It is only fragments of the life of Abraham that are brought before us in the pages of Genesis. They are like a series of pictures which have been saved from the shipwreck of the past. And the pictures are not always painted in the same colours. At one time the patriarch appears as ‘a mighty prince,’ as a rich and cultured Chaldæan immigrant, with armed bands of warriors under him with whom he can venture to attack even the army of the king of Elam. He is the confederate of the Amorite chieftains, the prince whom the Hittites of Hebron hear with respect. But at another time the colours on the canvas seem quite different. When the angels warn the patriarch of the approaching overthrow of the cities of the plain, they find him in the tent of a Bedâwi, leading the simple life of an uncultured nomad, and preparing the food of his guests with his own hands. Between this Bedâwi shêkh and the companion of the king of Gerar or the Pharaoh of Egypt the contrast is indeed great.
To the Western mind, however, the contrast is greater than it would be to the Oriental. The traveller in the East is well acquainted with wealthy Bedâwin shêkhs who live in the desert in barbaric simplicity, but, nevertheless, have their houses at Cairo or Damascus, where they indulge in all the luxury and splendour of Oriental life. Moreover, the narratives which have been combined in the book of Genesis do not all come from the same source. Some of them have been taken from written historical documents which breathe the atmosphere of the cultured city, of the educated scribe, and the luxurious court. Others, derived it may be from oral tradition, are filled with the spirit of the wanderer in the desert, and set before us the simple life and rude fare of the dweller in tents. The history of the patriarchs is, in fact, like Joseph’s coat of many colours. It is a series of pictures rather than a homogeneous whole. The materials of which it is composed differ widely in both character and origin. Some of them can be shown to have been contemporaneous with the events they record; some again to have been like the tales of their old heroes recounted by the nomad Arabs in the days before Islam as they sat at night round their camp-fires. The details and spirit of the story have necessarily caught the colour of the medium through which they have passed. The life of Abraham, doubtless, presented the contrasts still presented by that of a rich Bedâwi shêkh; at one time spent in the wild freedom and privations of the desert; at another amid the luxuries and culture of the town; but the contrasts have been heightened by the difference in the sources through which they have been handed down. Naturally, while the scribe would record only those phases of Abraham’s history which brought him into contact with the great world of kings and princes, of war and trade, the nomad reciter of ancient stories would dwell rather on such parts of it as he and his hearers could understand. For them Abraham would become a desert-wanderer like themselves.
This difference in the sources of the narrative explains why it is that the figure of Abraham so largely overshadows that of his son Isaac. Isaac seems almost swallowed up in that darkness of antiquity through which the figure of his father looms so largely. Apart from his dispute with Abimelech of Gerar, which reads like a repetition of the dispute between Abimelech and Abraham, there is little told of the life of Isaac which is not connected with his more famous father or son. Between Abraham and Jacob, the great ancestors of Israel, Isaac seems to intervene as merely a connecting link.
But the life of Isaac was that of a Bedâwi shêkh. The other side of his father’s life and character was lost. The forefather of Israel had ceased to be a Chaldæan, and had become simply a dweller in the desert, like the fugitive slaves from Egypt in after days. Even Hebron was left, and the life of Isaac was mainly passed on the northern edge of that desert in which his descendants were in later times to receive the Law. If he approached Canaan, it was only to Beer-sheba and Gerar on the southern skirts of Canaanitish territory, where the Bedâwin and their flocks still claimed to be masters. But his chief residence was further south, in the very heart of the wilderness.
Isaac was thus essentially a Bedâwi, a fit type of the phase of life through which the Israelites were destined to pass before their conquest of the Promised Land. With the politics and trade of the civilised world, accordingly, he never came into contact. There was nothing in his existence for the historian to chronicle; nothing which could bring his name into the written history of the time. If his memory were to be preserved at all, it could be only through the unwritten traditions of the desert, through the tales told of him among the desert tribes.
Once indeed, it is said, he had relations with a king. The king was one of those Canaanitish princelets with whose names the Tel el-Amarna tablets are filled. The dominions of Abimelech of Gerar were of small extent, and must have been barren in the extreme. The site of Gerar lies two hours south of Gaza,[[74]] and the territory of its king extended eastward as far as Beer-sheba. It was essentially a desert territory: during the greater part of the year the whole country is bare and sterile; only after rain does the wilderness break forth suddenly into green herbage.
In the story of Isaac’s dispute with Abimelech the writer of Genesis calls him ‘king of the Philistines,’ and speaks of his subjects as ‘Philistines.’ This, however, is an accommodation to the geography of a later day. In the age of the patriarchs the south-eastern corner of Palestine has not as yet been occupied by the Philistine immigrants. We have learned from the Egyptian monuments that they were pirates from the islands and coasts of the Greek Seas who did not seize upon the frontier cities of Southern Canaan until the time of the Pharaoh Meneptah, the son of Ramses II. Up to then, for more than three centuries, the frontier cities had been garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and included in the Egyptian empire. It was not till the period of the Exodus that the district passed into Philistine hands, and the old road into Egypt by the sea-coast became known as ‘the way of the Philistines.’
In speaking of the ‘Philistines,’ therefore, the writer of the book of Genesis is speaking proleptically. And in reading the narrative of Isaac’s dealings with Abimelech by the side of that of Abraham’s dealings with the same king, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that we have before us two versions of the same event. Doubtless, history repeats itself; disputes about the possession of wells in a desert-land can frequently recur, and it is possible that two kings of the same name may have followed one another on the throne of Gerar. But what does not seem very possible is that each of these kings should have had a ‘chief captain of his host’ called by the strange non-Semitic name of Phichol (Gen. xxi. 22; xxvi. 26); that each of them should have taken the wife of the patriarch, believing her to be his sister; or that Beer-sheba should twice have received the same name from the oaths sworn over it.
When we compare the two versions together, it is not difficult to see which of them is the more original. It is in the second that Abimelech is called ‘king of the Philistines’; in the first he is correctly entitled ‘king of Gerar.’ Abraham was justified in calling Sarah his sister; there was no ground and no reason for Isaac doing the same in the case of his own wife. Moreover, Beer-sheba had already received its name from Abraham, who had planted there an êshel or tamarisk, and ‘called on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God.’
The wife of Isaac was brought from Harran, from the members of Abraham’s race who had settled in Northern Syria, and there become an Aramæan family. She was the daughter of Bethuel, ‘the house of God,’ a proper name which is found in the Tel el-Amarna letters, where it also belongs to a native of Northern Syria.[[75]] Bethuel is the older form of Bethel, that anointed stone which, according to Semitic belief, was the special residence of divinity. There was something peculiarly appropriate in such a name at Harran, where the great temple of the Moon-god, the ‘Baal of Harran,’ was itself a Beth-el on a large scale.