Genesis26chapter 26

Genesis 26:1-2

A second famine comes and Isaac sets out for Egypt exactly as his father had done, and God stops him with a command Abraham never received, Go not down into Egypt. Isaac becomes the only one of the three patriarchs who never leaves the land of promise. The road his father took in chapter 12 is closed to the son, and the closing of it is the first thing God says to him here.

Genesis 26:3-5

Every clause of Abraham's promise is said again to Isaac, the land, the seed as the stars of heaven, and all the nations of the earth blessed in his seed. The reason given is his father's obedience rather than his own, that Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge. He receives a covenant he had no part in earning, which is the order the book keeps everywhere.

Genesis 26:6-7

Isaac tells the men of the place that Rebekah is his sister, the third time this happens in Genesis and the second time in this town. He had not been born when Abram said it in Egypt, and he had not been born when Abraham said it here to a king of this same name, since chapter 20 stands before his birth. Genesis never says how the son came to know his father's answer, and it does not fill the silence.

Genesis 26:8-9

Abimelech finds him out by looking through a window and seeing Isaac sporting with Rebekah, which is how a husband behaves and a brother does not. The first two times the lie was broken by plague and by a dream sent from God; this time an ordinary domestic moment breaks it, seen by a man who happened to be looking. Isaac's answer when challenged, lest I die for her, is his father's reasoning repeated almost word for word.

Genesis 26:10-11

This is the third time a pagan king rebukes a patriarch in Genesis, after Pharaoh in chapter 12 and this king's namesake in chapter 20. Each time the man outside the covenant states the moral case and the man carrying the promise has little to say back. Abimelech then puts the couple under a decree of death for anyone who touches them, so the protection Isaac lied to secure is handed to him openly by the man he lied to.

Genesis 26:12-14

Isaac sows and reaps a hundredfold in the year of a famine, and he is the only patriarch in Genesis shown farming rather than keeping flocks alone. The text says plainly that the LORD blessed him, and then that he went forward and grew until he became very great. The verse reporting the blessing is followed at once by the verse reporting that the Philistines envied him.

Genesis 26:15-18

The Philistines had stopped his father's wells and filled them with earth after Abraham died, which strikes at a dead man's work as much as at a living neighbour's water. Isaac digs them open again and gives them back the names his father had called them by. He does not make a new inheritance for himself; he recovers one that had been buried.

Genesis 26:19-22

Three wells carry three names that track the quarrel, Esek because they strove with him, Sitnah because they opposed him, and Rehoboth because at last no one did. Isaac moves rather than fight over water each time, and the room he finally names is given to him rather than taken. Jerome notes that the word standing behind Sitnah is the word that stands behind the name Satan.

Genesis 26:23-25

God appears the same night Isaac reaches Beersheba and names himself the God of Abraham thy father, which is the ground the whole chapter stands on. Isaac builds an altar, calls on the name of the LORD, pitches his tent, and only then digs a well. That is the order his father kept, worship before shelter and shelter before water.

Genesis 26:26-31

The men who had told him to go now come after him to swear a treaty, and the reason they give is that they saw certainly that the LORD was with thee. Abraham had sworn the same kind of oath at this same place with a king of this name and a captain called Phichol, in chapter 21. Isaac answers the men who hated him with a feast, and they part in peace in the morning.

Genesis 26:32-33

We have found water: His servants come the same day with word that they have found water, so the oath and the well arrive together. He calls it Shebah, and the city keeps the name Beersheba, which his father had already fixed on it after his own oath at the same spot. The place is sworn over twice by two generations.

Genesis 26:34-35

Esau marries two Hittite women at forty, which is the age at which his own father had married Rebekah. The chapter ends on one line about the cost, that they were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah. That grief is the hinge into the next chapter, where Rebekah moves to keep the blessing away from him.