the assuming of his fathers maxim in this respect may be explained from his modest, susceptible nature. But that he does not imitate his father slavishly, is seen especially from the fact of his quiet suffering without any resistance. This is made evident, too, by the fact that he does not, like Abraham, go to Egypt during the famine. Moreover, he does not take a concubine, as Abraham did; nor like him does he look to divine revelation for the decision respecting the lawful heir, but holds himself sure of it by reason of the transmitted right of the first-born. New and original traits appear in his transition to agriculture, as well as in his zealous digging of wells. The naming of the wells, taken away from him, has something of humor, such as is peculiar to tranquil minds. His pleasant disposition reveals itself not only in his preference of venison, but by his peculiar manner of preparing, for Abimelech of Gerar, and his friends, a feast, even after the gentle reproof, and before he made a covenant with him on the following day. In his vocation, however, as patriarch, he shows himself a man of spirit by building an altar unto the Lord, and calling upon his name (Gen 26:25). And while there are but two visions mentioned definitely during his life (Gen 26:3, Gen 26:24), still there follows a higher spiritual life, and, at the same time, a further development of the Abrahamic promise through the disposition he manifests in the blessing of his sons. Our section may be divided as follows: 1. Isaacs sojourn in the country during the famine in consequence of an injunction of Jehovah. Renewed promise (Gen 26:1-6); 2. Isaacs assertion that Rebekah was his sister (Gen 26:7-11); 3. Isaacs prosperity; his exile from the city of Gerar, and his settlement in the valley of Gerar (Gen 26:12-17); 4. Isaacs patience in what he endured from the Philistines, and its blessing (Gen 26:18-22). Knobel regards the present chapter as a Jehovistic supplement, mingled with Elohistic elements. [In regard to the numerous points of resemblance between Isaac and Abraham, Kurtz has shown (Gesch., p. 226) that these resemblances are not slavish imitations, but are marked by distinct peculiarities, and moreover, that these similar experiences are not accidental, but on the one hand, as the result of the divine providence, they flow from the same purpose and discipline with the father and the son, and on the other hand, as far as they are the result of human choices, they arise from an actual resemblance in their condition and hopes. Thus all believers in their experiences are alike and yet unlike.A. G.]

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

1. Gen 26:1-6. Isaacs abode in the country.A famine.It is distinguished from the famine in the history of Abraham. Isaac, following the example of his father, was on the point of going to Egypt, but is arrested by divine interposition. Isaacs history commences with the same trial as the history of Abraham (Delitzsch). This frequent calamity of antiquity occurs once more in the history of Jacob.Isaac went unto Abimelech.Not the one mentioned Gen 20:21 (Kimchi, Schum, etc., Del.), but his successor (Knobel). The same may be said of Phichol (Gen 21:22). There is here, very probably, a different Abimelech, and with him another Phichol. The former is expressly called king. Upon this name Abimelech, as a standing title of the kings, compare the title to the 34th Ps. with 1Sa 21:11.Gerar.The ruins of which, under the name of Kirbet-el-Gerr, have been again discovered by Rowland, three leagues in a southeasterly direction from Gaza. Del. Isaac intends to go to Egypt, but according to Gods instruction, he is to remain in Palestine as a stranger.Go not down.It is characteristic that Abraham received the first divine instruction to depart, Isaac to remain. God leads every one according to his peculiar necessities. Even in Canaan nothing shall be wanting to him.All these countries.Extending the promise beyond Canaan [or rather all the lands of the different Canaanitish tribes.A. G.]I will be with thee.A promise of help, blessing, and protection, especially needed by Isaac.I Will perform the oath.As for God, the divine oath was absolutely firm, though, on the part of Abraham, it might have been obscured. But since Abraham, on his part, remained true to the covenant, it is renewed to the son by virtue of an oath, whilst in regard to the contents of the promise, it is even enlarged. The one land of Canaan is changed into many countries, the seed multiplied as the stars of heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea-shore, becomes stars only; and the blessing of the nations (Gen 22:18) becomes in his seed a voluntary blessing of the nations among themselves.Because that Abraham.Literally, for that. Abrahams obedience is brought out conspicuously through the use of the richest deuteronomic terms. To the commendation of obedience in general, follows in strict derivation: 1. the charge; 2. the commandments; 3. the institutions; 4. the germ of the Thorah in the plural, . [He kept the charge of God, the special commission he had given him; his commandments, his express or occasional orders; his statutes, his stated prescriptions graven on stone; his law, the great doctrine of moral obligations. Murphy, p. 874. His obedience was not perfect, as we know, but it was unreserved, and as it flows from a living faith, is thus honored of God.A. G.] The motive of the promise emphasizes the humility and low position of Isaac. He must also, however, render the obedience of faith, if Jehovahs blessing is to rest upon him, and, indeed, first of all, by remaining in the country. Abraham had to go to Egypt, Jacob must go to Egypt to die there, Isaac, the second patriarch, is not to go to Egypt at all. Notwithstanding the resemblance to the promise, Genesis 22, the new here is unmistakable.

2. Gen 26:7-11. Isaacs assertion respecting Rebekah. In the declaration of Isaac, the event here resembles Abrahams experience, both in Egypt and at Gerar, but as to all else, it differs entirely. With regard to the declaration itself, it is true that Rebekah was also related to Isaac, but more distantly than Sarah to Abraham. It is evident from the narrative itself that Isaac is not so seriously threatened as Abraham, although the inquiries of the people at Gerar might have alarmed him. It is not by a punishment inflicted upon a heathen prince, who perhaps might have abducted the wife, but through the intercourse of Isaac with Rebekah that the true relation became known. That the Abimelech mentioned in this narrative is the same person who, eighty years before, received Sarah into his harem, appears plausible to Kurtz and Delitzsch, since it may be taken for granted that as a man gray with age he did not send for Rebekah and take her into his harem. We reject these as superficial grounds. The main point is, that Isaac appears in this narrative as a very cautious man, while the severe edict of Abimelech seems to suppose a solemn remembrance in the kings house of the former experience with Abraham. The oath that follows seems also to show that the new Abimelech avails himself of the policy of his father, as well as Isaac. The windows in old times were latticed openings for the light to enter, as found in the East at the present day.

3. Gen 26:12-17. Isaacs prosperity and exile.Then Isaac sowed.Besides planting trees, Abraham was yet a mere nomad. Isaac begins to pursue agriculture along with his nomadic life; and Jacob seems to have continued it in a larger measure (Gen 37:7). Many nomads of Arabia connect agriculture with a nomadic life (see Burkhardt: Syrien, p. 430, etc.). Knobel. This account agrees well with the locality at Gerar. The soil of Gaza is very rich, and in Nuttar Abu Sumar, a tract northwest of Elysa, the Arabs possess now storehouses for their grain (see Robinson, i. p. 291, 292). Even at the present time, in those countries (e.g., Hauran), the soil yields a very rich produce (Burkhardt: Syria, p. 463). Knobel. [The hundred-fold is a large and very rare product, and yet Babylonia is said to have yielded two hundred and even three hundred fold. Herod., i. p. 193; Murphy, p. 375.A. G.] The exigency of the famine induced Isaac to undertake agriculture, and in the very first year his crops yielded a hundred-fold (). The agriculture of Isaac indicates already a more permanent settlement in Palestine; but agriculture and the occupation of the nomadic life were first engaged in equally by the Israelites in Egypt, and it was not until their return from Egypt that agriculture became the predominant employment. Delitzsch.And the Philistines envied him.Hostilities began in their filling with earth the wells that Abraham dug at Gerar, and which therefore belonged to Isaac. This very act is already an indirect expulsion, for without wells it is not possible that Isaac should live a nomadic life at Gerar. [The digging of wells was regarded as a sort of occupancy of the land, and as conferring a kind of title to it; and hence perhaps the envy of the Philistines.A. G.] This conduct was customary during wars (2Ki 3:25; Isa 15:6), and the Arabs fill with earth the wells along the route of the pilgrims if they do not receive the toll asked by them (Troilo: Orientalische Reisebeschreib., p. 682; Niebuhr: Arab. p. 362). Knobel.Go from us.Abimelech openly vents his displeasure against Isaac. He banishes him from his city, Gerar, and from his country in the narrower sense.In the valley of Gerar.The undulating country Gurf-el-Gerr, through which flows a wady (Ritter: Erdk. xiv. p. 804). Constantine erected a monument in this valley (Sozom. 6, 32).

4. Gen 26:18-22. Isaacs patient behavior under the violation of his rights by the Philistines. The wells.Digged again the wells.Behind his back too, the Philistines filled the wells which Abraham dug. Knobel infers from verse 29 that the hostile conduct of the Philistines was not mentioned in the more ancient record! The discoveries of the wells (Gen 26:19; Gen 26:21), too, must be regarded as identical with the digging again, Gen 26:18!The quarrels about the wells seem to be connected with views respecting the boundaries of Isaacs place of exile. He is driven further and further by them. Quarrels about watering-places and pastures are common among the Bedouins (see Gen 13:7; Exo 2:17; Burkhardt: Syria, p. 628, and Bedouins, p. 118). Among the ancient Arabs, also, severe contests arose about watering-places (Hamasa, i. p. 122 f. 287). In many regions the scarcity of water is such that the Bedouins rather offer milk than water as a beverage (Seetzen, iii. p. 21). Knobel. Isaac yields without any resistance; still he erects a monument to the injustice he suffered. The name of the second well, , from the verb , brings to view an enmity malignant and satanic.A well of springing water.Running water (Lev 14:5, etc.).Rehoboth (ample room).The third well was probably situated beyond the boundaries of Gerar; for it is previously said that he had removed from thence, i.e., from the valley of Gerar. The name Rehoboth indicates that now by the guidance of Jehovah he had come to a wide, open region. Ruhaibeh, a wady, southwest from Elusa, and discovered by Robinson (i. 291 ff.), together with the extended ruins of the city of the same name, situated upon the top of a mountain, remind us of this third well (Strauss: Sinai and Golgotha, p. 149). Delitzsch. Robinson also discovered further north, in a wady, what was perhaps the Sitnah of Isaac. Ruhaibeh is situated about three hours in a southerly direction from Elusa and about eight and a half from Beer-sheba, where the main roads leading to Gaza and Hebron separate from each other.

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

1. Delitzsch: This chapter (26) is composed of these seven short, special, and peculiarly colored narratives, which the Jehovist arranged. One purpose runs through all: to show, by a special narration of examples running through the first forty years of Isaacs independent history, how even the patriarch himself, though less distinguished in deeds and sufferings, yet under Jehovahs blessing and protection comes forth out of all his fearful embarrassments and ascends to still greater riches and honor. His life, however, is not the echo of the life of Abraham; but Isaacs meekness and gentleness indicate rather a decisive progress, which, like his pure monogamy, was a type of New Testament relations.

2. The events related in the present section belong undoubtedly to a time when Esau had not reached the development of all his powers, for otherwise this stately and powerful hunter would scarcely have submitted so quietly to the infringements of his rights by the Philistines.
3. The two visions which mark the life of Isaac are entirely in accordance with his character and his point of view. In the first, Jehovah addresses him: Go not down into Egypt; in the second: Fear not. The promises, however, which he receives, are further developments of the Abrahamic promise. For Isaac, moreover, Jehovahs promises become a divine oath, i.e., a confidence of faith in him built upon a rock.
4. The three famines occurring in the history of the three patriarchs constitute the fixed manifestations of one of the great national calamities of antiquity, from which the pious have to suffer together with the ungodly; but in which the pious always experience the special care of the Lord, assuring them that all things work together for good to them that love God.
5. Isaacs imitation of his father in passing his wife for his sister, incurs the more severe censure of history than the same actions of Abraham, and it has this time for its result the gradual expulsion from Gerar. This ignominy, too, must have the more inclined him to yield patiently to the infringements of his rights by the Philistines; and thus he is again blessed with the freedom of a new region, so that the word is fulfilled in him: Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.
6. Isaac and Abimelech, sons of their respective fathers, and yet having each a peculiar character according to their individual and finer traits.
7. Isaac, and the signs that appear of a willingness to struggle bravely for the faith, though still subject to his natural infirmities and obscured by them.
8. Isaacs energy in his agricultural undertakings and in the diligent digging of wells.
9. The filling of the wells with earth, as taken in a spiritual sense, indicates an old hatred of the Philistines towards the children of God.
10. And thou shouldst have brought guiltiness upon us. The idea of guilt is the extension of culpability over the future of the sinner; and frequently (as e.g. in public offences) more or less even to those around us. Participation of sin is participation in its corrupting and ruinous results.

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

To the whole chapter. How the promises of Abraham descend upon Isaac: 1. As the same promises; 2. as newly shaped in their development and confirmation.Incidents of a life of faithful suffering and rich with blessings, as presented in the history of Isaac: Isaac during the famine; in danger at Gerar; as exposed to the jealousy of the Philistines; during the exile; in the strife about the wells; in the visit of Abimelech; in the marriage of Esau.How Isaac gradually comes out of his difficulty: 1. From Gerar to the valley of Gerar; 2. from the valley of Gerar to Rehoboth; 3. from Rehoboth to Beer-sheba.Isaac as a digger of wells, a type also of spiritual conduct: 1. In digging again the wells of the father that are filled with earth; 2. in digging new wells.Isaac and Abimelech, or the sons in relation to their fathers: 1. Resemblance; 2. difference.The blessing of Isaac in his crops (at the harvest-festival).Malignant joy, a joy moat destructive to the malignant man himself. [Wordsworth, who finds types everywhere, says: Here also we have a type of what Christ, the pure Isaac, is doing in the church. The wells of ancient truth had been choked up by error, but Christ reopened them and restored them to their primitive state and called them by their old names, etc., p. 115.A. G.]

Starke: (What Moses narrates in this chapter appears to have happened before Esau and Jacob were born (see Gen 26:7). [More probably when they were about fifteen years old, after Abrahams death.A. G.] Regarding the Philistines and Philistia, see Dictionaries.) The reason why God did not permit Isaac to go to Egypt is not given, yet it may have been that Isaac might experience the wonderful providence and paternal care of God toward him. Some (Calvin) assign the reason, that Isaac, because not as far advanced in faith as his father Abraham, might have been easily led astray by the idolatrous Egyptians (the result shows, however, that it was unnecessary this time).I will give all these countries. Thy descendants through Esau shall receive a great part of the southern countries, lying between Canaan and Egypt.

Gen 26:5. It does not follow from these four terms, which were frequently used after the law was given upon Mt. Sinai, that Abraham already possessed the law of Moses, as the Jews assert. Had this been the case, no doubt he would have transmitted it to his children. Moses, however, chooses these expressions, which were in use in his time, in order to point out clearly to the people of Israel how Abraham had submitted himself entirely to the divine will and command, and earnestly abstained from everything to the contrary in his walk before God. To these four terms there are sometimes added two more, viz., rules and testimonies.Osiander: There are no calamities in the world from which even the pious do not sometimes suffer. The best of it, however, is that God is their protection and comfort (Psa 91:1).We are to remember the divine promises, though ancient and general, and apply them to ourselves.Cramer: We are to abide by Gods command, for his word is a light unto our path (Psa 119:105).Thus God sometimes permits his people to stumble, that his care over them may become known.To Gen 26:10. From this we see that the inhabitants of Gerar, notwithstanding their idolatry, were still so conscientious that they considered adultery a crime so great as to involve the whole land in its punishment.Cramer: Comely persons should be much more watchful of themselves than others.The woods have ears and the fields eyes, therefore let no one do anything thinking that no one sees and hears him.Strangers are to be protected. (Since Isaac possessed no property, perhaps he cultivated with the kings permission an unfruitful tract of land, or hired a piece of ground.)It is the worst kind of jealousy if we repine at anothers prosperity without any prospect of our own advantage.

Bibl. Tub.: God blesses his people extraordinarily in famine. Cramer: Success creates jealousy; but let us not be surprised at this; it is the course of the world.

Gen 26:17. To suffer wrong, and therein to exercise patience, is always better than to revenge oneself and do wrong.Christian, the Holy Scriptures are also a well of living water; draw therefrom incessantly.Bibl. Tub.: The jealousy and artifice of enemies cannot prevent or restrain the blessing which the Lord designs for the pious.

Footnotes:

[1][Gen 26:8.When the days were drawn out.A.G.]

[2][Gen 26:10. within a little; it lacks but little, as the Chaldee renders.A.G.]

Fuente: A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical by Lange

CONTENTS.

The beginning of Isaac’s spiritual warfare, like that of his father before him, affords large occasion for the exercise of faith. A famine prevails in Canaan: God directs the Patriarch what to do: Covenant promises are renewed: Isaac, through distrust and fear, denies that Rebekah is his wife, by calling her his sister: the consequence of this follows in a suitable punishment: after this Isaac prospers in worldly substance: God appears to him: his son Esau marries two Hittite women which occasions great grief to Isaac and Rebekah. These are the principal things noticed in this chapter.

Gen 12:10 . Gerar, a place to the north-east of Egypt. Reader! observe how extraordinary are the trials of faith. The very land which was the glory of all lands, is visited by famine: and in the country to which God promised a fullness of blessings, there is first a want even of bread. Such are the exercises of grace.

Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

Isaac the Peacemaker

Gen 26:12-25

Isaac gave up his wells rather than quarrel over them. A similar historical instance of peace-loving is given by Knox in his History of the Reformation. George Wishart, the martyr, a man, ‘lowly, lovely, glad to teach, desirous to learn,’ went by request to the church of Mauchline to preach there. But the Sheriff of Ayrshire, fearing the destruction of the ornaments of the church, got a number of the local gentlemen to garrison it against the preacher. One friend of Wishart’s determined to enter it by force, but Wishart, drawing him aside, said: ‘Brother, Christ Jesus is as potent upon the fields as in the kirk,… it is the word of peace that God sends by me; the blood of no man shall be shed this day for the preaching of it.’ And so, withdrawing the whole people, he came, says Knox, to a dyke on a moor-edge, upon which he ascended and continued in preaching for more than three hours.

Reference. XXVI. 12-25. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Genesis, p. 201.

The Buried Wells

Gen 26:18

There is a deep sense in which every life might say, ‘All my springs are in Thee’. With that vision in our hearts we need not be afraid to speak of springs of good in men’s lives. To say that you can hear the ripple of a spring is not to say you never heard the splash of falling rain. You can honour the water in the well without despising the original and continuous bounty of the skies. And so, with the great overarching heaven in our minds all the time, we can begin our search for the earthly wells.

I. And they need looking for. They are often lost beneath the drift of the years, or choked up by the rubbish that a Philistine world has cast into them. And it is easy to forget that they are there. We see the ground trampled and dust-strewn, and there is little or nothing to suggest that down beneath that unpromising surface there is a spring that might be helping to refresh a tired and thirsty world.

Beneath the barren and trampled surface of humanity we must find the wells of reverence and faith and love that God Himself has sunk in these hearts of ours. Man was made to worship and believe and aspire. God made him so. This Philistine world succeeds in burying deep the springs of the heart’s true life. The wells are choked.

II. That is the sad fact on which we have to concentrate our toil. But that involves another fact, bright and inspiring and thrilling the wells are there. Isaac and his servants worked with a will, with a steady enthusiasm, amidst those piles of stones and heaps of earth. A bystander knowing nothing of the history of these desert spots might well have wondered at the sight of such hopeful toil amid such unpromising surroundings. But they who were doing the work were in possession of one fact that afforded them complete inspiration. They knew that there were springs of water if only they had the energy and patience to come at them.

The essential spirituality of human life is an ultimate fact. When we toil for the souls of men, we are not working on the strength of a speculation. We are not prospecting. Like Isaac of old, we work where our Father Himself has worked before us.

III. ‘He digged again the wells of… Abraham his Father;… and called them after the names by which his father had called them.’ Is not that the story of Jesus of Nazareth?

Even as Isaac found in the devastated valley of Gerar the wells of his father Abraham, so did Jesus find in the barren hearts of men the wells of His Father God. They were choked with sins and the cares of the years, but He found them and sounded them, and let into them the light and air of the sky of the Father’s mercy, and set the water of life, love and faith and hope, flowing into these poor world-choked hearts.

P. Ainsworth, The Pilgrim Church, p. 157.

Reference. XXVI. 18. C. Perren, Outline Sermons, p. 135.

Life on God’s Plan

Gen 26:25

Isaac is felt by every Bible reader to be a much less commanding figure than the men who stand on either side of him his father Abraham and his son Jacob. He had neither the lofty and daring faith of the one, nor the other’s passionate instinct of adventure. His qualities were not such as stir the imagination of the world. Passive rather than intense, he spent one of those lives that are largely controlled and arranged by other people. The influence of his friends always tended to be too strong for him; so it was, for example, when the wife he was to marry was selected by his father, and brought home to him by deputy. Hence we are apt to call him tame, torpid, and slow; at all events the too easy victim of over modesty and inertia.

But of course such a character has another side. Isaac, it is true, is unlike Abraham and Jacob; but it is they that are uncommon men, not he. Of the three he exhibits far the closest resemblance to average humanity. You will find a score of Isaacs for every Abraham that emerges. And just for that reason the fact that Isaac was given his place in the great patriarchal succession speaks to us of the truth that God is the God of ordinary people, not less than of those in whom there sleeps the Divine spark of genius or greatness. As some one has said, ‘God has a place for the quiet man’. We may have neither distinguished talents nor a distinguished history, but one thing we can do, we can form a link in the chain by which the Divine blessing goes down from one generation to another… Pick out the three centres here, where the threads cross, and they are these, the altar, the tent, the well. There we see focused sharply, and gathered up, the main constituents or impulses which are always to be found in the life of a man after God’s own heart; and without being unduly imaginative or fantastic, we may decide that they stand for religion, home, work… . The man of the tent is the prey of time, and passes; the man of the altar endures for ever. Religion has in it that which is superior to time…. Considered as one of the threads which God’s hand is weaving into the strand of life, is not work a pure blessing? Is it not, like Isaac’s will, an ever-flowing source of power and refreshment? Does not the will feed both tent and altar.

H. R. Mackintosh, Life on God’s Plan, p. 1.

Common Place People

Gen 26:25

Isaac is the representative of the unimportant but overwhelming majority, and his life and history stood to his descendants, and stand to us, for the glorification of the commonplace.

I. The World’s Useful Drudges. When shall we begin to see the poetry, the beauty, the eternal blessedness of common work; the loyalty, the patriotism, the high Christian service there may be in simply conducting an honest business or filling a commercial situation! Every man who conducts his business with clean hands is helping to bring in universal clean-handedness: every man who fills a situation as it ought to be filled is raising the ideal of service and enriching and beautifying his race. Isaac was not an Empire-builder like Abraham, not a great pathetic heroic figure like Jacob, he was a plain man of affairs. He stuck to his work as a sinker of wells, and for three thousand years men, to whom Abraham was a legend and Jacob a hazy tradition, have drunk of the sweet waters of Beersheba, and blessed the memory of the man who digged that well.

II. The Well-digger’s Blessing. And these things, important in themselves, are also parables of higher things. Your business gives you no time for the work you would so dearly like. It is all you can do to keep things straight in your own little world of trade. Never fear; you will supply your neighbour with an honest article at a reasonable price, and finding employment for those who otherwise might starve, you are digging one of father Isaac’s wells. When with quaking heart you took that class book and tried to start that little class-meeting you digged a well, and thirsty souls have drunk of it and will bless you evermore. Your little Sunday-school class, your mission-room, is a well, and when this life is over for you, men will think and speak in blessing of the man that digged that well.

F. R. Smith, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxx. p. 118.

References. XXVI. 29. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxviii. No. 2238. XXVI. F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 77. XXVII. 1-4. F. W. Robertson, Sermons (4th Series), p. 123. XXVII. 13. A. G. Mortimer, The Church’s Lessons, vol. ii. p. 255. B. Cooper, Fifty-two Family Sermens, p. 247.

Fuente: Expositor’s Dictionary of Text by Robertson

The Wells of Isaac

Gen 26:17-33

If you look at single verses of this chapter you might suppose that Isaac was a very excellent man. If you look at other verses in the same chapter you will find that he was guilty of express and abominable falsehood. Is it not the same chapter which records your life? mine? Our life is not one whole chapter in a solid paragraph, to be read through as if it were but one great sentence: our life-chapter is broken up into verses, punctuated sometimes very strangely and surprisingly. To pick out a single verse from that chapter and say “That is the man” might make us too good; shall I add that to pick out another kind of verse from the same chapter and to say “That is the man” might perhaps hardly do justice to the roundness and the inner most quality and meaning of our character? Believe me we are not quite so good as some little verse in our own life-chapter would seem to imply, and you will believe me when I say that, notwithstanding the blackness of some stinging verses the horrible blasphemy we did not altogether mean it exactly as if might be read by an elocution that was determined against us. Blessed be Heaven! it is not the business of any man to read my life-chapter, nor my business to read any other man’s life-chapter. God will read all the writing a wondrous Reader: skilled in all the holy cunning of love which gets meanings and suggests emphases, and reads up into accents quite out of the way of mere scholarly reading and literary articulation. Jesus Christ has given us an instance of his way of reading, and when he read the chapter to the very people who were supposed to have dictated it by their action, they said “Well, well.” That will be so in the last great reading. Comfort one another with these words. Great meanings will come out of little actions, as great trees come out of little bulbs. Spoken by the Lord, our life’s speech will expand into a noble eloquence, and throb with inexpressible meanings, and heaven will begin in the surprise with which we shall listen to the testimony of him who is above our life. Never exclude the other side of the picture. Let us be frank with ourselves. Some of our neglects may be turned into impeachments; some of our omissions may be charged upon us as high treason against the law of love and trust and obligation. We do not recognise them; we have a way of over-leaping certain spaces in the life, and of referring to some things in whispers; but our neglects may be the beginning of our hell. Suppose we are not guilty of direct, overt, and nameable crimes, we may be charged with omissions you ought to have done this beauteous deed of charity; you ought to have spoken that tender word of comfort, you ought to have visited such and such solitude and turned it into sweet companionship. These are the things we make nothing of. Because we are not guilty of murder, therefore we think we are not guilty of heart-slaughter. God will read the life-chapter at last, and in the reading of it he will divide the universe of humanity into heaven and hell.

What a detestable man Isaac is when he tells lies to the king of the Philistines! Then he goes out well-hunting, as if he deserved to find water in the earth; and, secondly, calls the wells after the names which his father Abraham had given them. What contradictions we are! telling lies to a living king, and sentimentally honouring a dead father. Mean man! has Isaac left any posterity upon the earth? Do we look upon him as an ancient character, or as a modern instance? We are doing the same thing ourselves in some form or way. What if in the very middle of our life there be just one great black lie, and lying outside two or three beautiful touches of sentiment quite a skill in the drawing up of epitaphs, and quite a tearful and watery way of talking about old fathers and old associations? All these speeches make the lie the worse; when we see how little good we might be and might do, it aggravates the central evil of the life into overpowering and intolerable proportions. We never know how profane is the blasphemy until we catch ourselves in prayer. To think that the tongue blackened by that profanity could have also uttered that same prayer! Why, in the contrast is a new accusation and a fresh reproach. But let us follow Isaac in his well-digging. Man must have wells; man must go out of himself and pray to God in digging, if he will not pray in liturgy and uttered hymn and psalm in words. God lays his hand upon us at unexpected places: if we will not fall down upon our knees, we must still bend the proud back and dig in his earth in quest of water. At best we are dependants, seekers, always in quest of something which another hand alone can give us. Oh that men were wise! that in these true and inevitable providences we might see the beginning of inward and spiritual revelations, and that knowing the goodness of God in the gift of water and of bread, we might proceed to know that ineffable goodness which expressed itself in sacrificial and propitiatory blood. From the lower to the higher, I charge thee to go, or else thy reasoning is a base sophism and the beginning of an awful crime. Isaac’s men are now in a little valley through which the summer torrent poured, and it is very dry, and they must seek water, and they dig and find the water of which they were in quest, and then the herdmen of the Philistines said, “The water is ours”; and Isaac called the well Strife Esek . We have dug that well ourselves; you have dug it in your business. Do not suppose that men can find wells and be let alone. If Isaac’s men had found nothing but dust, the men of Gerar would never have spoken to them. It is what you find that excites the surprise, the envy, the opposition of those who are not in sympathy with you. If you sometimes take that view of life, it may help you. If you had plunged your hand into the wild wind and plucked nothing out of it, your unkindest neighbour would not have spoken harshly about you; he would have been rather pleased on the whole, and have treated himself to some new little luxury; but when you bring back news of wells, and mines, and fruit-fields, and harvests plentiful and golden, and then have to enter into contest, do not look so much at the contention as at the prize: take the broader, brighter view of things, even the divine aspect of life’s reality, and remember that all life is after all, through all a contest, a strife, a controversy, a sharp friction.

Isaac took the right course: he said, “Pass on and find another well.” His men “digged another well,” and the men of Gerar “strove for that also: and he called the name of it Sitnah ” Hatred. Who can bear two successes? One might have been forgotten, but repetition is unpardonable. At first, mere strife, contradiction, contention of a worthy sort; and then a settled frown, the awful disgust, the virulent detestation. To that pass may human feeling be driven! Let us beware of it: it hinders prayer, it beclouds heaven, it dries up the beautiful well that springs in the middle of our own heart; or it turns the crystal water rising from that human fountain into a kind of poison. Hatred and love cannot live in the same house. Hatred may seem to expend itself upon the outer object, but in reality it is hurting you more than it is hurting your victim; it takes the angel out of you, it slays your very soul; it chokes the sweet song in your throat, and turns all the milk of human kindness into gall and bitterness. Hatred distorts the countenance into unbeautiful and hideous gnarls; hatred takes out of the voice its frank trustfulness and sympathetic music; hatred takes away the appetite, so that a man’s bread becomes sour in his own mouth; hatred gives the hand a wrong twist in writing letters of love and friendship, so that the readers can see between the lines indications of an unhappy and undivine condition of mind. Hatred does not expend itself upon the victim: it expends itself in the ruin of the soul of the man who hates. He who hates cannot pray; he who hates can offer no sacrifice upon God’s altar that shall be accepted. If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and then rememberest that thou hatest thy brother and hast not forgiven him, or hast been unkind to him, run back, and when thou hast spoken the true and noble word to thy brother, return, and thy mouth shall be opened in prevailing prayer, and God will say Amen in the uptaking of thy sacrifice and placing it in heaven.

Isaac had a sweet nature, too: he was not turned sour by all this, as some of us might have been. The worst issue that these arrangements can produce is an issue of souring the mind of the sufferer, turning him away from social paths as a disappointed and wounded man. Brother, I would I could speak comfortingly to thee herein! Surely, having dug two wells, and been driven away from both of them, there might be some excuse for a little pouting of the lip and hanging down of the head, and a groaning out of bitter words against men. Here I can but preach where I would gladly practise; but the right preaching would tell both you and me that, having been driven away from two wells, dug by our own industry, and secured, as we think, under God’s blessing, by our own skill, we are not justified in complaining impiously; we ought to go straight on, and try to find another well. It is weary work. I do not like people to tell me in a jaunty and cheerful voice that I ought to carry my griefs and disappointments in an airy manner; I prefer the solemn tone that assures me that the grief is noted, is weighed, and is regarded as very serious; but that, after all, the world is bigger than any part of it; the globe is larger than any section of its crust the Lord reigneth, and perhaps I am only driven away from this place that I may find a larger; the disappointment which I now mourn may be the beginning of largess and fortune and benediction and heaven. I will up and go and dig again. Yes, that is the right preaching; and whoever alters his tone, the preacher must never alter his; whilst he stands in his pulpit, with God’s book open before him, and the roof of the sanctuary over his head, he must speak the great word ay, even though in speaking it he be pleading against himself, and convicting his practical life of a breach of every word he has spoken before the bar of God. Our prayer must be right, whatever our life is; our speech must have in it the right tone and music, whatever our poor doing may be. It is our duty to lift up the life to the prayer, and the doing to the speech; meantime, prayer to God and speech to man must be of the royalest kind, imperially pure, inexorable in righteousness, most tender in charity, most radiant in hopefulness.

The leader being of sweet temper, the men went forward “removed from thence and digged another well; and for that the Philistines strove not.” That is the way to wear out an enemy. Hatred does give in sometimes; black, hideous hatred, does sometimes exhaust itself. The Philistine herdmen strove no more, so Isaac said, “We will call this well Rehoboth ” Room, space to live in; a place to stand upon. There is a place for every one of us, could we but find it; some have a long, long search in quest of the right place. Do not let us who stand in circumstances of comfort be the men to chide and sting such with reproaches; what have we that we have not received? It is easy for men who are in great prosperity to sneer at poor strugglers, against whose faces every door is shut and locked and bolted; let us show our refinement by abstaining from vulgar criticism on the difficulties of other men; let us show our gratitude by our sympathy, and let us prove our strength by the moderation of its exercise. The well you have found is God’s gift: your beautiful home, your happy family, your prosperous business. You did not perhaps come to that estate of contentment and enjoyment all at once. Remember the first well you dug, and what a fight you had over it; the second, and how hatred turned you out of the place; and, remembering your own difficulties, have pity upon the fruitless exertions of other men. That may be the beginning of piety; to take a right view of such circumstances may be the dawn of prayer. I shall not despair of you if you have one kind, hopeful word for men who are still at the well of Strife, or at the fountain of Hatred.

After that another well was dug, and Isaac said, “We will call it Sheba ” an oath, a covenant: a settled and unchangeable blessing. So the course of life runs Strife, Hatred, Room, striking of the hands in holy covenant. Happy is the consummation; it is possible to us all under the providence of God. It is a surprising thing that we should have all this friction to pass through, if we look at some aspects of our character; but if we look at other aspects, it is surprising that we have so little discipline to encounter and to endure. Looking at certain aspects of our nature and position we say, “Is it not surprising that we should be called upon to endure all this?” Thus we mistake ourselves for ill-used men of piety. The right speech would be: “This comes of that lie I told the Philistines; God is hurting me now for that base falsehood; this is John the Baptist risen from the dead; this is God’s ghost sent to make ‘night hideous.’ Thanks be unto God that the discipline is so little, so attempered, so adapted to my weakness. When I remember the great lie, the awful deed, the plucking of fruit from the interdicted tree, the treachery, and then think that I have only been driven from two wells, how good is God! I will join the house of Aaron, and say, His mercy endureth for ever.” That is the view I would take of my own life-course, and therefore would exhort other men to follow the same method of judgment. We are not so deeply pious, so supremely holy, that God ought to spare us the prick of a pin, or the thrust of a thorn. Dwelling upon one side of our excellences, we might wonder that God should allow one touch of the goad to disturb us; then we are self-deceivers. I will reckon up the prayers I ought to have prayed but never spoke, the deeds I have done that I ought not to have accomplished; I will reckon up all neglects, all offences against God and man, all the weaknesses of my character; and, adding these up, the wonder is that God has not struck me through and through not merely punctured me with a thorn here and there, but struck me with his seven lightnings, and utterly consumed me from the face of the earth. The trial has been severe, the disappointment has been acute; looked at from various standpoints we may have had too much to bear, but enclosing ourselves within the solemnity of God’s holiness and our own deeds, we cannot but wonder that the men should have been men and not wolves that, springing from hidden places, might have devoured us because of our unrighteousness.

Then there is another and higher aspect It is not necessary that a man’s parents should have sinned that he should be born blind, nor is it necessary to find a crime in order to explain a suffering. This is the course of Jesus Christ himself. He came unto his own, and his own received him not; he came again, and he was despised and rejected of men; he came again, and he is finding room; he is coming again, and he will realise the oath that he shall have the heathen for his inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for a possession. He was made perfect through disappointment and cruelty and wrong, through injustice and suffering. Both sides of this question, therefore, must be carefully looked at, and each man must determine for himself in the secrecy of his own consciousness to which side he ought to look for comfort or for warning.

Speaking of wells, I like the word; it is full of music, there is a plash in it as of the water which it represents. “With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation.” “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” O ye poor well-diggers, digging where there is no water, how long will ye turn your back upon the right way, and be as gods unto your little selves? Why eat stones for bread? Why dig where there is no stream to be found? “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money.” Whosoever will may come. We cannot explain these words: they are not to be treated exegetically, after the manner of analysis or vivisection; but they cannot be uttered sympathetically without touching something in us that tells us we are not earth-born or time-imprisoned, but arc made of God, and are meant for eternity.

Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker

XXVI

ISAAC AND JACOB

Gen 25:19-28:9

We take up the story of Isaac and Jacob. The closing paragraphs of Isaac’s history are recorded in Gen 35:28-29 , his death and burial. There is an old saying, “Blessed is the nation which has no history.” History is devoted to extraordinary events. A thousand years of quiet and peace find no description in the pages of history. A few years of wars, pestilences, and earthquakes receive much attention. Isaac may be called the patriarch without a history.

I wish to refer first to his mother. An examination question will be: What New Testament passages refer favorably to Sarah? The answer in Heb 11 says that she is a woman of faith. By faith she was enabled to bear seed. 2Pe 3:6 , places her above the woman of Peter’s time as a model in subjection and obedience to her husband and the laws of maternal relation. The apostle Paul in Gal 4 makes Sarah the type of the Jerusalem which is above the mother of us all.

We have considered in previous lectures the things which went before Isaac’s birth. As early as Gen 12:3 , God had promised that in Abraham’s seed all the families of men should be blessed, but Abraham thought that could apply to an adopted child as well as a real child. When the promise is spoken a second time, it is expressly stated that it should be his own child. Then Abraham did not know who the mother would be. But the third statement was that it was not only to be his own child, but by his wife, Sarah. So according to Paul, Isaac comes into the world the child of promise, and by a miraculous birth. In this respect he is the type of all Christians who are regenerated, born of supernatural power.

In contrasting Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we find Isaac unlike his father and son in the following particulars: He was unlike them in age. He lived to be 180 years old; neither of them lived that long. In the matter of travel: Isaac never got out of the sight of the smoke that went up from the tent where he was born. With a compass you might draw a circle with a radius of 100 miles around his birthplace as a center, and he was never beyond that circle. He was never north of the city of Jerusalem; east of the river Jordan; south of the South country where Beersheba was; never west of the Mediterranean Sea. No man of his age and with his wealth traveled so little. Again, he was unlike both father and son in his marriage relations. He had but one wife, and she bore him only two children, both at one birth. He was as pure a man in the marriage relation as ever lived in the world. He was unlike both father and son in his passiveness, i.e., he had no spirit of aggression or self-assertion. He was never in a battle. There were very few stirring events in his history. But when you read the lives of Abraham and Jacob many mighty and thrilling events come up. Unlike father and son, he became blind in his old age and nearly helpless. You might say that Jacob’s life commenced with a struggle, and was under the clouds the early years, but about the middle of his life the sun shines out, and the sunset is unclouded. Isaac commenced life with laughter and ended with sorrow. The record tells of his building only one altar, though he may have built others. He offered only one prayer, the prayer for his wife. God appeared to him only twice, but to Jacob and Abraham many times. He was like Abraham in one fault, duplicity concerning his wife to the king of the Philistines. He was like both father and son in being a prophet of God.

The record passes over the happy years of his life, most of the 120 years. If you have read Thomson’s Land and the Book, or any modern book about the South country, you have a vivid description of the kind of land where he lived. No perennial streams, scarcely any trees, bleak mountains and plains, in the spring a beautiful country of flowers, but they last only a short time. I have seen at least forty varieties of them gathered from the fields where Isaac lived. The water question was a great question in his life, as of all the patriarchs, there being little rain and the streams entirely dry the greater part of the year. So they had to dig for water. And one may imagine the growing up of this boy under favorable and happy circumstances, loved by his father and mother, scarcely any troubles, quietly Jiving his life in a tent, amid flowers and flocks and herds.

The record does tell about his trials. I give you a list. They commenced when he was weaned, at three years old. At that time he wag very much persecuted by his big brother, Ishmael, who was fourteen years older. That strong wild boy, superseded by the coming of Isaac, persecuted the little fellow, and if I had to say under what sense of wrong my soul was most indignant in my youth, it would be in observing rude, big boys, being cruel to timid little fellows at school. Nobody can tell through what horrors a timid soul passes in going out in public life and coming in contact with rougher beings. Especially is this true in schools, and where hazing is permitted, it is perfectly awful. The next sorrow was when he was offered up. He was then about twenty and had lived in perfect peace about seventeen years. Next when his mother died. He could not be consoled for several years, because she was everything to him. He was the child of his mother. There is a legend I do not call it history that when Abraham took Isaac to offer him up he told Sarah and broke her heart and caused her death. You don’t get that out of the Bible, however. The next trial is one that a good many children come in touch with, the introducing of a stepmother into the family, but the record does not indicate that there was any trouble between Isaac and his wife and Keturah, the second wife of Abraham. The next, a very great sorrow, was that his wife bore no children. He had been married twenty years, and it troubled him much, knowing the promise of God. But instead of seeking to fulfill the prophecy as Abraham and Sarah had done, he carried the case to God in prayer. The Lord heard him and promised that children should be born to him. The next trial was the death of his father. His twin boys, Jacob and Esau, were about fifteen years old. So the grandfather lived long enough to know the boys thoroughly. The next trouble was when the famine came, and he had to go into the land of the Philistines, and he was afraid that Abimelech or some other ungodly man would kill him in order to get his wife. It does not always follow, however, that other people are as anxious to capture our wives as we think they are. But it nearly happened in this case.

We now come to the culminating period of Isaac’s life, Gen 26:12-28 . He is now in the country of Abimelech: “And Isaac sowed in that land . . . and there Isaac’s servants digged a well.” There Abimelech and Phicol made a covenant with him and from now on his sorrows multiply. The next sorrow arises from a little transaction concerning a mess of pottage. You remember the prophecy that the older child of Isaac should serve the younger. The mother was partial to Jacob. Esau, a man of the plains, and a great hunter, was loved by his father. The mother instructed her son to help out God’s prophecy. She watched her chance. The chance came when Esau returned from hunting, tired and hungry, and Jacob had Just made a pot of red pottage. Esau’s own name meant red-headed, and people don’t have red heads for nothing. Esau said to Jacob, “Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage, for I am faint.” And Jacob said, “I will give it to you if you will acknowledge that the birthright belongs to me.” That was driving a hard bargain, but Esau was so hungry that he sold the birthright. Isaac did not say a word, but in his own mind he determined to bestow the blessing on Esau, because he loved him most. The next trouble comes in Esau’s marriage. Esau married two idolatrous women, and the record states that it was a great grief to Rebekah and Isaac. The next calamity is that Isaac begins to go blind. Next the great deception was practiced on him by his wife and Jacob. Feeling that he might soon pass away he determined as a prophet to bestow the blessing on the firstborn, on Esau. So he told Esau to go out and kill venison and fix him a savory dish. Isaac liked Esau’s venison, somewhat of a sensual man. I am told that it is a characteristic of some preachers these days to like savory dishes, and woe to the preacher who has to preach at night after eating a big dinner of mince pie at twelve o’clock! Rebekah seemed to have a listening ear and heard Isaac talking to Esau. Now she is going to help God out. Isaac willed that Esau should have the birthright. Esau ran to kill the venison. Jacob and Rebekah plotted to defeat him. So she put Esau’s clothing on Jacob, as Esau was a hairy man. Rebekah told him to kill and dress a kid and tell the old man it was venison, and that he was Esau. It was a very villainous transaction. Jacob brought the kid and the father said, “Is this my son Esau?” and Jacob said, “Yes, father.” Isaac said, “Come here, let me feel.” He felt of the garment and said, “The touch is like Esau, but the voice is like Jacob.” Anyhow he ate the dish of kid and pronounced the blessing on Jacob. Here is that blessing in poetic form:

See, the smell of my son

Is as the smell of a field which

Jehovah hath blessed;

And God give thee of the dew of heaven,

And of the fatness of the earth,

And plenty of grain and wine:

Let peoples serve thee,

And nations bow down to thee:

Be lord over thy brethren,

And let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee:

Cursed be every one that curseth thee,

And blessed be every one that blesseth thee.

There Isaac gives Jacob power over his brother, thinking he was giving it to Esau. Now the question arises and Paul argues it in Rom 9 , how could God approve such fraud as that? Well, God did not approve it. Paul says, “It is not of him that willeth.” Isaac willed to give it to Esau. “It is not of him that runneth.” Esau ran to get the venison. It was not of Jacob and his mother, but of the election, God having decreed before the children were born, before either one had done good or evil, that the younger should be the one through whom the Messiah should come.

The most touching thing was when Esau came back: “And it came to pass as soon as Isaac had made an end of blessing Jacob, and Jacob was yet scarce gone out of the presence of Isaac, his father, that Esau, his brother, came in from his hunting. And he also made savoury food, and brought it unto his father; and he said unto his father, Let my father arise, and eat of his son’s venison, that thy soul may bless me. And Isaac, his father, said, Who art thou? And he said, I am thy son, thy firstborn, Esau. And Isaac trembled exceedingly, and said, Who then is he that hath taken venison and brought it me, and I have eaten of all before thou earnest, and have blessed him? Yea, and he shall be blessed. When Esau heard the words of his father, he cried, Bless me, even me, O my father. Jacob hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright, and behold he hath taken my blessing.” And Isaac answered:

Behold, of the fatness of the earth shall be thy dwelling,

And of the dew of heaven from above;

And by thy sword shalt thou live, and thou shalt

serve thy brother;

And it shall be as thou rovest at will, thou wilt

shake off thine enemy.

In one of the old prophets it is said, “Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated.” That refers not to the persons of Jacob and Esau, but to the nationalities. Esau was heathen, and Jacob was Israel. None of this work of election in any particular had anything to do with the character of either. None of it with the wishes of the father and mother. It was God’s sovereign disposition of the case and touched the descendants rather than the two persons. Heb 12:16 brings out the character of Esau a little more plainly: “Lest there be any fornicator or profane person, as Esau, who for one mess of meat sold his birthright. For ye know that when he afterward desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected; for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.” That used to trouble me. It looked like Esau wanted to repent of his sin and God would not forgive him. I will read it to you according to the true rendering: “For he found no place for a change of mind in the father.” It was not Esau’s repentance, but Isaac’s repentance. Don’t ever misapply that scripture. That was a great trouble to Isaac. And as for the rascality of Jacob and Rebekah, they had to bear a heavy burden. Esau determined to kill Jacob and his mother seat him away and never saw him again.

The next thing was the death of his brother Ishmael; then the death of his wife; and afterward the departure of Esau. There he was alone, father, wife, brother dead, one son banished and another gone away. Then Jacob came and comforted him in his last illness. I have given you an outline of the sorrows of Isaac, but there are really two that I have not mentioned, viz.: Jacob had gotten to the Holy Land on his return, but had not reached his father’s house when Rachel died. Isaac was living, but he never got to see Rachel. Joseph was sold into slavery and Isaac never saw him, then comes the death of Isaac.

Let us look at the character of this man. He was intensely religious, domestic and peaceful; passive in his resistance to evil and in one event of his life a type of Christ; when he got to the mountain he carried the wood upon which he was to be offered as Christ bore his own cross until he fainted. A type of the Christian is his miraculous birth. When we come to consider Jacob and Esau further attention will be given to these details. In the grave of Machpelah, by the side of his father Abraham, and mother Sarah, Isaac and his wife Rebekah were buried. And to this day the Arabs point to the casket which contains the remains. This is the culminating period of the prosperity in the life of Isaac. So we now pass to the

HISTORY OF JACOB In the first of the chapter on Isaac we have necessarily considered somewhat the incidents of Jacob’s life up to the time that he left his father’s home. It was then said that those incidents would be examined more particularly when we studied Jacob’s own life. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in reply to the question, How early should the education of a child begin? replied, “Commence with his grandmother.” To a great extent certainly most lives are the mixed results of preceding forces. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, are all in some degree reproduced in Jacob. Oliver Wendell Holmes also says, “A man is an omnibus in which all his ancestors ride.” Don’t forget these two quotations. This thought he embodies and illustrates in his book Elsie Venner. The object of that book was to show how conflicting ancestral traits struggled for supremacy in this girl. We might add that every life is a result of many forces, including the following: (1) God; (2) the devil; (3) heredity; (4) individuality; (5) environment; (6) opportunity; (7) education; (8) habits. We will be little prepared to analyze or comprehend Jacob’s life, if we lose sight of any one of these forces. So far in Jacob’s life individuality has bad but limited place, since he has been under the dominion, or domination, of his mother. Individuality comes most into play when we are thrown upon our own resources, and are responsible for our own decisions and have to make our own way. We will find in this history that Jacob appears to much greater advantage when his own individuality comes into play than when he was under the influence of another. We will find the value of his past habits in his taking care of himself and making a support, and that, too, under very adverse conditions, more adverse than that of any of you boys, hard as you think your lot is. We are going to like Jacob a great deal better as we get on in his history than we do at the start. It has been well said that no hunter is a good businessman. This holds good from Esau to Rip Van Winkle. The domestic habits of Jacob, and his training in caring for flocks and herds, serve him well in after life. From his mother and her family comes his shrewd business sense. Woe to the man who expects to get rich trading with Jacob. He is a prototype of all Yankees and modern Jews in driving close bargains. Hunter Esau was the first victim to “cut his eye-teeth” on that fact.

But before we study the individuality as manifested when thrown upon his own resources, we must refresh our minds with a backward glance at his history as given in previous chapters. His parentage, Isaac, son of Abraham, and Rebekah, granddaughter of Nahor, Abraham’s brother. But a mightier factor than parental influence or heredity touches him. Prophecies and mighty doctrines were on their way toward him before be began to be. God comes before parents. The divine purpose and the divine election touching his life will look far beyond the personal Jacob, and be far above and paramount over affection, will, weakness, or duplicity of parent or child, long after the earthly actors are dead. Yea, into thousands of years of the future the foreknowledge, predestination and election of God will project themselves until the whole human race becomes involved in Jacob, and until eternity and everlasting destiny comes. Deep and wide as may be this shoreless ocean of the divine purpose, we are permitted to look at it, so far as revealed, though it be unnavigable by the human reason. Prophecies: The first prophecy directly affecting. Jacob is God’s answer to the mother’s inquiry concerning the infants in her womb. “Two nations are in thy womb, and two peoples shall be separated therefrom, and one shall be stronger than the other people and the elder shall serve the younger.” This prophecy evidently refers not so much to the boys themselves as to their descendants. Indeed in its wider significance it concerns all nations more than the two nations. So referring, it considers neither parental bias, nor character of either child. It is not a divine decree fixing the eternal destiny of either child. For reasons sufficient to himself, God of his own will selects one of these nations to become his people and through whom he will savingly reach all other peoples. The second relevant prophecy appears in Isaac’s blessing on Jacob: “And God give thee of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth, plenty of grain and new wine.” That is temporal. “Let peoples serve thee and nations bow down to thee.” That is national. That refers to the primogeniture. “Cursed be every one that curseth thee and blessed be every one that blesseth thee.” That is the prophecy of the twenty-seventh chapter. This prophecy is restated and enlarged in the blessing on Esau, as follows: “And thou shalt serve thy brother, but it shall come to pass, when thou shalt break loose, thou shalt shake his yoke off thy neck” (Gen 24:40 ). These two prophecies, like the first, find their real meaning in the descendant nations, rather than in Jacob and Esau personally. Esau himself never served Jacob himself. Their application to the nations rather than to the brothers themselves appears in the last Old Testament book, Mal 1:2-5 : “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith Jehovah, yet I loved Jacob, but Esau I hated, and made his mountains a desolation.” It is evident that Malachi in his day, thousands of years after Jacob and Esau, is not discussing the two men personally, but Jacob the people, and Edom, Esau’s people. This national application is also evident from Paul’s use of the Genesis and Malachi quotations in Rom 9:10-13 . He is there discussing God’s election of Israel to be his people, and how that nation, on account of infidelity, was cast off and the Gentiles took their places. He is proving that doctrine from this quotation from Malachi. All this prophecy, Paul says, illustrates God’s sovereign election. But so far it is the election of a nation. Personal election of an individual Christian is not so far discussed. The personal privilege conferred in this is the primogeniture conferred on Jacob. In what did this right consist? I am sure to ask that question on examination. The answer is: (1) Rule in family and tribe; (2) A double portion of the inheritance (Deu 2:17 ); (3) The priesthood of the family and the high priesthood of the tribe. In England the right of primogeniture still prevails to a large extent. The eldest son inherits the father’s estate, and in order to support that property they have the “Law of Entail,” that the property cannot be alienated, but must pass down to each first son. The income may be used in providing a portion for the other children, but the principal must remain intact. That is one of the special privileges our forefathers objected to. Jefferson and his colaborers determined to abolish both of these laws as far as they applied to America. The history of Virginia shows various steps of legislation undertaken by Jefferson, and aided particularly by the Baptists, in destroying these laws. A man may bequeath his property by will, but that will is subject to legal investigations. It can be broken if he unjustly deprive any child of a fair share of the inheritance. The original prophecy that the elder should serve the younger was never forgotten by the mother, and through her it was made known to her favorite son, Jacob. In both of them arose a desire to hasten the fulfillment of that prophecy. Like Sarah, their impatience could not wait for God himself to fulfill his word. Now comes another examination question, What was the first step taken to hasten its fulfillment? That mess of pottage business. I will not recite the history, but I will ask you on examination to analyze Jacob’s sin in that transaction, and Esau’s sin. The analysis of Jacob’s sin is: (1) Presumption toward God by human instrumentality to hurry up God’s purpose. (2) Unfilial toward Isaac. (3) Unfraternal and inhuman toward Esau to take advantage of his extremity by a sharp bargain. (4) It was snatching at a promise before it was ripe. The doctrine involved is: You may do evil to bring about a good thing. That is the doctrine of the Jesuits, abhorrent to God’s Word. This evil rather delayed matters. It brought on Jacob the intense hatred of Esau. The analysis of Esau’s sin is: (1) He was sensual; the satisfaction of present desire seemed greater than future blessing. (2) There was profanity in his sin; he despised the sacred primogeniture. How does the Old Testament characterize Esau’s sin? “He despised the birthright.” How does the New Testament? “He was guilty of profanity.” Any act of irreverence is profanity. There has come a proverb from that transaction: “Don’t sell your birthright.” Who has written a book entitled The Mess of Pottage You will find it in the book stores, but I do not recommend it to you. Ben Franklin has a similar proverb. When he was small, a man had a whistle which he made very attractive. Ben Franklin, so intense in his desire to get that whistle, gave the man everything he had. But when he walked off he felt very much dissatisfied; it did not whistle as well as he thought it would. It taught him this: Never pay too much for a whistle. John Bunyan, in Pilgrim’s Progress, has a picture hanging in the interpreter’s house: Two boys, Patience and Passion. Passion rushes up and says, “Father, give me all my goods right now.” The father gives him the goods and he soon spends all. But Patience waits for the right time. Many people are so governed by appetite that though they may know that the commission of an offense will wreck their future career, they forget the future in their lust.

What was the second step to hasten the fulfillment of the promise? It consists in the concerted action between Rebekah and Jacob to deceive blind old Isaac and have him bless Jacob, confirming the right of primogeniture. I shall now proceed to analyze the sin of Rebekah in this transaction. Rebekah’s sin consisted in presumption toward God in doing an evil thing and in the overweening power over Jacob’s character, who did.. not want to do it. “Honoring the mother,” was carried beyond the legitimate limit. Children ought not to obey their parents in committing a crime. Jacob’s sin consisted in making his mother’s desire greater than the promptings of conscience and regard for God’s will. This did not help the purpose a particle. How does the New Testament show that it did not help the purpose? “It is not to him that willeth, like Isaac, nor to him that runneth, like Esau, but it was of God.” It intensified Esau’s hatred against his brother: “He cheated me out of my birthright by trade, and now out of my father’s blessing. I will kill him.” Esau was the fellow to do it. He would boil over, and in anger would kill anybody. So to save the favorite child the mother sent him away and never saw him again. She did not make anything, “but it is true that both of these evil steps were overruled by the providence of God for good.

QUESTIONS 1. Why may Isaac be called a “patriarch without a history”?

2. What New Testament passages refer favorably to Sarah?

3. What three revelations to Abraham concerning the “child of promise” and of what is this child in his birth a type?

4. In what respects of life and character did Isaac differ from his father, Abraham, and his son, Jacob?

5. For what does the New Testament commend him? (Heb 11:20 .)

6. Describe the land where he lived. What was the great problem of his life?

7. Though the most of Isaac’s life was joyful and peaceful, he had some trials and sorrows. Tell them.

8. Cite scripture showing culmination of Isaac’s prosperity.

9. In which one of the trials was he a type of our Lord?

10. What prophecy was Jacob trying to have fulfilled in the “mess of pottage” translation? Was it right to seek its fulfillment in this way?

11. How did Isaac undertake to nullify the trade between Jacob and Esau and how was his plan defeated?

12. Did God approve such transaction and what Paul’s explanation of it?

13. What pathetic incident followed and what was the blessing upon Esau?

14. What is the meaning of the name “Jacob” and from what incident originated?

15. What is the meaning of “Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated”?

16. Give the character of Esau as interpreted in the New Testament and what other name had Esau?

17. In Heb 12:17 , was the blessing that Esau vainly sought salvation? Explain, then, the passage: “He found no place for repentance, though he sought carefully with tears.”

18. What two sad events after Jacob’s return to the Holy Land before he reached his father’s house?

19. Describe the character of Isaac and in what was he a type of Christ?

20. With whom, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, must a child’s education begin?

21. What other saying of his bears on heredity?

22. What book did he write on ancestral traits?

23. What forces are factors in every human life?

24. When does individuality come most into play and the application to Jacob?

25. What was the mightiest force that touched Jacob, what was the prophecies concerning him and what is the application of these prophecies?

26. What was Paul’s use of the first of these prophecies together with Mal 1:2-5 ?

27. What was the personal privilege conferred on Jacob in these prophecies and blessings?

28. In what did the right of primogeniture consist and what traces of this in history?

29. Analyze Jacob’s and Esau’s sin in the “mess of pottage” transaction and what was the doctrine involved?

30. How does the Old Testament characterize Esau’s sin? The New Testament?

31. What is profanity and what proverb from the transaction? Illustrate.

32. What were the sins of Isaac, Rebekah, Esau, and Jacob, respectively, in the transaction about the blessing?

Fuente: B.H. Carroll’s An Interpretation of the English Bible

Gen 26:1 And there was a famine in the land, beside the first famine that was in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went unto Abimelech king of the Philistines unto Gerar.

Ver. 1. Beside the first famine. ] New sins bring new plagues Flagitium et flagellura, ut acus et filum. Where iniquity breakfasts, calamity will be sure to dine – to sup where it dines, and to lodge where it sups. If the Canaanites had amended by the former famine, this later had been prevented; for “God afflicts not willingly, nor grieves the children of men”. Lam 3:35 Polybius wonders why man should be held the wisest of creatures, when to him he seemeth the foolishest. For other things, saith he, where they have smarted once will beware for the future. The fox will not rashly return to the snare; the wolf to the pitfall, the dog to the club, &c. Solus homo, ab aevo ad aevum peccat fere in iisdem, et in iisdem plectitur. Only man is neither weary of sinning, nor wary of smarting for it.

And Isaac went to Abimelech. ] As Abraham had done before to Pharaoh. Gen 12:10 The trials of God’s servants, in several ages, are much alike: we suffer the same things that our betters have done afore us: which both Paul and Peter press as a lenitive to our miseries, and a motive to patience. 1Co 10:13 1Pe 5:9 The same fable is acted over again in the world, as of old; the persons only changed. “That which hath been, is now; and that which is to be, hath already been”: “and there is no new thing under the sun,” saith Solomon. Ecc 3:15 ; Ecc 1:9-10

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

NASB (UPDATED) TEXT: Gen 26:1-5

1Now there was a famine in the land, besides the previous famine that had occurred in the days of Abraham. So Isaac went to Gerar, to Abimelech king of the Philistines. 2The LORD appeared to him and said, “Do not go down to Egypt; stay in the land of which I shall tell you. 3Sojourn in this land and I will be with you and bless you, for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will establish the oath which I swore to your father Abraham. 4I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven, and will give your descendants all these lands; and by your descendants all the nations of the earth shall be blessed; 5because Abraham obeyed Me and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes and My laws.”

Gen 26:1 “Now there was a famine in the land” This is very similar to the occurrences in Gen 12:10 that forced Abraham to leave the Promised Land.

“So Isaac went to Gerar, to Abimelech king of the Philistines” The Philistines were a mercenary people from the islands of the Aegean. They attempted to invade Egypt, but were repulsed and so they settled in the southwestern coast of Palestine, somewhere around 1200 B.C. Because the name Abimelech is mentioned earlier in Gen 21:22, this must have been the common name to denote all of the Philistine kings. This is similar to the use of Hadad in Syria and Pharaoh in Egypt.

It is surely possible that

1. there were earlier Philistine tradesmen in Canaan

2. that a Canaanite group merged with the Philistines and this name is an anachronism

3. Philistines are listed in Gen 10:6-20 coming from Ham and the Canaanites, not Japheth (Islands of the Aegean). It is possible the name refers to several groups associated with Palestine/Canaan (NIDOTTE, vol. 4, p. 1049).

Gen 26:2-3 YHWH’s appearance to Isaac has several directives and promises.

1. “do not go down to Egypt,” Gen 26:2, BDB 432, KB 434, Qal IMPERFECT used in a JUSSIVE sense

2. “stay in the land,” Gen 26:2, BDB 1014, KB 1496, Qal IMPERATIVE

3. “sojourn in this land,” Gen 26:3, BDB 157, KB 184, Qal IMPERATIVE

4. “I will be with you,” Gen 26:3, BDB 224, KB 243, Qal IMPERFECT used in a COHORTATIVE sense

5. “I will bless you,” Gen 26:3, BDB 138, KB 159, Piel IMPERFECT used in a COHORTATIVE sense

6. “I will give all these lands,” Gen 26:3, BDB 678, KB 733, Qal IMPERFECT used in a COHORTATIVE sense

Gen 26:2 “and the LORD appeared to him and said, ‘Do not go down to Egypt'” This may have been because of Abraham’s experience in Egypt or because Isaac needed to trust God for provision in the Promised Land.

Gen 26:3 “I will be with you and bless you” This again is a reaffirmation, not only of God’s presence (cf. Gen 28:15; Gen 31:3), but His blessings and a reaffirmation of the covenant.

“and I will establish the oath which I swore to your father Abraham” This is a reference to God’s special promises to Abraham which are found in Genesis 12, 15, 17, 22.

The VERB “establish” (BDB 877, KB 1086, Hiphil PERFECT) is used several times in Genesis.

1. to establish or ratify a covenant, cf. Gen 6:18; Gen 9:9; Gen 9:11; Gen 17:7; Gen 17:19; Gen 17:21

2. give effect to or confirm the covenant, Gen 26:3 (note Lev 26:9; Deu 8:18)

Gen 26:4 There seem to be three specific promises mentioned: (1) abundant descendants; (2) land (cf. Gen 12:7; Gen 15:18-19; Gen 17:7-8; Gen 26:1-5; Gen 28:10-15; Gen 35:12); and (3) all the nations of the earth would be blessed through Isaac and his descendants.

“as the stars of heaven” This had been mentioned earlier to Abraham in Gen 15:5; Gen 22:17. The other two metaphors used by God to describe their fruitfulness were the sand of the sea and the dust of the earth.

“all these lands” This was part of the promise to Abraham (cf. Gen 12:7; Gen 13:15; Gen 15:18; Gen 17:8).

“all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” This phrase is literally interpreted “shall bless themselves.” There are two distinct VERBAL forms of this promise. The Niphal is found in Gen 12:3; Gen 18:18; Gen 28:14. It is also quoted in the NT in Act 3:25; Gal 3:8. Gen 26:4 is in the Hithpael, which is found only here and in Gen 22:16-18 and should properly be translated “shall bless themselves.” In truth, there is little difference between “bless themselves” and “shall be blessed.” As a matter of fact the Septuagint translation makes no distinction between these VERBAL forms at all. The obvious, tremendous blessing is that through Abraham and his children God was seeking to bless the entire world. God chose one man to choose a nation to choose a world. We must keep in mind that the Jews were chosen, not for a special blessing, but as an instrument for the redemptive blessing to come to all men. Israel was always meant to be a kingdom of priests (cf. Exo 19:5-6). See Special Topic: YHWH’s Eternal Redemptive Plan .

Gen 26:5 “because Abraham obeyed Me and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws” The two VERBS in this verse emphasize the human aspect of the covenant (cf. Gen 12:1; Gen 17:1; Gen 17:9-14; Gen 22:16; Gen 26:3-5).

1. “obeyed” (lit. “hear so as to do”), BDB 1033, KB 1570, Qal IMPERFECT

2. “kept,” BDB 1036, KB 1581, Qal IMPERFECT

Both denote ongoing action.

There is a real (and purposeful) tension between God’s free grace given to one human/nation to call all humans/nations (cf. the unconditional action of God in Gen 15:12-21) and the recurring mentioning of obedience (i.e., the conditional nature of God’s promises). Both are true! Human performance does not bring fallen humans into Divine acceptance. However, once we have had an encounter with Him, we cannot be unaffected, unchanged (cf. Eph 1:4; Eph 2:8-10). The goal of God is a righteous people to bring the nations to Himself. The danger is a free grace with no conditions and a merited grace with many conditions. The New Covenant of Jer 31:31-34 and Eze 36:22-38 show us the waya new heart, a new mind, a new spirit. God’s external code becomes an internal mandate.

The listing of “charge” (BDB 1038), “commandments” (BDB 846), “statutes” (BDB 349), and “laws” (BDB 435) is found only here in the early books of Genesis – Numbers, but appears often in Deuteronomy. See Special Topic: Terms for God’s Revelation following the next paragraph.

This seems to be an allusion to Gen 15:6. In this account, Abraham’s belief that he would have a child was taken by God as an act of faith and was reckoned unto Abraham as righteousness. This significant OT passage is used as the theological underpinnings by the Apostle Paul for the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, explicated so beautifully in Romans 4 and Galatians 2-3. The word “laws” here is the first use of the term “Torah” (BDB 435), which is a Hebrew word meaning “teachings” or “guidelines.” This term came to be the title for the first five books of Moses.

Notice the repetition of the personal PRONOUN!

SPECIAL TOPIC: TERMS FOR GOD’S REVELATION (using Deuteronomy and Psalms)

Fuente: You Can Understand the Bible: Study Guide Commentary Series by Bob Utley

famine. Accounts for Esau’s despair of living, and hence selling his birthright. Gen 25:29-34.

first. One of the thirteen famines. See note on Gen 12:10.

Abimelech = official name. Not the same as Gen 20:2.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

CHAPTER 26

Now there was a famine in the land, beside the first famine that was in the days of Abraham. [And like father, like son,] Isaac went to Abimelech the king of the Philistines unto Gerar ( Gen 26:1 ).

Now, it was to Abimelech that Abraham went, but certainly not the same one that Isaac went to because this is a hundred years later, more than a hundred years later. So Abimelech was sort of a title of the king of the Philistines. And so Isaac went unto the land of the Philistines

And the Lord appeared unto him, and said, Don’t go down to Egypt; dwell in the land which I will tell thee of ( Gen 26:2 ):

Now this is God’s direct command: “Don’t go down to Egypt. Dwell in the land I show you”.

Sojourn in this land, and I will be with thee, and will bless thee; for unto thee, and unto thy seed, I’m gonna give these countries, and I will perform the oath which I swore to Abraham thy father. And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and I will give unto thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed ( Gen 26:3-4 );

And so now God visits Isaac as he is going over to the land of the Philistines. God comes to him and visits and reiterates to Isaac the promise he had made to Abraham. The land is gonna be yours. I’m gonna multiply your seed, but then the heart of the thing is “through thy seed shall all of the nations of the earth be blessed”. Not plural, but singular, referring to Jesus Christ; so the promise of the Messiah to comedown through Isaac. And thus, reiterated, the promise that he had made to Abraham, now that same covenant and promise is passed on to Isaac at this particular time in his life.

Because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws ( Gen 26:5 ).

So really it is because of Abraham that the promises come and Isaac is the beneficiary even of his father’s faithfulness.

And Isaac dwelled at Gerar. Now the men of the place asked him about his wife; and he said [like I said, father like son], She’s my sister: for he feared to say, She is my wife; lest, the men of the place would kill me for Rebekah; because she was still beautiful to look upon. And it came to pass, when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech the king of the Philistines looked out at the window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife [making love]. And Abimelech called Isaac, and said, Behold, of a surety she is your wife: how is it that you said she is your sister? And Isaac said to him, Because I said, Lest I die for her. And Abimelech said, What is this you have done to us? one of the people might lightly have lien [have laid] with your wife, and you should have brought guiltiness upon us. And Abimelech charged all of his people, saying, He that toucheth this man or his wife shall surely be put to death. Then Isaac sowed in the land, and received in the same year a hundredfold: and the Lord blessed him ( Gen 26:6-12 ).

So the king put out a protective custody over him, saying no one was to touch him or his wife. And Isaac went out and sowed and planted and God blessed it and he reaped a hundredfold from his planting.

And Isaac waxed great, and went forward, and grew until he became very great: For he had a possession of flocks, and a possession of herds, and a great store of servants: and the Philistines envied him. For all of the wells which his father’s servants had digged in the days of Abraham, the Philistines had stopped them, and filled them with earth. And Abimelech said unto Isaac, Go from us; for thou art much mightier than we ( Gen 26:13-16 ).

So the same thing that happened to Abraham; they saw the blessing and the work of God upon his life and they became fearful of Abraham. And now Abimelech is doing the same thing concerning Isaac. Seeing the fact that God’s hand is so much upon him and the greatness of his wealth and all, he became fearful and they asked him to leave.

And so Isaac departed from there, and he pitched his tent in the valley of Garer, and he dwelt there. And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called the names after the names which his father had called them. And Isaac’s servants digged in the valley, and they found there an artesian well. And the herdmen of Gerar did strive with Isaac’s herdmen, saying, The water is ours: and he called the name of the well “Strife;” because they strove with him. And he digged another well, and they strove for that also: and so he called it contention; And so he removed from there, and he digged another well; and for that one they did not strive: and he called it roominess; for he said, The Lord has made room for all of us, and we will be fruitful in the land. So he went up from there to Beersheeba. And the Lord appeared unto him in the same night, and said ( Gen 26:17-24 ),

Now again, God is appearing to him just like he appeared earlier as he returned. Now though,

I am the God of Abraham thy father: fear not for I am with thee, and will bless thee, and multiply thy seed for my servant Abraham’s sake ( Gen 26:24 ).

“Fear not, for I am with thee”. The presence of God in our lives should be sufficient to dispel all fears. We only get frightened when we forget that God is with us. If you get all filled with fear and just all shook and upset, it means one thing: you’ve forgotten that God is with you. “Fear not”, God said, “for I am with thee”. How many times had God made that the basis of dispelling fear? “Fear not, for I am with thee”. Be not dismayed, for I am thy God; I will help thee. I will strengthen thee. Yea, I will hold thee by the right hand of my righteousness ( Isa 41:10 ). “The Lord is my helper” David cried “of whom shall I be afraid?” “Fear not, I am with thee”, and for Abraham’s sake I’m gonna bless thee.

And so Isaac built an altar there, and called upon the name of the LORD, and he pitched his tent there: and there Isaac’s servants digged a well. And then Abimelech came to him from Gerar, with Ahuzzath one of his friends, and Phichol the chief captain of his army [which is the title of the army general]. And Isaac said unto them, Hey why have you come to me, seeing you hate me, and you kicked me out. And they said, We have seen that the Lord is certainly with you: and we said, Let us now make a treaty between us, a covenant with you; That you will not hurt us, for we didn’t touch you, and we have done nothing to you but good, and we have sent you away in peace: and now you’re blessed of the LORD. And so he made them a feast, and they did eat and drink. And they rose up in the morning, and swore one to another: and Isaac sent them away, and they departed from him in peace. And it came to pass the same day, that Isaac’s servants came, and told him concerning the well which they had dug, and they said, We have found water. And so he called it Shebah: therefore the name of the city is Beersheeba unto this day. And Esau was forty years old when he took a wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite: Which were a grief in the mind unto Isaac and Rebekah ( Gen 26:25-35 ).

So Esau, forty years old now, and he married a couple of girls of the Canaanites from the Hittite tribe. And these girls were just a heartache to Rebekah and to Isaac. Probably were so imbued with the customs of their own culture, and all, and probably their own gods that they worshipped, that it was just a heartbreak for Rebekah and Isaac. There wasn’t really good fellowship with these daughters-in-law. There was just too much diversity for them to be close and have a close fellowship. So they became sort of a burden and a heartache to Rebekah and Isaac. And that is why, one of the reasons why, they encouraged Jacob to go back and to get his bride from the family of Abraham, back in the area of Haran again. Because Esau’s brides, they were just a mess, and brought no joy to Isaac and Rebekah. “

Fuente: Through the Bible Commentary

We have here the account of the first direct divine communication of Jehovah to Isaac. It came in a time of difficulty such as that which had caused his father to go down into Egypt. Warned against repeating that folly, he was thus saved from making his father’s mistake. Strangely enough, however, he repeated the folly of his father in Gerar in connection with Abimelech. The story reminds us that there is no richer inheritance into which a man can enter than a godly parentage, but that, after all, every man has to fight his own battles and work out his own salvation.

The quiet patience of Isaac is manifested in the matter of the wells. He first proceeded to dig again the wells of his father Abraham. His servants then dug a new well, for which the Philistine herdsmen contended, and he called it Esek, that is, Contention. Still persevering, they dug another and this was followed by further strife. This well Isaac named Sitnah, which means enmity. Again they dug and no contention followed. All this was the calm persistence of faith.

Returning from Gerar to Beersheba, Jehovah made His second direct communication to Isaac. It would seem as though this communication followed Isaac’s return to his own proper place. It was of the nature of the ratification of the covenant, and Isaac at once responded in a way which indicated his fidelity in heart to the principle of faith. He built an altar and pitched a tent. This action was followed by a visit from Abimelech and a covenant between him and Isaac very similar to that made between Abraham and Abimelech.

In the story we see how faith operates in the case of such quieter and less adventurous natures.

Fuente: An Exposition on the Whole Bible

Isaac Is Blessed and Grows Rich

Gen 26:1-17

There was no harm in Isaacs going to Gerar, as he had a distinct command to that effect, Gen 26:2-3. But he does not seem to have been strong enough to stand the test of residence there. He might have received into his soul that sufficient grace which is always within the reach of tempted men; but, like so many of us, he looked down and not up. What could have been more reassuring than the promises of the divine presence and blessing! But he was guilty of incredible meanness to the woman who had come so far to be his wife, and of deceit to Abimelech. Notice how the sins of the fathers repeat themselves in the children! It was a disappointing lapse from the glorious height on which he had stood when he yielded himself to Gods call on Mount Moriah! But we have experienced the same contrasts within ourselves. Now on the mount of transfiguration, asking to live there, and then in the valley, quarreling for pre-eminence. But, notwithstanding all, Gods loving-kindness does not fail. See Gen 26:12.

Fuente: F.B. Meyer’s Through the Bible Commentary

Gen 26:20-22, Gen 26:33

These four names are the names of four wells of springing water, dug in a valley, to feed families and flocks. Esek means strife; Sitnah, hatred; Rehoboth, room; and Shebah, oath. Have you not been at them all?

I. When you began life you found people trying to put you down by saying that the well was theirs, and that you were crowding yourself upon their grounds. If they did not try to put you down, you tried to put them down. The well is there in life,-strife, contention, debate,-you must find it in your life somewhere.

II. If you drive people off the ground, they may strive with you no more. They will hate you: your name will be the signal for abuse. First you are opposed, then you are hated, so you call it Sitnah-hatred-the second well. Human nature is so far astray that it tends to hatred in all men’s lives; they either receive it or give it: it is human nature, and human nature cannot permanently conceal itself.

III. Then you come to the third stage, if you are not killed. Some find a grave at Esek, others die at Sitnah, and are buried beside the waters of hatred. But perhaps you have heavenly elements enough to get beyond the second stage. You are hated, but you keep digging away, and at last room is made for you-room, Rehoboth. You are recognised, you are looked for, and missed if you do not come.

IV. If you have got to Rehoboth, is there anything to hinder you from going on? The next step is easy: confidence-rest. Be not discouraged: move on honestly, laboriously, religiously. Go on: that is your duty in two words. Life is full of difficulty. It is through tribulation that you get into any kingdom worth anything. In Christ we are called to strife. His words are: “In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

Parker, The Fountain, April 28th, 1881.

Reference: Gen 26:17-33.-Parker, vol. i., p. 254.

Gen 26:34-35

I. Esau was forty years old when he married. A sin is aggravated, sometimes, by the age of the sinner. Some men learn nothing by age: they are forty years old on the books of the registrar; they are no age at all in the books of wisdom.

II. Esau’s wives were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah. Sin has consequences. Actions are not solitary and uninfluential; they have relations to other actions and to influences simply innumerable and incalculable.

III. A sin does not confine itself to one line of punishment. Esau went against the law of his country and his people in marrying Canaanitish women. What was the punishment? Endless, ubiquitous, complete: (1) Esau was alienated from his family; (2) he was a rebel against the laws of organised society; (3) he forfeited his hereditary rights.

The law of the land was: To marry a Canaanitish woman is to lose your primogeniture. Esau supplanted himself. Find out the roots and beginnings of things, and you will always discover that a man is his own supplanter, his own enemy.

Parker, vol. i., p. 261.

References: Gen 27-Expositor, 2nd series, vol. viii., p. 67; R. S. Candlish, Book of Genesis, vol. i., p. 456; F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 85; M. Dods, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, p. 61; Parker, vol. i., p. 268. Gen 27:1-4.-F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 4th series, p. 123. Gen 27:1-41.-Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. iv., p. 96. Gen 27:13.-E. Cooper, Fifty-two Family Sermons, p. 247. Gen 27:28.-New Manual of Sunday School Addresses, p. 16.

Fuente: The Sermon Bible

CHAPTER 26 Isaac in Gerar

1. The famine (Gen 26:1)

2. Jehovah appears unto Isaac (Gen 26:2-5)

3. Isaac in Gerar where he denies Rebekah (Gen 26:6-11)

4. Isaacs prosperity and the digging of wells (Gen 26:12-22)

5. Jehovah appears at Beersheba (Gen 26:23-25)

6. Isaac and Abimelech (Gen 26:26-33)

7. The wives of Esau (Gen 26:34-35)

When the famine came Jehovah commanded Isaac not to go to Egypt. As Isaac is the type of Christ risen from the dead and Egypt is the type of the world, this command has a significance. Isaac is separated from Egypt as Christ and His people are, who share in Him a heavenly place. We also notice, while the Lord spoke to Abraham that his seed should be like the sand of the sea (the natural descendants) and the stars of heaven (the spiritual seed) to Isaac the Lord promises the seed as the stars of Heaven; this confirms the typical character of Isaac.

In Gerar he failed as his father failed. And while Sarah was seized by Abimelech, Rebekah is not touched nor separated from Isaac. Christ and His church are inseparable.

The digging of the wells and Isaacs patience fully manifests his character; a little picture of the patient suffering of the Son of God who when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not. Then Jehovah appeared unto him again and he receives still greater blessings as the reward of his obedience.

When Esau was 40 years old he manifested his defiance still more by taking wives of the Hittites to the grief of his parents.

Fuente: Gaebelein’s Annotated Bible (Commentary)

famine

(See Scofield “Gen 12:10”).

Fuente: Scofield Reference Bible Notes

am 2200, bc 1804

the first: Gen 12:10

And Isaac: Gen 25:11

Abimelech: Gen 20:2, Gen 21:22-32

Reciprocal: Gen 10:19 – Gerar Gen 20:1 – Gerar Gen 24:17 – water of Gen 42:5 – for Jos 13:2 – borders Rth 1:1 – a famine 2Sa 21:1 – a famine 2Ki 8:1 – sojourn 2Ch 14:13 – Gerar

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

Where faith exists in any of us, it is ever God’s way to test it, as we have seen very clearly in the case of Abraham. The faith of Isaac, though less robust than that of his father, must now be subjected to a test. Canaan was watered with rain from heaven, and if the rain was withheld famine supervened. Egypt was watered by its famous river, and usually was the land of plenty. So when famine again descended on Canaan, Isaac’s steps would naturally turn towards Egypt. But the word of the Lord to him was that Egypt was forbidden. He was to stay in the land and in spite of appearances God would bless him there and fulfil all that had been promised to Abraham. So Isaac descended to the coastal region, inhabited by the Philistines, and there for a time he dwelt.

But settling down amongst these people, there came the same test as confronted his father, and he met it in the same way, by subterfuge. Now subterfuge, practised by men of the world, may have considerable success; practised by a saint of God it always ends in failure, sooner or later. In Isaac’s case it seemed to answer for a considerable time but at length the Abimelech of those days discovered the truth. Consequently we find again a man of the world, marked by a considerable measure of uprightness, rebuking the saint of God – a sorrowful sight! But one which has often been repeated from that day to this. Let each of us be careful lest it be repeated in our own history.

Nevertheless God did not forsake Isaac because of this lapse on his part. He had obeyed the instruction not to descend into Egypt and hence, in spite of the famine, God blessed him abundantly in his sowing, his flocks and herds and servants, so much so that he had to depart from the Philistine’s land. In those days the Philistines were not numerous, since Abimelech, their king, had to confess that Isaac’s large household had become mightier than they were. But one thing they had done to Isaac’s disadvantage, as verse Gen 26:15 records; they had filled the wells with earth.

In that land everything depended upon the well-springs, that made the rain of heaven available; hence the well becomes symbolic of the source of life and fertility, and ultimately of the Holy Spirit, springing up into life and blessing. The wells had been dug through Abraham, the man of faith, but the Philistines had stopped them with earth. Presently in Scripture we hear a great deal about the Philistines, who became numerous and powerful, and they have undoubtedly a typical significance. In these earliest mentions of them that significance becomes manifest.

They were a people who got into the land of promise, without being called into it by God. They were not like the Amorites, the old inhabitants of the land, mentioned in Gen 15:16 but they were a people who had got into God’s land without being God’s people, and therefore typical of the religious world rather than of the worldly and irreligious world. Now the religious world, whether nominally Jewish or Christian, has always concentrated on a purely earthly order of things. Stopping the wellsprings of divine and heavenly blessing has always been a favourite occupation of the Philistine, whether literal or typical, and earth and its things have ever been the material they have handled. The Apostle Paul had the typical Philistine in view when he penned Php 3:19 and even when he wrote Col 3:2.

Isaac had to dig again the old wells, but he called them by their original names for they had not changed their characters. He also dug new wells and some of these the Philistines claimed. The well, Rehoboth, however, he retained, for he left hid case in the hands of the Lord who made room for him. We may see an analogy to this in church history. Many a well of apostolic days was filled with earth as the centuries passed and has had to be dug again. But when dug it has the same old name. Luther and his co-workers in other lands dug again an important well. It had the old name of “Justification by faith.”

With the well Isaac connected the thought of fruitfulness, as we see in verse Gen 26:22. This fits in with its spiritual significance. We are only fruitful as we abide in Christ and He in us, as stated in Joh 15:5 and of this we have knowledge, “by the Spirit which He hath given us” (1Jn 3:24). Isaac now returned to “The well of the oath” where his father had dwelt, and there again God appeared to him and renewed His promises, and there we see Isaac at his best, for there he pitched the tent of his pilgrimage, and there he had his altar of sacrifice and communion, in addition to the well.

There too the Philistine king and his servants approached him, and confessed that they had seen that the Lord was with him, and this in spite of the fact, of which Isaac reminded them, that they had disliked him because of his prosperity and had sent him away. They now wished that there should be an oath and a covenant of peace between them, and this was established. Isaac could now pursue his pilgrim way without further interference from the Philistines, and we can see how his course illustrates the injunctions of Rom 12:17-19. Isaac had not recompensed evil for evil, nor sought to avenge himself, but as much as lay in his power he had lived peaceably with all men. May the same spirit be ours as we go through the world.

The two verses that close the chapter show us that at the age of forty Esau had developed a mind altogether opposed to that of both Abraham and Isaac, who made no alliance with the Canaanite. Esau established the most intimate connection, that of marriage, with two Hittite women. He thus brushed aside the thought of taking a wife from their own kindred, and linked himself with the people of the land whose iniquity was rising until their judgment fell some three to four hundred years later. Previously he had despised the birthright, now he despised a restriction that had Divine sanction. The call of God was nothing to him. It was a grief of mind to his parents and a challenging of the purpose of God.

In Gen 27:1-46 we see the governmental result beginning to manifest itself. Isaac does not now appear in a very favourable light, nor indeed does Rebekah. Both were marked by partiality, as had been stated in verse Gen 26:28 of the previous chapter, and were governed by their own special fancies. Isaac’s loss of sight made him anticipate death a good many years before it came to him, and he was anxious to bestow the blessing on Esau, in spite of the fact that before birth it had been indicated that he was to serve Jacob. He was thus attempting to defeat the purpose of God, and the chapter reveals how his effort failed.

Rebekah, on the other hand, knew what God’s purpose was, but in her anxiety for the blessing of her favourite she resorted to a calculated course of deceit in order to trick her blind husband. She instigated the deceit and Jacob practised it with success. Later episodes in Jacob’s life reveal him to us as a man who was a master of artful and even underhand designs. It is a solemn thought that he got the earliest recorded lesson in this kind of thing from his mother. His bartering with Esau as to the pottage and the birthright was sharp practice, but had not in it the element of deceit.

Mankind is endowed with five senses, as we all know. One of the five was lacking with poor Isaac. Sight being gone, he was shut up to the other four, and this striking story shows that all the four were exercised. Rebekah’s clever cookery presented the flesh of the kids as though it were venison, so his taste was deceived. Her production of Esau’s garments, putting them on Jacob, was effectual in deceiving his sense of smell. Her plan of covering Jacob’s hands and neck with the hairy skin of the slain kids was equally successful in deceiving his powers of feeling. One sense remained, that of hearing, and Isaac recognized the voice as that of Jacob. It was a case of three senses against one. Three senses declared that the son he could not see was Esau, and only one declared that it was Jacob. Isaac accepted the verdict of the majority and blessed the son he could not see.

Yet the majority verdict was wrong, and only the testimony of his ear was right. We see in this an allegory, illustrating a very important principle, namely that God-given faith comes by hearing. Faith is not sight, as we know. But there are many who seem to think that it comes by feeling; and that, not only among those who are desiring assurance of salvation, but also among those who are saved. Such would like to be guided by feelings or other natural senses rather than by simple faith in the word of God. We are living in an epoch in which God is addressing Himself, not to sight or feeling, but to the hearing of faith. We may safely trust His voice, even if all our natural senses contradict.

The deceit which Jacob practised, as instigated by his mother, was reinforced by a direct lie on his part, when he declared that he was Esau. Fully deceived, Isaac blessed him. Verses Gen 26:28-29 give the terms of it, and we notice that it was all concerned with earthly things. He was to have plenty to eat and drink, and be served by his brethren and other nations, who would themselves be cursed or blessed by their attitude to him. There was no word as to God being his shield and reward, as we find with Abraham. Still, such as it was, it indicated the blessing on earth that was to be his. His descendants have forfeited it, as we know, but it will all be made good to them in the coming millennial day.

Our thoughts are now turned to Esau, who had been forestalled in this fraudulent way. Yet, as is so often the case, man’s evil is overruled to work out the purpose of God. The great trembling of Isaac would seem to indicate that he was convicted of having tried to defeat God’s purpose, and that having failed in this, and having been used to pronounce on Jacob what he intended for Esau, the thing was irrevocable. As for Esau, he at once recognized that here was the sequel to the wanton way in which he had sold his birthright. In regard to him we might summarize the whole sad story as: – The birthright: the barter: the bitter cry. The birthright was gone, and the bitter cry remained.

In Heb 12:16, Esau is designated, “profane person,” and coupled with a “fornicator.” The appropriateness of the connection is apparent when we remember that this latter sin is used figuratively for unholy connections between the believer and the world; whilst the profane person is one who lives wholly for this world, and shuts God and His world out of his thoughts. Esau had not only done this but also had despised what was of God. Now when people go to the length of despising God and His blessing they perish, as is stated in Act 13:41. In our day and in our land there are multitudes slipping into that great sin in regard to the Gospel, and they stand on the brink of destruction.

Esau was now a pitiful sight. He wept. His tears could not undo the past or recover the birthright, but they did draw forth a blessing from Isaac, though not the blessing. And in uttering what he did in verses 39 and 40, he spoke doubtless as a prophet. For many a long century the yoke of Jacob has been off the neck of Esau.

But the feud between the two brothers remains to this day, and is one of the greatest forces provoking discord in the earth. The beginning of it and the root of it come before us in verse 41. But again we see that in all his thoughts Esau had not God before him, otherwise he would not have imagined he could defeat God’s purpose by slaying his brother.

He miscalculated in thinking that his father’s death was impending, when it did not take place for a number of years. His threat however reached Rebekah’s ears and stirred her to a further plan on behalf of her favourite son. There was in it again, we think, an element of subterfuge. To explain to Isaac his sudden departure to Laban, she complained of the annoying behaviour of the Hittite wives of Esau, which doubtless was quite true, and insinuated that Jacob might follow this bad example. Really, however she only anticipated that Jacob’s stay with his uncle would last for “a few days,” and then, Esau’s anger having evaporated, she would have her favourite son back again.

The incident that fills this chapter relates some sordid details, but contains some searching instruction. We see how God maintains His purpose and at the same time exercises His disciplinary government. Everybody suffered; Esau and Isaac, and finally both Jacob and Rebekah, since the parting lasted for many years, rather than “a few days,” as she anticipated. Further, Jacob went forth to be deceived by others and Rebekah was left to the unwelcome society of the daughters of Heth. She dwelt upon her weariness as a reason and an excuse for sending Jacob off to her brother, but doubtless the discord between them was very real, and she was left to face it without her favourite son.

That Isaac was satisfied with Rebekah’s explanation is evident as we read the opening verses of Gen 28:1-22. Indeed at this point we see him in a much more favourable light, and speaking as a man of faith. He charges Jacob to go to Padan-aram and find a wife among his own people, and he blesses him in a way that surely indicates that he now accepted the purpose of God as to his two sons, which overruled and cancelled out his own natural inclinations. He calls upon God to give “the blessing of Abraham” to him, for that particular blessing, which carried with it the coming of the “Seed,” in whom all nations should be blessed, was the very essence of the coveted birthright.

We notice further, that the possession of this blessing entailed the ultimate possession of the land of promise, but for the present strangership in the midst of it. This has a remarkable voice for us, since we read in Gal 3:14, of “the blessing of Abraham” coming “on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” In receiving the Spirit we have the Earnest of the heavenly portion that is ours, but for the present we are left as strangers in the place where we are. Our portion lies there in the age to come. Our strangership is here in the age that is.

Verses Gen 26:6-9, are sadly illuminating as to the mind of Esau. He not only contracts a further marriage that was bound to displease his parents, but that also would contravene the purpose of God. In the previous chapter he appears as a prospective murderer: now he is again revealed as a deliberate and high-handed despiser of God and His word. We saw this contrary spirit characterizing him at the end of Gen 26:1-35; we now see it breaking out even more decisively and flagrantly, so that it is not difficult to understand the statement in the last Old Testament book, “I hated Esau.” As yet the history of Jacob has not furnished us with any clear reason why God should say, “I loved Jacob.”

Fuente: F. B. Hole’s Old and New Testaments Commentary

Isaac and Abimelech

Like his father before him, Isaac went to Gerar in a time of famine. God instructed him not to go down into Egypt and repeated the promise of the blessing. He lied about Rebekah by saying she was his sister, because he reasoned they would kill him for his beautiful wife. After quite some time, Abimelech the king “saw Isaac and his wife Rebecca laughing together” (New English Bible). The king chastised Isaac for lying about his wife, thereby endangering any man who might have tried to make her his wife. The king then commanded all his people not to harm Jacob or Rebekah ( Gen 26:1-11 ).

Because of God’s blessing, Isaac prospered during his stay at Gerar. The Philistines began to envy him. Abimelech asked him to move away from the city. So, Isaac went into the valley. The Philistines had filled in the wells his father had dug years before. The herdsmen of Gerar contested his right to the first well, so he named it Esek, or quarrel. They also contested the second, so he named it Sitnah, or enmity. When he dug again the third, they left him alone. So, he named it Rehoboth, which means spaciousness. God had made room for him in the land.

Eventually, Isaac moved up to the place Israelites call Beersheba. The Lord appeared to him that night and renewed his promise. Isaac built an altar and worshipped God. Abimelech and his army commander, Phichol, came up to meet with him. Isaac asked why he had come when they had driven him away. They said they had seen God was with him. They wanted to solidify a peaceful relationship with the one God blessed. An agreement was reached and they departed in peace. On the same day, his servants reported they had found water in the well they were digging. The well was named Shebah, or well of the oath. Thus, the name Beersheba was born ( Gen 26:12-33 ).

Fuente: Gary Hampton Commentary on Selected Books

Gen 26:1. Abimelech was a name common to the kings of Gerar, and the Philistines were of African descent. Gen 10:14.

Gen 26:2. The Lord appeared unto him. The infancy of the patriarchal family was the infancy of the church, which needed the fostering care of God. A removal to Egypt at this period might have been eventful to Isaac. The Egyptians might have seized his substance for the supply of bread. If Abimelech was jealous of Isaac, Pharaoh might have been so too. Besides, God had in view a far more auspicious occasion of bringing the Hebrews into Goshen than at this juncture of temporary scarcity. Happy the man who is thus under the eye and care of the Lord, and who in the time of trouble enjoys the tokens of his presence.

Gen 26:7. She is my sister. Augustine in his City of God, book 16. chap. 36, undertakes to justify Abraham, and consequently Isaac, in the use of this precaution. But the Holy Ghost having recorded Abimelechs reproof of Sarah, we ought to admit its equity.

Gen 26:11. He that toucheth this manshall be put to death. Perhaps this Abimelech recollected the judgment of God on one of his predecessors for the detention of Sarah, chap. 20. And if a heathen prince did not think death too severe a punishment for known and studied adultery, the guilty may tremble at the sentence which God is ready to pronounce against them: his revenge against murder and adultery has often been remarked in the course of providence.

Gen 26:12. A hundredfold. Herodotus says, that the land about Babylon yielded two hundredfold. Gentlemen distinguished by agricultural science and their patronage of husbandry, are the best friends of the nation. Veteres siquem virum bonum colonum appellassent, amplissime laudasse extimabant. Cicero. The ancients thought it a very high encomium to be a good agriculturalist.

Gen 26:23. He wentto Beersheba, where the Lord again appeared to him, and where he built an altar, and called on the name of the Lord in regular acts of prayer and devotion, with all his camp. Men are bound to attend public worship, or to stay in their houses on the sabbath; to wander abroad is to live like the beasts, and to forget the God who made them.

Gen 26:26. Phichol; that is, the mouth of all. The word therefore may indicate his office of speaker, as well as express his proper name. A man of the same name had come, and with another Abimelech to contract a covenant with Abraham, nearly a century before. Phichol was, it would seem, a military title.

Gen 26:28. Let there be now an oath, &c. The wicked having driven Isaac from wells which his servants had dug, and grounds which he had cleared, were afraid of war from Isaacs angry camp. A good mans word is as his bond; yet the wicked want an oath.

Quo teneam vultus mutantum Protea nodo?

HORAT.

REFLECTIONS.

The covenant so often renewed to Abraham, we see confirmed to Isaac, and in the same words. Hence the children of the righteous, to whom in like manner the promises are positively made, should be careful to enter into the covenant of their fathers, and personally to renew it with God. If they neglect this, and devote themselves to vanity and the world, they may forfeit all its benefits, and the day may come when they shall see their parents in glory, and themselves excluded from the kingdom.

Was Isaac, notwithstanding the gift of much of his fathers property to seven sons, made rich in cattle and patriarchal wealth; and did he receive in harvest a hundred measures for one? Then we have farther proof, that God will keep covenant and promise to the seed of the righteous. All ages have afforded evidence of this. The good man beginning the world with but a small capital, rises by industry and temperance, by fidelity and economy to affluence and honour. This is the blessing of God on the work of his hands. But alas, riches have their snares, and being therefore the nether gift, they are scarcely named in the new covenant. They generally draw families into a conformity to the world, and often tarnish the piety of good men with the excess of parsimony. And what is still worse; though many have a pious Isaac, yet those branches of the family whose passions are unrestrained by regeneration, dash away in the circles of gaiety and dissipation. In this sad case, a merchant had better throw his riches into the sea, than hoard them up for the corruption of his children.

The prosperity of Isaac, so evidently a sign that God was with him, provoked the envy of the Philistines. In the hundred and twelfth Psalm we have a remark to the same effect. David speaking of the prosperity of the righteous man, and the establishment of his sons, says, the wicked shall see it and be grieved, yea he shall gnash with his teeth: the desire of the wicked shall fail. Oh what blessings and comforts they forfeit by not being on the Lords side.

Did the Lord appear to Isaac a second time after Abimelech had driven him away; and did Isaac, following the example of his father on the like occasion, raise an altar to God; may we therefore learn to improve all the calamities and vicissitudes of life for devotion, to live by faith, and be the more prepared for a state of unchangeable felicity.

On a review of Isaacs mercies and the divine protection afforded him, we cannot overlook the great condescension of Almighty God. Though he had called Abraham by his grace, and blessed him according to his good pleasure; yet he is pleased to say, that he had done it because Abraham had obeyed his voice. So also at the day of judgment, our Saviour, overlooking the whole of his redeeming love, will invite the saints to glory, because they gave meat to his hungry members. Oh how happy, how inconceivably happy must the society of the blessed be, where this endearment reigns between Christ and the church! But at the same time let us obey like Abraham, and be liberal according to our power, for the Lord will not applaud the saints in lying words.

But do we find a farther complaint against Esau, for having grieved both Isaac and Rebekah by his double and polluted marriage. Let all young men be warned to act in obedience to their righteous parents; and especially in not being unequally yoked with unbelievers, for this is an evil of which they will scarcely ever hear the last.

Fuente: Sutcliffe’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Genesis 26

The opening verse of this chapter connects itself with Gen. 12. “There was a famine in the land, beside the first famine that was in the days of Abraham.” The trials which meet God’s people, in their course, are very much like; and they ever tend to make manifest how far the heart has found its all in God. It is a difficult matter – a rare attainment, so to walk in sweet communion with God as to be rendered thereby entirely independent of things and people here. The Egypts and the Gerars which lie on our right hand and on our left present great temptations, either to turn aside out of the right way, or to stop short of our true position as servants of the true and living God.

“And Isaac went unto Abimelech, king of the Philistines, unto Gerar.” There is a manifest difference between Egypt and Gerar. Egypt is the expression of the world in its natural resources, and its independence of God. “My river is mine own,” is the language of an Egyptian who knew not Jehovah, and thought not of looking to Him for ought. Egypt was, locally, further removed from Canaan than Gerar; and, morally, it expresses a condition of soul further from God. Gerar is thus referred to in Gen. 10 “And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza as thou goest unto Sodom, and Gomorrah, and Admah, and Zeboim, even unto Lasha.” (Ver. 19) We are informed that “from Gerar to Jerusalem was three days’ journey.” It was, therefore, as compared with Egypt, an advanced position; but still it lay within the range of very dangerous influences. Abraham got into trouble there, and so does Isaac, in this chapter, and that, too, in the very same way. Abraham denied his wife, and so does Isaac. This is peculiarly solemn. To see both the father and the son fall into the same evil, in the same place, tells us, plainly, that the influence of that place was not good.

Had Isaac not gone to Abimelech, king of Gerar, he would have had no necessity for denying his wife; but the slightest divergence from the true line of conduct superinduces spiritual weakness. It was when Peter stood and warmed himself at the high priest’s fire that he denied his Master. Now, it is manifest that Isaac was not really happy in Gerar. True, the Lord says unto him, “sojourn in this land;” but how often does the Lord give directions to His people morally suitable to the condition He knows them to be in, and calculated also to arouse them to a true sense of that condition? He directed Moses, in Num. 13 to send men to search the land of Canaan; but had they not been in a low moral condition, such a step would not have been necessary We know well that faith does not need “to spy out” when God’s promise lies before us. Again, he directed Moses to choose out seventy elders to help him in the work; but had Moses fully entered into the dignity and blessedness of his position, he would not have needed such a direction. So, in reference to the setting up of a king, in 1 Sam. 8. They ought not to have needed a king. Hence, we must always take into consideration the condition of an individual or a people to whom a direction is given before we can form any correct judgement as to the direction.

But again it may be said, if Isaac’s position in Gerar was wrong, how do we read, “Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received the same year an hundred-fold: and the Lord blessed him.” (ver. 12) I reply, we can never judge that a person’s condition is right because of prosperous circumstances. We have had already to remark, that there is a great difference between the Lord’s presence and His blessing. Many have the latter without the former; and, moreover, the heart is prone to mistake the one for the other – prone to put the blessing; for the presence; or at least to argue that the one must ever accompany the other. This is a great mistake. How many do we see surrounded by God’s blessings, who neither have, nor wish for, God’s presence? It is important to see this. A man may “wax great, and go forward, and grow until he becomes very great, and have possession of flocks, and possession of herds, and great store of servants,” and all the while, not have the full, unhindered joy of the Lord’s presence with him. Flocks and herds are not the Lord. They are things on account of which the Philistines might envy Isaac, whereas they never would have envied him on account of the Lord’s presence. He might have been enjoying the sweetest and richest communion with God, and the Philistines have thought nothing whatever about it? simply because they had no heart to understand or appreciate such a reality. Flocks, herds, servants, and wells of water they could appreciate; but the divine presence they could not appreciate.

However, Isaac at length, makes his way from amongst the Philistines, and gets up to Beersheba. “And the Lord appeared unto him the same night, and said, I am the God of Abraham thy father; fear not, for I am with thee, and will bless thee.” (Ver. 24) Mark, it was not the Lord’s blessing merely, but the Lord Himself. And why? because Isaac had left the Philistines, with all their envy, and strife, and contention behind, and gone up to Beersheba. Here the Lord could show Himself to His servant. His liberal hand might follow him during his sojourn in Gerar; but His presence could not there be enjoyed. To enjoy God’s presence, we must be where He is, and He certainly is not to be found amid the strife and contention of an ungodly world; and hence, the sooner the child of God gets away from all such, the better. So Isaac found it. Ho had no rest in his own spirit; and he assuredly did not, in any wise, serve the Philistines by his sojourn amongst them. It is a very common error to imagine that we serve the men of this world by mixing ourselves up with them in their associations and ways. The true way to serve them is to stand apart from them in the power of communion with God, and thus show them the pattern of a more excellent way.

Mark the progress in Isaac’s soul, and the moral effect of his course. “He went up from thence,” “The Lord appeared unto him,” “he builded an altar,” “he called upon the name of the Lord,” “he pitched his tent,” “his servants digged a well.” Here we have most blessed progress. The moment he took a step in the right direction, he went from strength to strength. He entered into the joy of God’s presence – tasted the sweets of true worship, and exhibited the character of a stranger and pilgrim, and found peaceful refreshment, an undisputed well, which the Philistines could not stop because they were not there.

These were blessed results in reference to Isaac himself; and now observe the effect produced upon others. “Then Abimelech went to him from Gerar, and Ahuzzath, one of his friends, and Phicol, 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 now be an oath betwixt us,” &c. The true way to act on the hearts and consciences of the men of the world is to stand in decided separation from them, while dealing in perfect grace toward them. So long as Isaac continued in Gerar, there was nothing but strife and contention. He was reaping sorrow for himself, and producing no effect whatever upon those around him. On the contrary, the moment he went away from them, their hearts were touched, and they followed him, and desired a covenant. This is very instructive. The principle unfolded here may be seen constantly exemplified in the history of the children of God. The first point with the heart should ever be, to see that in our position me are right with God, and not only right in position, but in the moral condition of the son. When we are right with God, we may expect to act salutary upon men. The moment Isaac got up to Beersheba, and took his place as a worshipper, his own soul was refreshed, and he was used of God to act upon others. So long as we continue in a low position, we are robbing ourselves of blessing, and failing, totally, in our testimony and service.

Nor should we, when in a wrong position, stop to inquire, as we so often do, “Where can I find anything better?” God’s order is,” Cease to do evil;” and when we have acted upon that holy precept, we are furnished with another, namely, “learn to do well.” If we expect to “learn” how to do well,” before we “cease to do evil,” we are entirely mistaken. “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from among the dead.” (ek ton nekron.) And what then? “Christ shall give thee light.” (Eph. 5: 14)

My beloved reader, if you are doing what you know to be wrong, or if you are identified, in any way, with what you own to be contrary to scripture, hearken to the word of the Lord,” Cease to do evil.” And, be assured, when you have yielded obedience to this word, you will not long be left in ignorance as to your path. It is sheer unbelief that leads us to say,” I cannot cease to do evil, until I find something better.” The Lord grant us a single eye, and a docile spirit.

Fuente: Mackintosh’s Notes on the Pentateuch

Genesis 26. Isaac and the Philistines.Apart from Gen 26:34 f. this chapter belongs to J. The original has been expanded in Gen 26:1-6, and Gen 26:15; Gen 26:18 are harmonistic insertions. Apart from Gen 26:12-17 the incidents are parallel to incidents recorded of Abraham. On the relation to the earlier adventures of Sarah in Egypt and Gerar, see Gen 26:20*. The incident is misplaced; obviously it is earlier than the birth of Esau and Jacob. The dispute about the wells and covenant with Abimelech are doublets of the similar events in Abrahams life.

Like Abraham, Isaac is forced to migrate by famine, but he goes to Gerar, not Egypt, whose king, like the king of Gerar in Gen 26:20, is named Abimelech, but is styled king of the Philistines. Yahweh bids him remain in the land and not remove to Egypt as his father had done, renewing to him the promise made to Abraham (Gen 26:1-5). He passes off Rebekah as his sister, till the king surprises them in their connubialities and rebukes him for the guilt of unconscious adultery that his people might have incurred through his poltroonery. Although a semi-nomad, Isaac practises agriculture, as is to-day done by the Bedouin (at Beersheba among other places), and so successfully that seed produces a hundredfold, an exceptional but not an impossible yield (cf. Mar 4:8). His flocks, herds, and slaves multiply, the Philistines envy him, and the king bids him depart. His slaves discover water but the herdmen of Gerar contest the well with them, and similarly with a second well, and only with the third (Rehoboth) do they leave him in possession. This was probably at Ruhaibeh, about 20 miles SW. of Beersheba. He went from there to Beersheba, where, Yahweh appeared to him and renewed his promise, whereupon Isaac built an altar and invoked Yahwehs name. Thus the origin of Beersheba as a sanctuary is traced back to Isaac as well as to Abraham (Gen 21:33). Abimelech, recognising Yahwehs blessing on Isaac, proposes a covenant which he accepts, and which is made by a feast and an oath. Learning the same day from his slaves of a well they had sunk there (cf. Gen 26:25), he gives it the name Shibah (swearing), from which the city derived its name Beersheba, a variant of the account in Gen 21:31.

The chapter closes with two verses from P about Esaus two Hittite wives, which prepare the way for Jacobs dispatch to his mothers family to secure a wife, since his parents are grieved that by intermarriage with the natives Esau should have tainted the purity of the stock.

Fuente: Peake’s Commentary on the Bible

ISAAC IN GERAR

A famine occurs in the land, just as it had in the days of Abraham (ch.12:10). In that case Abraham went down to Egypt, whereas Isaac went only as far as Gerar, in the land of the Philistines, but the same place where we read of Abraham denying his relationship with Sarah. It may be that Isaac had some thought of continuing down to Egypt, for God appeared to him, telling him not to go there, but to remain in the land of promise (v.2). He was not told to remain in one place, but to sojourn in the land. He could in this way count upon the blessing of the Lord for himself and his descendants.

Again God confirms the word that He had spoken to Abraham, telling Isaac that “all these lands” (as described in chapter 15:18-21). He would give to him and to his descendants, thus reaffirming His oath to Abraham and applying it to Isaac (v.3).

God speaks of multiplying Isaac’s descendants “as the stars of heaven.” He does not tell Isaac, as He does Jacob later, that his seed would be “as the dust of the earth” (ch.28:14), for Jacob is seen as the father of Israel, while Isaac, typifying Christ, is prominent for His relationship to Rebekah, a type of the church. Since Israel is God’s earthly people, the dust of the earth signifies their number, and the church, being heavenly, is symbolized by the stars of heaven.

Yet also, as God had said to Abraham, so He assures Isaac, “in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” (v.4). The “seed” here is not their many descendants, for Gal 3:16 insists, He does not say, “and to seeds”, as referring to many, but “and to your seed”, that is, “Christ.” Abraham is typical of God the Father, and in His Son, the Lord Jesus, all nations will be blessed. Interestingly, God adds here, “because Abraham obeyed Me, and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes and My laws” (v.5). This was never stated as a condition to Abraham, but is said after he had lived his life. It shows the sovereignty of God in knowing perfectly well beforehand that this was Abraham’s character, which of course was proven in his life. God did not lay down any conditions to Isaac either. As He had told Abraham, “I will,” so He tells Isaac (Gen 22:15-18).

In spite of God’s clear declaration of His faithfulness, Isaac does not take this to heart in being diligent to prove faithful himself. He is snared by the same fault that overtook his father Abraham, telling the Philistines that Rebekah was is sister rather than his wife (v.7). He was motivated also by the same unfounded fears, thinking that because Rebekah was beautiful, the men of the place might kill him in order to get his wife. He certainly failed as regards his being a type of Christ in this matter. The Lord Jesus will never deny His relationship with the church, though she may sadly at times deny in practice her relationship to Him.

In this case Rebekah is not brought into Abimelech’s court, nor is she evidently courted by anyone else over a period of “a long time.” Isaac was also near enough to Abimelech’s house that Abimelech could see him showing such affection for Rebekah that would only be the case between husband and wife. How can our true relationship ever be indefinitely concealed? Things must always come out as they are.

When Abimelech faces Isaac with such facts, Isaac can only admit that his fear had moved him in being deceitful (v.9). Then he must receive a righteous reproof from Abimelech, who told him he had been guilty of an injustice toward the Philistines in misrepresenting the truth. One of his men might easily have treated her as an unattached woman and had sexual relations with her. If a believer does not frankly confess before the world his relationship to the Lord Jesus, he is unfair to the world.

Isaac is not sent away, however. Rather, Abimelech gives orders to his people not to touch Isaac or his wife, on pain of death (v.11). In view of this, how foolish had been Isaac’s fear of being killed by the Philistines! The truth having come out, then we read that Isaac is greatly blessed. The crop he planted that year brought forth one hundred bushels from one bushel of seed, an absolutely maximum yield. This prosperity continued, so that his wealth increased to such an extent that he became the envy of the Philistines (v.14)

There is important spiritual significance in the envy of the Philistines leading them to stop up the wells that Abraham had dug, and fill them with earth. Wells are typical of the living refreshment of the word of God obtained through the work of the man of faith. Only through spiritual diligence do we find the blessing of drinking in the truth of God’s word, and Abraham’s faith and labor had been rewarded by this refreshment. But the Philistines picture the mere formalism of Christian religion, without its living power. They do not appreciate the pure word of God, but contaminate it with material, earthly doctrines. Earthly pleasures and cares displace the word of God so far as they are concerned. This has happened over and over again in our present dispensation of grace.

WELLS RESTORED

However, the time comes when Abimelech recognizes that Isaac’s prosperity is a threat to the Philistines, and he asks him to leave them, which Isaac does, though he does not go far distant, for he was still in the valley of Gerar. In that area he dug a second time the wells that Abraham had before dug, but which the Philistines had filled with earth. Formalistic religion may obscure to us some of the most precious truths of the word of God, as has taken place extensively in Christendom. The energy of faith will labor to restore these, however. Isaac also called them by the same names that Abraham had given them. When we are privileged to recover any truth, let us not think that we have done something original. Rather, let us remember that the truth was in scripture before we discovered it, so that we have nothing to boast of. Let us give it the same name it had long ago.

Digging in the valley, Isaac’s servants found a spring of living water, but the herdsmen of Gerar contended for this, claiming that the water was theirs. Isaac named the spring Esek, meaning “contention,” but “the servant of the Lord must not strive” (2Ti 2:14), and instead of continuing the strife, Isaac dug another well. However, this too became a matter of contention (v.21), to the point that Isaac named it Sitna, meaning “hatred.” The wise thing for him to do therefore was to move from the place before digging another well (v.22). Evidently this was far enough away that the Philistines no longer demanded if for themselves. Isaac called it Rehoboth, meaning “room,” considering that the Lord had made room for him to be fruitful and expand.

However, he finally left the land of the Philistines and went to Beersheba (v.23). Likely by this time the famine had abated (v.1). But only then did the Lord appear to him again (v.24), for Beersheba means “well of the oath,” and indicates that Isaac was learning to depend on the oath that God had made to Abraham and himself. God reminds him that He is the God of Abraham his father, and assures Isaac that He is with him, would bless him and multiply his descendants for Abraham’s sake. How often did the Lord remind Abraham, Isaac and Jacob of this absolute, unconditional promise! but we too easily forget what God Himself has purposed concerning us, and we need as many reminders as they. Consider Heb 6:16-18.

Isaac’s response to God’s word is good. He built an altar there (v.25). Of course this was for offering sacrifices, which would tell us of His appreciation of Christ and the value of His great sacrifice of Calvary. Isaac did not fully understand this, but he did know that only a blood sacrifice was acceptable to God in order that Isaac might be accepted. The promise of God therefore was on the basis of the value of the sacrifice of His beloved son. The altar indicates Isaac’s relationship to God, while his tent (as with Abraham) speaks of his relationship toward the world — a pilgrim passing through. In the same place Isaac’s servants dug a well, speaking of the refreshment of the word of God energized by the Spirit of God.

A COVENANT WITH ABIMELECH

The prosperity of Isaac served to put questions in the mind of the Philistine king Abimelech and his officers as to whether Isaac might threaten their liberty or their independence. When they come to him, Isaac is puzzled, however, because they had before asked him to leave them, and he considered that they hated him (vs.26-27). Actually, they were more afraid than they were hateful.

They tell him that they see plainly that the Lord is with him, of course because of his prosperity. They knew well that if a man has power in his hand, he may often use it in oppressing others. Sad to say, even believers are not exempt from this danger, as we see in some of Judah’s kings, including Solomon (1Ki 11:6; 1Ki 12:4). It is too bad that an unbeliever must require a promise from a believer that he will not harm him. Our character as believers should be such that an unbeliever would have full confidence that we should do him good rather than harm.

But Abimilech reminds Isaac that the Philistines had actually been good to him, and asks that Isaac should respond in the same way. Isaac had no reservations as to making such a covenant, however, and he makes his visitors a feast, while both parties make oaths to one another that they will remain peaceful (vs.30-31).

At the same time Isaac learns from his servants that they had dug a well and found water (v.32). They called the well Shebah, meaning “oath,” and the place was therefore called Beersheba (v.33). but this must have been a confirmation of the fact that this was its name before, for Abraham and Abimelech had made a covenant at Beersheba, naming it this because of their oath (ch.21:31-32). These two covenants (between Abraham and Abimelech and Isaac and Abimelech) were the occasion of the well receiving its name, but it is symbolical of the far greater covenant that God made with Abraham and confirmed to Isaac.

But verses 34-35 show us that Esau, the firstborn of Isaac, did not value the promise of God as his fathers did. Isaac had received a wife from the kindred of Abraham, for God’s promise was connected with that line, the line of faith. Esau took two wives, both from the Hittites, the children of Heth, which means “fear,” typical of those who live in fear of death rather than by faith. Compare Heb 2:15, which speaks of “those who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” How dishonoring to God it is to mix His promise with the fear of death! But mixed marriages have been a source of great trouble throughout history. Esau’s marriages therefore were a grief of mind to his parents. May every believer pay closest attention to the serious admonition of 2Co 6:14-18, which begins, “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers.”

Fuente: Grant’s Commentary on the Bible

26:1 And there was a famine in the {a} land, beside the first famine that was in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went unto Abimelech king of the Philistines unto Gerar.

(a) In the land of Canaan.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

3. Isaac and Abimelech 26:1-11

God prevented Isaac from leaving the Promised Land and renewed the covenant with him, but then He had to protect Rebekah when Isaac lied about his relationship with her to Abimelech.

"In the short span of one chapter, the writer shows how the whole of the life of Isaac was a rehearsal of that which happened to Abraham. Thus the lesson that is conveyed is that God’s faithfulness in the past can be counted on in the present and the future. What he has done for the fathers, he will also do for the sons." [Note: Sailhamer, "Genesis," p. 185.]

Whereas the events of Isaac’s life repeated those of Abraham’s on several occasions, God dealt with Isaac differently and in harmony with his individual character. The many parallels between this chapter and the story of Abraham (esp. chs. 12-14 and 20-21) show that the writer wanted the reader to compare and contrast the two men. [Note: See Garrett, p. 136, or Waltke, Genesis, p. 366, for several striking parallels.]

"The figure of even a great man may be dwarfed by comparison with that of a distinguished father or of a famous son. Thus the character of Isaac is overshadowed by the majesty of Abraham and the dramatic interest of Jacob. There was a third factor which diminished the importance of Isaac; he was the husband of a clever and masterful wife. No matter how exciting the scene in which he may appear, he is always assigned to a minor part. At least, by contrast with these other actors, his role in life was prosaic, uneventful, obscure." [Note: Charles R. Erdman, The Book of Genesis, p. 86.]

"The chapter before us is full of illustrations of how difficulties should and should not be met." [Note: Thomas, p. 238.]

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

Isaac was evidently considering going to Egypt to escape the famine. He was in Gerar when God spoke to him. This was God’s first revelation to Isaac (cf. Gen 25:23). Therefore, it appears that Isaac may have previously moved north from Beer-lahai-roi. Of course, constant relocating was common for the nomadic patriarchs, and these places were not far from one another.

The major migration of the Philistines into Canaan took place in the twelveth century B.C. However, there were some Philistines already in Canaan at this time, as is clear from this reference and others in Genesis (cf. Gen 21:32; Gen 21:34).

God’s will for Isaac to remain in the land was definite, and He communicated it clearly to the patriarch. Perhaps God wanted Isaac to stay in the land so he would learn that God would "be with you and bless you" (Gen 26:3). God reiterated His promise to Abraham to give Isaac a promise to believe and encouragement to obey Him. Promises of protection are also prominent in the Jacob story (cf. Gen 26:24; Gen 28:15; Gen 28:20; Gen 31:3; Gen 31:5; Gen 31:42; Gen 32:10).

The promise, however, was that God would protect and bless Isaac, multiply his descendants, and give them "all these lands" (Gen 26:4; i.e., the lands held by the various Canaanite tribes). One reason for God’s blessing of Isaac was Abraham’s obedience to God (Gen 26:5; cf. Gen 22:18). Isaac became the spiritual beneficiary of a godly parent, but he had the opportunity to increase God’s blessing on him through his own obedience to God.

"The Abrahamic blessing will pass to Isaac. Everything included in that blessing will now belong to the son, and in turn will be passed on to his sons. But there is a contingency involved: if they are to enjoy the full blessings, they will have to obey the word of the LORD. And so obedience is enjoined here, with the example of how well Abraham obeyed." [Note: The NET Bible note on 26:3.]

Gen 26:5 sounds like Abraham kept the commands, statutes, and laws of the Mosaic Covenant before they were in existence. It seems to contradict Gen 15:6 that says God justified Abraham because of his faith.

"Ultimately, we should attempt to find the meaning of this verse in the larger strategy and purpose of the Pentateuch. Did the author of the Pentateuch intend to depict Abraham as a model of faith or as a model of obedience to the law? Curiously enough, the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars have read this passage as if the verse intended to show Abraham’s life as an example of obedience to the law (Gesetzesgehorsam).

"It appears reasonable to conclude . . . that the importance of Gen 26:5 lies in what it tells us about the meaning of the deuteronomic terms it uses. It is as if the author of the Pentateuch has seized on the Abrahamic narratives as a way to explain his concept of ’keeping the law.’ The author uses the life of Abraham, not Moses, to illustrate that one can fulfill the righteous requirement of the law. In choosing Abraham and not Moses, the author shows that ’keeping the law’ means ’believing in God,’ just as Abraham believed God and was counted righteous (Gen 15:6). In effect the author of the Pentateuch says, ’Be like Abraham. Live a life of faith and it can be said that you are keeping the law.’" [Note: John H. Sailhamer, "The Mosaic Law and the Theology of the Pentateuch," Westminster Theological Journal 53 (Fall 1991):253, 254. Cf. John 6:29.]

"Israel would immediately see Torah (Law) terminology in the record of Abraham, and would be prompted to keep the Law." [Note: Ross, "Genesis," p. 71.]

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)