Beersheba

Where it is

the country around it

Coordinates: 31.2450° N, 34.8409° Efind it on the Atlas →
Region: The Negev

Located: the gazetteer fixes one site

Not located: Egypt. The gazetteer records no location for it, so it is not marked.

Beersheba and the country around it, about 70 km across. Every mark sits at the coordinates the gazetteer records for it.

Reference map of ancient Palestine: the coast, the hill country, the Jordan rift and the Dead Sea, with the towns of the biblical narrative marked. — Reference map of ancient Palestine: the land from Dan to Beersheba: most of the historical books happen on this one sheet.Rand McNally reference map (1926), public domain.Open this plate full size in The Atlas →

Why Beersheba matters

Beersheba stands where the settled country stops and the Negev begins. There is no river here and very little rain. Water has to be dug for, and a well is worth fighting over. That one fact drives almost every scene the Bible sets in this town. Abraham had dug a well, and the servants of a local king named Abimelech had seized it. When the king came to make a treaty, Abraham raised the well. The two men swore, and Abraham set seven ewe lambs apart from the flock and made Abimelech take them, so that accepting the lambs was an admission that the well was Abraham's. Genesis says the place was called Beersheba because the two of them swore an oath there. The Hebrew carries both halves of that at once. Sheba is seven and shaba is to swear, and they are the same root, which is why the name reads as the well of seven and the well of the oath together. Genesis gives the reader both explanations and does not choose. Then Abraham planted a tamarisk, a slow desert tree that outlives the man who plants it, and called on the name of the LORD, the Eternal God. The King James renders that title the everlasting God. He planted it in country the same chapter twice calls the land of the Philistines. He owned the well and not the ground. A lifetime later the same thing happened again to Isaac. God appeared to him here, he built an altar, his servants dug, and a king of the same house came out to swear a second oath. When the diggers struck water that day, Isaac named the well Shibah, and the narrator says the city is called Beersheba to this day. After that the town keeps turning up as a threshold. Jacob left the land from here as a young man on the road to Haran, and left it again as an old man on the way down to Egypt, stopping to sacrifice and hearing God tell him not to be afraid to go. Elijah ran here from Jezebel, left his servant in the town, and walked on into the wilderness alone. Because Beersheba was the last town in the south and Dan the last in the north, Scripture says from Dan to Beersheba when it means everybody. The town has a second story and the page tells it plainly. Centuries after the patriarchs, people were traveling south out of the northern kingdom to worship at this old shrine, and Amos told them to stop. He named Beersheba beside Bethel and Gilgal, three places where God had genuinely acted, and said seek Me and live instead. The covenant that gave the town its name is told next, step by step.

What has been found

the evidence, and where it is disputed

Three things carry this name and a reader has to be able to tell them apart. Tel Beersheba, also written Tel Be'er Sheva and Tell es-Seba, is the ancient mound on the eastern edge of the modern city, and it is the Iron Age town. Modern Be'er Sheva is the city about four kilometres to the west, which grew out of an Ottoman administrative town founded in 1900, and its old quarter holds the well shown to visitors as Abraham's Well. That identification is a local tradition and this page names it as one. The Beersheba valley is the wider basin around both, holding the much older villages dug by Perrot. The mound was excavated by Yohanan Aharoni for the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University over eight seasons from 1969 to 1976, with the last season directed by Ze'ev Herzog after Aharoni's death. Because the walled town is small, roughly 12,000 square metres, the excavators were able to expose most of it. Herzog returned between 1993 and 1995 to finish the water system and published the stratigraphy and the town plan. What they found is a town laid out to a plan rather than grown by accretion. An oval mound is ringed by a casemate wall, with a street running just inside it so that every quarter can be reached without crossing the middle. There is a solid gate complex, a block of three long pillared storehouses beside the gate, a governor's residence, and four-room houses built against the wall. This is an administrative and military centre of the kingdom of Judah, planned and garrisoned. Population estimates for the best-preserved layer run around 350, and figures of that kind are worked out from excavated floor area, so they are estimates and not counts. A rock-cut well stands just outside the outer gate on the south-eastern slope, reaching about 70 metres, which puts its bottom well below the bed of the Beersheba stream. It is among the deepest ancient wells known in the country and it gave the town water all year. The excavators associate its first cutting with the earliest permanent settlement on the mound. Guides and popular accounts call it Abraham's well; the excavation does not date it to the patriarchal period and neither does this page. Inside the walls is a separate rock-cut reservoir fed by a channel from the stream bed, cut so the town could drink under siege. Herzog finished excavating it in the 1990s and it was opened to visitors in 2003. The same engineering problem was solved at Megiddo and at Hazor, and those three mounds were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005 as the property Biblical Tels: Megiddo, Hazor, Beer Sheba. The best-preserved town, Stratum II, was destroyed by fire at the end of the eighth century BC. The usual identification is Sennacherib's campaign against Judah in 701 BC, the campaign that also took Lachish. That identification is widely held rather than certain, and it is the point on which the argument about the altar turns. Beginning in 1973 the excavators recovered a set of dressed limestone ashlars that had been reused as building material in a later wall near the storehouses. Assembled, they form a four-horned altar about a metre and a half high with its projecting corner horns intact. It is the first monumental horned altar recovered in Israel. None of that is in dispute: the stones exist, they are dressed ashlar, they carry horns, and they were found built into a wall rather than standing on a floor. What the dismantling means is disputed, and three readings are on the table. Aharoni argued that the altar had stood in a sanctuary at Beersheba, that it was deliberately taken apart in a royal reform of the cult, and that the stones were then dumped into a wall of the town burned in 701 BC, which puts the reform in Hezekiah's reign, where 2 Kings 18:4 places it. Yigael Yadin dated the wall that reused the ashlars to a later horizon near the Babylonian destruction of about 587 BC and read the stones as belonging to a different structure, which leaves the altar saying much less about Hezekiah. Herzog and others have since argued that the stones went out of use at the end of an earlier stratum, which moves the dismantling off Hezekiah's reign, and some connect the reform evidence with Josiah instead, whose reform 2 Kings 23:8 says reached from Geba to Beersheba. What the evidence settles is that a monumental horned altar stood here, that it was taken apart, and that public sacrifice was going on at Beersheba, which is exactly what Amos assumes. What it does not settle is which king stopped it, and this page leaves that where the evidence leaves it.

The oath at the well

Genesis 21:22 to 21:34, in the order it happens

Read Genesis 21:22 to 21:34, in the order it happens

Genesis explains the name twice. At 21:31 it is the oath the two men swore. At 26:33 Isaac names a well Shibah on the day his servants find water, and the narrator adds that the city is called Beersheba to this day. In Hebrew the word for seven and the word for swearing are the same root, so both readings stand in one name.

The covenant God cut with Abraham: the full study

What happened here, in order

in the order the canon tells it

Where it points

Beersheba is a town built on the problem of water in a place that has almost none, and every scene here turns on a well. There is the well Abimelech's men seized, the well Abraham paid for with seven lambs, the well Isaac's servants found, and the well God opened Hagar's eyes to see while her son was dying of thirst. Jesus takes that exact picture and answers it. "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst" (John 4:13 to 4:14), and on the last day of the feast, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink" (John 7:37). Beersheba is where the Bible teaches a reader to be thirsty. The name of the town is an oath between two frightened men who needed a guarantee because neither could trust the other. Hebrews picks up the same idea and shows what God did with it for Abraham. Since God had no one greater to swear by, He swore by Himself, and Hebrews adds that men swear by someone greater than themselves and their oath ends the argument (Hebrews 6:13 and 6:16). At the tamarisk Abraham calls God by a name he has not used before, El Olam, which the Berean Standard Bible renders the Eternal God and the King James the everlasting God. Isaiah hangs a whole doctrine on the same phrase: "The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary" (Isaiah 40:28). A man with a hundred-year lifespan, standing in a country he does not own, names God by the one attribute that outlasts his problem. The tree makes the same point. Abraham plants a slow tamarisk in territory the same chapter twice calls the land of the Philistines. Hebrews reads that whole habit of life as faith, that by faith he lived in the promised land as a stranger in a foreign country, in tents, because he was looking forward to the city with foundations whose architect and builder is God (Hebrews 11:9 to 11:10). The tamarisk is the tent-dweller's one permanent act. At Beersheba God appears to Isaac first and Isaac builds the altar second. The order matters and it is the order of the gospel. The earliest surviving Christian reading of this place by name is Origen's, about AD 253, who takes Isaac going up to the well of the oath as the place where the promises are confirmed, and reads the oath through Psalm 110, where the Lord has sworn and will not repent that He is a priest forever. That is a third-century preacher's typological reading and this page presents it as one. Elijah's night beyond the town is the same pattern in a harder key. A prophet who has just won the greatest public victory in the Old Testament runs to the last town in Judah, leaves his servant, walks another day into the desert and asks to die. God's first answer is not a rebuke and not a vision. It is bread baked over coals, a jar of water, sleep, and a second meal with a reason attached, that the road ahead would be too much for him. On that food he goes forty days. This site's tradition reads the Bread of Life discourse against the scene, where Jesus says "I am the living bread that came down from heaven" (John 6:51). That pairing is a reading rather than a claim about what the writer of Kings intended, and the page says so. The formula names the two ends of the country in order to say everybody. Jesus takes the boundaries off it: "many will come from the east and the west to share the banquet with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 8:11), and Paul says the promise to Abraham was that he would be heir of the world (Romans 4:13). Cyril of Alexandria, writing about AD 444, read the sending of the disciples against this same phrase, that they were sent past the old limit of the law's commandment, which ran from Dan to Beersheba, to all under the sun. He is describing a mission widening outward. The land the formula names is still Israel's own and the promise to Abraham still stands. And the last word Scripture speaks over Beersheba as a shrine is a prohibition, because a place can be genuinely holy ground and still become a substitute for God. The remedy Amos offers is not a better shrine. It is a person: "Seek Me and live!"

The voices

each quoted from the work named

(Verse 30) And he said, 'You shall take these seven ewes from me, that they may be a witness for me that I have dug this well.' Therefore he called that place Beersheba, because both of them swore an oath there. Where this is read, Beersheba, in Hebrew it is called Beersheba. But there are two reasons why it is so named: either because Abimelech received seven lambs from the hand of Abraham, for seven are called Sheba, or because they swore there, for an oath is also called Sheba in the same way.

Jerome, Hebrew Questions on Genesis (420), on Genesis 21:30

Seven ewe lambs - These were either given as a present, or they were intended as the price of the well; and being accepted by Abimelech, they served as a witness that he had acknowledged Abraham’s right to the well in question.

Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible (1832), on Genesis 21:28

Abraham planted a grove--Hebrew, "of tamarisks," in which sacrificial worship was offered, as in a roofless temple.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Genesis 21:33

4 more teachers on these versesOrigen of Alexandria · Adam Clarke · Charles Spurgeon · Matthew Henry

And for this reason perhaps Isaac is said to have gone up to the well of the oath and there the Lord is said to have appeared to him. For through the prophets "the Lord has sworn and he will not repent, that he is a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek." God appeared to him, therefore, "at the well of the oath" confirming the fulfillment of the promises made to him.

Origen of Alexandria, Homilies on Genesis 14.2 (253), on Genesis 26:24

All Israel from Dan even to Beer-sheba - Through the whole extent of Palestine; Dan being at the northern, Beer-sheba at the southern extremity.

Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible (1832), on 1 Samuel 3:20

THE GREATEST BELIEVERS ARE SOMETIMES SUBJECT TO FAINTING FITS. The Apostle James tells us that "Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are." And this fact was very clearly manifest on the occasion to which our text refers.

Charles Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 3110: “Faintness and Refreshing” (1908), on 1 Kings 19:8

They had sought to Bethel, where one of the golden calves was; they had frequented Gilgal, a place which they chose to set up idols in, because it had been made famous in the days of Joshua by God's wonderful appearances to and for his people.

Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Amos 5:5

Beersheba in Scripture

33 verses name it, in 11 books

Open a book to read its mentions here. Text: Berean Standard Bible.

First namedGenesis 21:14Early in the morning, Abraham got up, took bread and a skin of water, put them on Hagar’s shoulders, and sent her away with the boy. She left and wandered in the Wilderness of Beersheba.Last namedAmos 8:14Those who swear by the guilt of Samaria and say, ‘As surely as your god lives, O Dan,’ or, ‘As surely as the way of Beersheba lives’—they will fall, never to rise again.”

Old TestamentNew Testamentsegment width = share of mentions

Old Testament11 books · 33 mentions

Genesis10 mentions

2 further mentions in Genesis, read them in the book.

All of Genesis→

Joshua2 mentions

All of Joshua→

Judges1 mention

Judges 20:1Then all the Israelites from Dan to Beersheba and from the land of Gilead came out, and the congregation assembled as one man before the LORD at Mizpah.

1 Samuel2 mentions

2 Samuel5 mentions

1 Kings2 mentions

2 Kings2 mentions

1 Chronicles2 mentions

All of 1 Chronicles→

2 Chronicles3 mentions

All of 2 Chronicles→

Nehemiah2 mentions

All of Nehemiah→

Amos2 mentions

All of Amos→

The account

Read the account as one telling

The 'well of the oath' where Abraham and Isaac make covenants and dig wells; the southern boundary marker of the promised land ('from Dan to Beersheba').

Common questions

Why is the place called Beersheba?

Genesis gives two explanations and both come out of the same Hebrew root. At Genesis 21:31 the name is the oath: the place was called Beersheba because it was there that the two of them swore. At Genesis 21:28 to 21:30 it is the seven ewe lambs Abraham set apart as his witness that he had dug the well.

Sheba means seven and shaba means to swear, and Strong's glosses the verb as to seven oneself, so the well of seven and the well of the oath are the same name. Jerome noticed both readings around AD 420 and set them side by side rather than choosing between them.

Is the well shown to visitors really Abraham's well?

Two different wells carry the name and neither is proven. The one shown in the old city of modern Be'er Sheva is a local tradition, and no excavation ties it to the patriarchs. The other is a genuine ancient shaft, about 70 metres deep, cut just outside the gate of the ancient mound at Tel Beersheba, and the excavators date its cutting to the Iron Age town rather than to Abraham's day.

What is not in doubt is the condition the whole story assumes. In this valley water has always had to be dug for, and a dug well was property worth swearing over.

Did Abraham and Isaac each make a covenant here, or is one story told twice?

Readers differ; the positions are named

The traditional reading, held across the church and by the commentators this site quotes, takes them as two events a lifetime apart. Abraham deals with Abimelech at Genesis 21:22 to 21:32, and Isaac deals with an Abimelech and a Phicol at Genesis 26:26 to 26:33, after the wells had been stopped up and had to be dug again. On that reading the repeated names are either a standing royal title, as Adam Clarke argues, or a father and a son.

A critical reading holds that the two accounts are variant tellings of one tradition, on the strength of how closely they run in parallel. The text as it stands presents two events, and this page prints both readings with their reasons.

What does "from Dan to Beersheba" mean, and what was Dan?

It means the whole country and therefore the whole people, the way an American says coast to coast. Dan was the northernmost settled town and Beersheba the southernmost, roughly 235 km apart in a straight line, and the formula runs seven times from Judges through Kings. Chronicles reverses it to from Beersheba to Dan, which is the order the phrase takes when it is spoken from Jerusalem. Albert Barnes read the formula as the writer's proverb for all Israel rather than a claim about when Dan was settled.

Dan itself has a hard story. The tribe could not hold its allotment, went north, took the quiet town of Laish by the sword and renamed it after their forefather, and set up a stolen idol with a Levite for hire. Jeroboam later put one of his two golden calves there. The mound is Tel Dan, at the foot of Mount Hermon by a headwater of the Jordan, excavated by Avraham Biran from 1966 for more than thirty seasons. He uncovered a mudbrick arched gate of the eighteenth century BC, preserved to full height under a rampart and called Abraham's Gate by guides, which is a modern nickname and nothing more, and a large stepped stone platform that the excavators read as the sanctuary of 1 Kings 12:29. In 1993 and 1994 his team recovered three fragments of an Old Aramaic victory stele naming a king of the house of David, and the reading of those letters is disputed among epigraphers. Beersheba has a page on this site and Dan does not yet.

Why did Amos tell Israel to stop going to Beersheba?

Because a real shrine had become a substitute for God. Amos names Beersheba beside Bethel and Gilgal, three places where God had genuinely acted, and puts the command to seek the LORD and live in front of the command to stop travelling there.

People were going south out of the northern kingdom to swear by the way of Beersheba. That is swearing by the shrine instead of by the LORD. The prophet is not attacking the town's history. He is attacking the traffic.

Was Elijah under the broom tree at Beersheba?

No, and the difference matters. He reached Beersheba, left his servant in the town, and then went a day's walk further into the wilderness before he sat down under the tree and asked to die.

Beersheba is the last town in Judah, so the town is where he stopped running from Jezebel and the wilderness is where he gave up. Albert Barnes noted that the tree the King James calls a juniper is the Hebrew rethem, a desert broom big enough to shade a traveller.

What is the horned altar found at Tel Beersheba, and does it prove Hezekiah's reform?

Readers differ; the positions are named

Excavators recovered a set of dressed limestone blocks reused in a later wall, and assembled they form a large four-horned altar with its horns intact. It is the first monumental horned altar found in Israel. Nobody disputes that it existed, that it was taken apart, or that its stones ended up in a wall.

What the dismantling means is disputed. Yohanan Aharoni read it as a royal reform of the cult and tied it to Hezekiah, whose reform 2 Kings 18:4 places before Sennacherib's campaign of 701 BC. Yigael Yadin dated the wall that reused the stones much later, nearer 587 BC, and read the blocks as belonging to a different structure. Ze'ev Herzog and others have argued for an earlier dismantling still, and some connect the reform evidence with Josiah, who reached from Geba to Beersheba.

An altar that size means public sacrifice happened here, which is what Amos assumes. It does not by itself name the king who stopped it.

What is a tamarisk, and why did Abraham plant one?

A tamarisk is a slow desert tree with deep roots and fine leaves that lives where almost nothing else will. Abraham planted one at Beersheba and called on the name of the LORD, the Eternal God, which the King James renders the everlasting God. The Hebrew behind both is one phrase, El Olam.

The King James says grove because the older translators read the word that way; Jamieson, Fausset and Brown explain it as tamarisks, worshipped in as though in a roofless temple. The rabbis argued over the same word. Sotah 10a in the Babylonian Talmud, closed around the sixth century AD, records one opinion that Abraham planted an orchard and another that he opened an inn, which is where the tradition of Abraham's open tent comes from.

Is Beersheba in the New Testament?

No. The town is named around thirty-three times in the Old Testament and never once in the New. Its last appearance is Nehemiah 11, where returning exiles resettle it and its villages.

The place is a foundation the New Testament stands on rather than a place it visits. That is why the section on Christ below works through the well, the oath and the name of God rather than through a Gospel scene.

Notable art

4 verified pieces depicting Beersheba

Abraham sends Hagar and the boy out at dawn into that same country, Genesis 21:14Gustave Doré, La Sainte Bible (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1866). Public domain.

The angel wakes Elijah beside the bread and the jar of water, a day's walk beyond Beersheba rather than in the town, 1 Kings 19:5 to 19:7Gustave Doré, La Sainte Bible (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1866). Public domain.

Jacob's household on the road in Pharaoh's wagons after leaving Beersheba, Genesis 46:5Gustave Doré, La Sainte Bible (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1866). Public domain.

Amos, the prophet who told Israel to stop coming to this town, Amos 5:5. The plate does not depict Beersheba.Gustave Doré, La Sainte Bible (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1866). Public domain.

Sources cited

OpenBible.info Bible Geocoding: Beershebaread 2026-08-20The coordinates on this page. Used under CC-BY with attribution to OpenBible.info.
Gustave Doré, La Sainte Bible (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1866)The five engravings on this page. Public domain.
Yohanan Aharoni (ed.), Beer-Sheba I: Excavations at Tel Beer-Sheba, 1969 to 1971 Seasons (Tel Aviv University, 1973)The first excavation report, and the source of Aharoni's reading of the horned altar.
UNESCO World Heritage List, property 1108, Biblical Tels: Megiddo, Hazor, Beer ShebaThe 2005 inscription, cited as a bare fact.
Jean Perrot, excavation reports on the Chalcolithic sites of the Beersheba valley, from 1951Bir es-Safadi and Abu Matar, published in the Israel Exploration Journal and in Syria. Cited by series.
Avraham Biran, Biblical Dan (Israel Exploration Society, 1994)The excavation of Tel Dan, cited for the Dan half of the formula.
Avraham Biran and Joseph Naveh, "An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan", Israel Exploration Journal 43 (1993), and "The Tel Dan Inscription: A New Fragment", Israel Exploration Journal 45 (1995)The publication of the stele and the reading of the letters as the house of David.
Philip R. Davies, "'House of David' Built on Sand", Biblical Archaeology Review 20:4 (1994)The challenge to that reading, with the replies printed in the same volume.
André Lemaire, "'House of David' Restored in Moabite Inscription", Biblical Archaeology Review 20:3 (1994)A second and separately contested piece of evidence for the same phrase.
Jerome, Hebrew Questions on Genesis, c. AD 420Public domain. The quotation giving both explanations of the name.
Origen of Alexandria, Homilies on Genesis, c. AD 253Public domain. The earliest surviving Christian reading of Beersheba by name.
Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John, c. AD 444Public domain. Cited in prose for his reading of the formula as the old limit of the mission field.
Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710)Public domain, CCEL edition.
Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible (1832)Public domain, CCEL edition.
Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832 to 1869)Public domain. Cited in prose for the broom tree of 1 Kings 19:4 and for the formula as a proverb.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)Public domain.
Charles H. Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 3110Public domain, CCEL edition, lightly modernized text.
Genesis Rabbah 54:4An aggadic midrash compiled in the Land of Israel, generally dated to the fifth century AD. Summarised on this page as reception history, not adopted.
Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 10aCompiled in Babylonia and closed around the sixth century AD. Cited for the rabbis' argument over the word rendered tamarisk.
The site's own stores, queried 2026-09-02The places row, the verses table at translation_id 3 for every Scripture quotation, the pull_quotes pool for every voice, and lexicon_entries for the Strong's ids linked here.

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