Isaac and the Wells That Were Dug Again

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There is a man standing at the edge of a hole in the ground, and the hole is full of earth.

Somebody has been here before him. Somebody has taken a good well, dug deep by his father's servants, with a stone rim and a path worn smooth by sheep, and has filled it to the top with dirt. On purpose. Not by accident, not by a flood. Somebody carried the dirt here in baskets and tipped it in, one basket after another, until there was no water left to find.

The man looks at it for a long while. And then he picks up a shovel.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the book of Genesis, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it straight, as it is written. The weather, the grumbling of the herdsmen and a few small thoughts of the people in it are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will tell you at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me begin with a family.

Some of you will remember Abraham, who sat in the heat of the day at the door of his tent and welcomed three visitors. Some of you will remember Rebekah, who watered ten thirsty camels at a well without being asked. Well, Abraham and Sarah had a son, a late and long-promised son, whose name is Isaac. And Rebekah is the woman who came across the desert to marry him.

So tonight's man is Isaac. And I have to confess that Isaac is not the sort of person who usually gets a whole evening to himself.

Think about it. His father is Abraham, who is one of the great figures of the whole Bible. His son is Jacob, who wrestles with an angel and has a ladder dream and gives his name to a nation. Isaac is in the middle. He is the quiet one. He is the one who is carried from one story to the next without making much noise about it. If the family were a procession, Isaac would be the one in the middle of the line, walking steadily, carrying something important, not talking.

And I have a lot of sympathy for people like that. Most of the world is made of them. Most of the good done in it is done by people who were handed something valuable by one generation and are trying to hand it to the next without dropping it.

So that is what tonight is about. A man in the middle of a long line, and what he does with what he was given.

Now, a word about where we are, because it matters.

We are in the land of Canaan, and it is a dry country. I do not mean that it is a desert, though there is desert at the edges. I mean that it is the sort of country where the whole year hangs on the rain. If the rains come at the right time, the hills are green and the barley grows and the sheep get fat. If they do not come, then by the end of the summer the grass is the colour of straw, the streams have stopped, and everyone starts looking at the sky.

A modern comparison might be a household that lives on one wage, with no savings, and the wage is paid in rain.

And water, in a country like that, is not a convenience. It is the whole thing. It is the difference between a family that can stay and a family that has to go. The people who live there do not talk about it as we talk about the weather at a barbecue. They talk about it the way we talk about our health.

And so, if you want to know what the great treasure of such a place is, it is not gold. It is a well.

A well is a hole dug through rock and gravel, sometimes twenty or thirty metres down, by men with picks and ropes and baskets, over weeks, with no certainty at the start that there will be anything at the bottom. It is a very expensive thing to make. It is a gamble. And when you strike water, when the first damp stone comes up and then the first cold trickle, there is a shout that can be heard across the whole camp.

A well belongs to whoever dug it, and to whoever they leave it to. It is, in that world, rather like a farm and a bank account and a house, all in one.

I want you to hold on to that. Because Isaac's father, Abraham, dug wells. And tonight's story is about what happens to them.

The chapter begins with bad news. The book says: "Now there was a famine in the land, besides the former famine that was in the days of Abraham."

So this has happened before. Abraham lived through a famine, and went down to Egypt to wait it out, and it did not go well. Now there is another, and Isaac is where his father was, at the same crossroads, with the same question: do we stay, or do we go to Egypt, where the great river runs whatever the weather does?

He gets as far as a town called Gerar. It is on the edge of the Philistine country, in the south, near the coast, a place where there is just enough water to keep going. Its king is a man called Abimelech.

Now, if that name sounds familiar, it is because Abraham met a king of Gerar with the same name, a generation ago. It is likely a title, as Pharaoh is, rather than the name of one man. The book does not say, and so we will not either. I mention it only so that you do not think you have heard this part before. You have. And you have not.

And Isaac stops there. He is thinking of going on to Egypt.

And the Lord appears to him.

I would like to read you what God says, because it is short, and because it matters that it is God who speaks first.

The Lord says: "Do not go down to Egypt; dwell in the land of which I shall tell you. Sojourn in this land, and I will be with you, and will bless you; for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfil the oath which I swore to Abraham your father."

Stay here. In the famine. Where there is no water. Do not go where it is easy; go where I tell you.

I find that a very hard instruction, and I think Isaac did too. It is the sort of thing that sounds beautiful on a Sunday and is a good deal less beautiful on a Tuesday when the barley has not come up. But I would like you to notice what comes with it. It does not say, stay, and do it alone. It says, stay, and I will be with you.

And the book says, quite simply, that Isaac stayed in Gerar.

Now, I have to tell you about something that goes wrong. Because it does, a little, and the book does not hide it.

The men of the place start asking about Isaac's wife. They notice her. She is, the book says, beautiful to look at. And Isaac is afraid. He is a stranger in a town he does not know, with no army and no walls, and he thinks, if they decide they want her, they will kill me.

And so he says, she is my sister.

You may remember that his father said exactly the same thing, twice, about Sarah. It was not a good idea then, and it is not a good idea now. I would like to say, kindly, that this is what happens when we are frightened. We do the thing our parents did. We do not even decide to. It simply comes out of us, like an old accent.

And it does not work for long. The book says that after a time, King Abimelech happens to look out of a window, and sees Isaac and Rebekah together, and what he sees is not at all what a brother and sister do. And he sends for Isaac.

"Behold, she is your wife!" says the king. "How then could you say, 'She is my sister'?"

Isaac answers, and I think it is one of the most honest answers in the whole book. He says: "Because I thought, 'Lest I die because of her.'"

That is all. He does not make an excuse. He tells the king what was in his heart, which was fear.

And here the story takes a turn that I find rather lovely. The king, who is a Philistine and not one of the people of God at all, is shocked. Not at Isaac's fear, but at what might have happened. "What is this you have done to us?" he says. "One of the people might easily have lain with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us."

He is more worried about doing wrong by accident than Isaac was. And he does something very good. He gives an order to the whole people: "Whoever touches this man or his wife shall be put to death."

So here is Isaac, a foreigner, a man who has just been caught telling a lie, and the king of the country has placed him under his protection. If there is a lesson in that, I think it is a quiet one. That the Lord's promises do not depend on our being brilliant. Isaac has done a rather foolish thing, and God has taken care of him anyway. And sometimes the instrument of that care is not a prophet or an angel, but a man at a window who is a bit more decent than expected.

I would also say, to be fair to the king, that he has just been told something embarrassing, and he does not take it out on the man who told it. We could all do worse.

Now the story gets lighter, and I am glad, because it is bedtime.

The book says: "And Isaac sowed in that land, and reaped in the same year a hundredfold. The Lord blessed him, and the man became rich, and gained more and more until he became very wealthy."

A hundredfold. In a famine year.

I do not know exactly how to describe this to you in modern terms. A good harvest in that country might return ten times what you planted. A hundred is the kind of number that would make a farmer sit down on a rock and say nothing for a minute. Imagine you put a hundred pounds into a drawer and a year later you opened it and there was ten thousand.

And it is a year when the neighbours' fields are failing. So you can see how the whole town looks at him.

He has flocks. He has herds. He has, the book says, a great household of servants. He started the year as a refugee, a man who had walked into town hoping not to be noticed, and he is ending it as the richest man in Gerar.

Now. I would like you to think about this from the point of view of the people of the town.

There is a stranger. He arrived in a bad year. He lied to the king, or very nearly. And now he has more sheep than anyone, and a bigger harvest than anyone, and every time one of the locals walks past his fields, there is something golden growing in them that is not growing in their own.

The book is very short on how they felt, but it has one word for it. It says: "the Philistines envied him."

And so we come back to the wells.

I told you that Abraham, Isaac's father, had dug wells in this country. Some of them were at Gerar, and some of them were nearby. They were dug long ago, when Abraham lived in the area, and when Abraham died, the Philistines did something to them.

The book says: "Now the Philistines had stopped and filled with earth all the wells which his father's servants had dug in the days of Abraham his father."

I told you at the beginning. This is the hole full of earth.

Think for a moment about the work that took. You do not fill a well by accident. You do not do it quickly. Whoever did it carried the soil and the stones, over days, and tipped them in. And they did it in a dry country, where a well is the difference between life and death. They did it because they did not want someone else to have what they could not have themselves.

And I do not want you to think too harshly of them, though I think we are meant to think it was wrong. Many of them were poor too. A well, in their view, was a claim. If an outsider's family had a well on your land, then in a generation or two, the outsider's family might have the land. Better to fill it in.

That does not make it right. But it makes it human.

And now the new king, Abimelech, comes to Isaac, and says something I find rather sad.

"Go away from us," he says, "for you are much mightier than we."

Not "you have done something wrong". Not "you have cheated us". Simply, you are doing too well, and it frightens us.

Now what would you do?

If you were Isaac. If you had been told by God to stay in the land. If you had done well, honestly, in a bad year. If you had been given the king's own protection, and now the same king was asking you to leave. And your father's wells, the ones that were rightfully yours, were choked with earth.

You could argue. You could say, I have the king's word. You could say, I have God's promise. You could gather your servants, of whom you have a great many, and say, let us see who is mightier.

The book does not say he thought about any of that. It says only this: "So Isaac departed from there and encamped in the valley of Gerar and settled there."

He goes. He does not go far. He moves out of the town and into the valley, a little way away, where the land is lower and quieter. And he sets up his tents again.

And then, the book says, "Isaac dug again the wells of water which had been dug in the days of Abraham his father, which the Philistines had stopped after the death of Abraham; and he gave them the names which his father had given them."

He digs them again.

I want to stay with that sentence for a little while, because I think it is the heart of the story, and it is easy to read past.

He did not dig new wells with new names. He could have. He could have chosen a better spot, and given the wells names of his own, and made his mark. Any ambitious man would have.

He dug out the old ones. The same wells, in the same places, with the same names. He found the places his father's servants had marked, and he took out the earth, a basket at a time, and he gave back to the wells the names that his father had given them.

Do you see what that is? It is a kind of humility. He is not the founder of anything. He is the one who keeps what was founded. His job is not to be remembered. His job is to make sure that his father's gift still works.

I think about people I have known who do that. The person who keeps the family recipes going. The one who winds the old clock. The parish volunteer who has been unlocking the church every morning since before the priest arrived. They are not famous, and they do not mind. They have been handed something, and they are going to see it through.

And there is something else I would like you to notice. It is a great deal of work to clear a well. It is, in some ways, harder than digging a new one, because you do not know what is down there. You have to take out every stone. A single basket of earth left at the bottom, and the water will not rise.

Isaac's servants must have worked for weeks. And I like to imagine the evening they finished the first one. They have cleared the last of the soil, and they are standing in the dusk, a little tired, with their hands blistered, looking down into the dark. And then someone says, "Is that—?" And someone else says, "Hush." And they all hold still. And from somewhere very far down there is a small, cool sound.

That is the sound of a well that was dead, and is not.

Now the book says that Isaac's servants dug in the valley, and found a well of spring water.

Not rainwater, mind. Not a cistern that collects what falls and holds it. A spring: water that comes up out of the ground by itself, clear and cold and running, in a land that is short of it. They had not expected that. They dug, and the earth gave them a gift.

Imagine the shout.

And then the herdsmen of Gerar arrive.

They are the local men who graze their animals on that land, and they have heard the shout too. They come over the ridge in a bunch, and they look at the new well, and they look at Isaac's servants, and the first one says, "The water is ours."

Which, I would like to point out, is a rather remarkable thing to say about a well that someone else has just dug.

The book does not say that they had a claim. It does not say that the land belonged to them. It says only that they quarrelled with Isaac's herdsmen, saying: "The water is ours."

Now, I would like to tell you what Isaac does. And I would like you to remember that he has a great many servants, and a great many animals, and is, as the king said, much mightier than they.

He lets them have it.

The book says: "So he called the name of the well Esek, because they contended with him."

Esek. It is a Hebrew word, and it means something like "contention", or "quarrel". He names the well after the fight, and he walks away.

Let me say something about that, because it is the sort of thing that is easily misunderstood.

I do not think the book is saying that Isaac is weak. Nor that you should always give in to whoever shouts loudest. The same book has stories of people who stood their ground, and were right to. The Lord does not ask us to be doormats.

But Isaac had been told by God to stay in this land, and to be a blessing in it. And I think he understood that to win a fight over a well, and to lose the neighbours for ever, was a bad bargain. There is a kind of victory that is worse than a loss. He could have kept the well. And then every man in Gerar would have been his enemy, for generations, and his sons and grandsons would have had to fight for every drop.

And so he does the harder thing. He moves. He takes his servants and his tools, and he goes a little further along the valley, and he digs again.

And the book says, quite flatly: "Then they dug another well, and they quarrelled over that also; so he called its name Sitnah."

Sitnah. It means "enmity" or "opposition".

Again.

I do not know about you, but I find this the most moving part of the whole chapter.

Because we are all quite good at the first time. The first time someone takes something from us, we can be gracious. We can say, never mind, it is only a well. And we feel rather noble.

It is the second time that costs. The second time, you have lost two wells, and it is a lot of work, and you are tired, and the same people have come again with the same complaint. Every instinct tells you to dig in your heels. You think, if I give in again, I will be giving in for ever. They will take everything.

And Isaac, the book says, simply goes on. He names the well after the quarrel. He packs up. He moves.

There is no speech. There is no explanation. There is just a man with a shovel, who has decided that he would rather lose a well than lose a neighbour, and who has not changed his mind after the second time.

I would like to tell you that this is easy, and that you get used to it. I do not think that is true. I think it is hard every time. But I do think that, for people who do it, it becomes a kind of habit of the heart, as steady as digging.

And so the third well.

The book says: "And he moved from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it; so he called its name Rehoboth, saying, 'For now the Lord has made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.'"

Rehoboth. It means something like "broad places" or "room".

They did not quarrel over it.

I would like you to imagine that moment. They have been digging for weeks. They are dusty and tired. The first two wells are behind them, with their sad names, and no one knows whether this one will go the same way. And the herdsmen of Gerar do not come. The day passes. The next day passes. There is only the sound of the water, and the sheep drinking, and the wind in the dry grass.

And Isaac stands by the well in the evening, and says the thing that the book records: "Now the Lord has made room for us."

Not "now I have won". Not "now I have shown them." Now the Lord has made room.

I think that is a rather beautiful sentence. It does not say that the quarrel was won. It says that the room was given. The difference matters. A man who wins a fight lives in a world that has shrunk to the size of his victory. A man who has been given room lives in a wide place.

And look at the order of things. He gave up one well, and then another. Two losses, and a third. And at the end of the three, he is not poorer, but freer. Out in the wide valley there is space to put up the tents, and graze the flocks, and let the children run.

I will say, for those of you who are drifting off, that you may drift. The rest of the story is gentle.

From there, the book says, Isaac went up to Beersheba. It is a place with a long history in his family. His father Abraham had dug a well there too, and made a covenant with a king of Gerar, and planted a tree. It is a good bit further inland, and a good bit higher up, and a good deal quieter.

And on the night he arrives, the Lord appears to him.

I would like you to notice the timing. Not when he was fighting for the wells. Not when he was digging them out of the dirt. Not when he was cheated, or when he was frightened. He comes to the place where he is going to rest, and he lies down, and in the night, God speaks.

"I am the God of Abraham your father," the Lord says. "Fear not, for I am with you and will bless you and multiply your descendants for my servant Abraham's sake."

Fear not. I am with you.

It is the same promise as before. It is, almost word for word, the thing that was said to him at Gerar, when the famine began. God is not saying anything new. He is saying the old thing again, just when Isaac needs to hear it. And I suspect that God does that with us a great deal. The promise does not change. We are the ones who forget it, and need reminding.

And Isaac's answer is very simple. The book says: "So he built an altar there and called upon the name of the Lord and pitched his tent there. And there Isaac's servants dug a well."

Notice the order. The altar first. The tent second. The well third. He worships, then he settles, and only then does he dig.

I find that I want to say something about this to anyone who is moving house, or starting a job, or arriving anywhere new. Say a prayer first. Put up the tent. And then go and find the water.

Now, I am afraid there is one more scene, and it is a good one. Because the story is not quite finished with the king.

One day, while Isaac is at Beersheba, a party arrives from Gerar. It includes Abimelech himself, and a man called Ahuzzath, who is described as his adviser, and a man called Phicol, who is the commander of his army.

Think about how that looks from Isaac's side. The king who told him to go away is coming up the road with his general. And he is not coming alone. Isaac has every reason to think he may have come to finish the job.

And Isaac says something that I love. He says: "Why have you come to me, seeing that you hate me and have sent me away from you?"

He does not hide. He does not pretend that nothing happened. He says it plainly, but he does not say it with a sword. He just asks.

And the king gives a most unexpected answer. "We see plainly that the Lord has been with you," he says. "So we said, let there be an oath between us, between you and us, and let us make a covenant with you, that you will do us no harm, just as we have not touched you and have done to you nothing but good and have sent you away in peace. You are now the blessed of the Lord."

Now, we might want to say that this is not entirely true. They had filled his wells. They had sent him away. But I think the king means it, in his way. They did not kill him. They did not take his wife. They sent him off without bloodshed, as these things go. And in the end, what impressed them was not his wealth. It was that he had not hit back.

And Isaac does what a man of peace does. The book says: "So he made them a feast, and they ate and drank."

He gives them dinner.

I would like to dwell on that for a moment too, because it is easy to rush by.

The men who stopped up his father's wells are sitting at his table. The king who sent him away is breaking his bread. And Isaac pours the wine and passes the dishes. He does not give a lecture. He does not bring up the wells. He lets them eat.

There is a moment, I think, in every long quarrel, when one person decides to set a table. It does not mean they have forgotten. It means that they have decided what they want more: to be right, or to be at peace. And somebody has to go first.

The next morning they rise early. They swear an oath to one another. And Isaac sends them on their way, and the book says: "and they departed from him in peace."

In peace. The same men.

And now, the last little scene, and it is my favourite.

On that very same day, while the king's party was still on the road, Isaac's servants come running. They have been digging a well, in the place where they had camped, and they have something to tell him.

"We have found water," they say.

I love that. After all that. After the famine, and the lie, and the harvest, and the envy, and the three wells, and the oaths, and the feast. It is the same day, and the servants come running, as servants always do, with the news of the thing they were actually sent to do. We dug, and there is water.

And Isaac calls the well Shibah. It is a word that means "oath", and also, in Hebrew, is close to the word for "seven". And the book says: "therefore the name of the city is Beersheba to this day."

Beersheba. The well of the oath.

The place where his father made a promise, and he made another. The place where the old wells were dug, and the new ones. The place where, to this day, there is a town. And all of it from a man who spent a year with a shovel.

Now, a few words as the candle burns down.

The story of Isaac is not a loud one. Nobody fights a dragon. No one is swallowed by a fish. There is no burning bush, no walls falling. There is a man, and a famine, and a lot of dirt in a lot of holes.

But I have come to think that quiet stories like this are the ones that most of us live in. We are not called to do something spectacular. We are called to dig again the wells our parents dug, and our grandparents, and the people before them. To keep the faith going. To keep the family going. To keep the house open and the table set. And when someone fills the well with earth, to pick up the shovel again.

It is not glamorous. It will not make the news. But look at what grows from it. Look at Beersheba. Look at the long line of people who followed. And look at the kind of man who comes out the other side, not bitter, not bruised, but standing in a wide place, saying that the Lord has made room.

I find that very comforting. And I hope you do too.

Now. Notes for the curious.

Everything in tonight's story about the famine, the Lord's instruction to Isaac not to go down to Egypt, Isaac's stay in Gerar, his saying that Rebekah was his sister, the king seeing them from a window, the king's rebuke and his order to protect them, the harvest of a hundredfold, the envy of the Philistines, the stopped-up wells, the king's saying "go away from us", the valley of Gerar, the digging again of the old wells and the keeping of their names, the wells Esek, Sitnah and Rehoboth, the journey to Beersheba, the Lord's appearing at night, the altar, the tent, the visit of Abimelech with Ahuzzath and Phicol, the feast, the oath, and the finding of the well called Shibah, comes from the book of Genesis, chapter twenty-six. The words of God, Isaac, Abimelech and the servants are told in plain paraphrase and not word for word.

What we invented is the narrator's own comparisons, the weather, the sound of the first well coming alive, the imagined evening when the diggers finish, the grumbling of the herdsmen and the small thoughts of Isaac and his servants. The book does not say how long the digging took, how far Isaac moved each time, or what the diggers said, and we have not guessed beyond a few sentences marked as imagining.

A few details are worth being careful about. First, the name Abimelech appears in this book for a king in Abraham's time and a king in Isaac's time, and many readers take it to be a royal title rather than one man's name; the text does not tell us, and we have not decided. Second, the book tells us that the people of Gerar are Philistines, but these are not the Philistines of the later wars with Saul and David, and scholars still discuss how the two are related. Third, the meanings we gave for Esek, Sitnah, Rehoboth and Shibah are those that the chapter itself gives or implies. Fourth, the story of a patriarch calling his wife his sister also appears in the book about Abraham, in chapters twelve and twenty, and some readers think these are variants of one memory; the Church receives them all as Scripture and we have simply told this one as it stands. Finally, the Church's teachers have often read the wells as a picture of patient peacemaking, and the reopening of the old wells as faithfulness to what we have received. Those are readings, and not part of the text.

And a last note about what follows the chapter, which we left out. At the end of chapter twenty-six, Esau, Isaac's elder son, marries two Hittite women, and the book says they were a bitterness of spirit to Isaac and Rebekah. The next chapter begins the story of the blessing, and Jacob and Esau, and it is a long and difficult one, with a good deal of trouble in it. It is in the Bible. We have not pretended otherwise. We have simply left it for another night.

That's the story of Isaac and the wells that were dug again, for tonight. If you would like to remember the holy forefather Isaac in your prayers, the Orthodox Church keeps the memory of the forefathers on the Sunday before the Nativity, and Catholics remember the patriarchs in the Church's readings and prayers. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you have the patience to dig again what was filled in. May you lose a well sooner than a neighbour, and be given a wider valley for it. May you find, when you are tired, a small cool sound far down in the dark. May you set a table for the one who sent you away, and may that table be where the quarrel ends. May the Lord make room for you, and may you be fruitful in the land. And may you build an altar first, and pitch your tent second, and only then go looking for water.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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