Wow, here we are at the end of Genesis chapter twenty-one at last! Before taking a break for the Fall Festivals, we’re going to look at the consequences of not being trusted as well as not being trustworthy—as both Abraham and Abimelech know very well. And we’ll be talking about sheep, wells, and planting trees in the middle of the desert!
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
Alright. Things have really changed in Abraham’s household. He has a three-year-old son and a ninety-three-year-old wife. He’s 103 years old, and now his seventeen-year-old son Ishmael is gone, along with Ishmael’s mom Hagar. Ishmael will show up again at Abraham’s funeral, but Hagar won’t be seen again as a character in the stories in the Hebrew part of the Bible. But she was visited twice by God, is the only person who has named God, and He calls her by her name. Not bad. She isn’t enslaved anymore, she’s a free woman living with her son and her son’s wife and someday a whole lot of grandkids. Like Sarah, she will be the matriarch of a clan. God is taking care of them just like He promised. Remember last time when I shared that God is no respecter of persons? That means that He isn’t impressed by any of the stuff that impresses us. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that He is taking good care of Hagar and her son, Ishmael. I think that Abraham was only willing to let Ishmael go because God told him point blank to listen to Sarah—and even though Abraham often did the wrong thing to other people with his fear and lies, when it came to obeying direct commands, He always just obeys right away. Abraham was great with doing what God told him but not so great at trusting God enough with His promises. So, he obeyed but it must have been hard. I wonder if he really believed that God would take care of Ishmael. No matter how much anyone trusts God in a situation like this, you still worry about your kid when they go out into the world. One of my twins lives across town and the other is still at home but soon they will both be gone. And I will worry. Even though I see them all the time and we talk on the phone still.
This week’s verses happen “at that time,” so that’s why I reminded you what just happened. I don’t know what made Abimelech decide to visit Abraham again—remember that four years earlier he had kidnapped Sarah and God protected her by making it impossible for Abimelech to marry her. Not only wasn’t he okay, but neither was anyone else in his household. When Abimelech found out that he had been lied to and that Sarah was Abraham’s wife and not just a sister as he had been told, he was furious. He was a king and this random guy was lying to him? This guy who had his critters and tents on Philistine land? Where’s the gratitude? Abimelech had to give Sarah back but also had to pay Abraham a lot of critters and money as an apology so that Abraham would pray for them not to be cursed anymore. That’s the last we saw of Abimelech, until now. Let’s look at this week’s verses, which take us to the very end of chapter twenty-one.
At that time Abimelech, joined by Phicol (who was like the general over his fighting men), said to Abraham, “God is obviously on your side. Promise me in the name of God here and now, that you will not break any agreement with me or with my children and their children forever. I have been loyal to you, so you need to be loyal to me in the very same way, and to the country where you are living as an alien.” And Abraham said, “I swear it.” But Abraham complained to Abimelech because Abimelech’s servants had taken a well that had been dug by Abraham’s men.Abimelech replied, “I have no idea who did this. You haven’t said one word to me before now, so I was clueless.” Abraham took flocks of goats and sheep and herds of cattle and gave them to Abimelech, and the two of them made a covenant. Abraham set aside seven young female sheep from the flock. And Abimelech said to Abraham, “Why have you separated these seven ewe lambs from the rest of the flock?” Abraham replied, “I need you to accept the seven ewe lambs from me as proof that I dug this well.” Therefore, that place was called Beer-sheba because it was there that the two of them swore an oath. After they had made a covenant at Beer-sheba, Abimelech and Phicol, the commander of his army, left and returned to the land of the Philistines. Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beer-sheba, and there he called on the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God. And Abraham lived as a foreigner in the land of the Philistines for many days.
So, we have something kinda strange here. Abimelech and Phicol are like the king and general of the Philistines in this area. But we also see these same names like sixty years later when Isaac and his wife Rebekah are living there. It’s not very likely that these are the same two guys because no one would be a general for over sixty years, right? It takes a long time to become good enough to be a general, which would make it really hard to stay alive long enough to have the job for that long. Also, the name Abimelech isn’t necessarily an actual name. It means, “my father is king.” That means it might be what we would call a throne name. We talked about this before. The names of kings in the Bible aren’t necessarily what they were named by their mommies when they were born. Queen Victoria’s real name was Alexandrina but it didn’t sound English enough so when she became Queen, she changed her name to Victoria. And Phicol might be a family name too, as it doesn’t seem to mean anything in particular. Want to hear a funny word? It’s papponymy, and it means naming a kid after their dad. So, this guy’s dad was probably the general and his kid never had a chance of being anything but a soldier. People didn’t really get to choose what they wanted to do in those days, whether they were any good at it or not. And they didn’t choose who they got to marry either, unless they were older and very powerful. No one would want to go back and live in Bible days. Not any of the Bible days. The world really needed Jesus!
As if Abimelech needed any more convincing that God was on Abraham’s side after being cursed for kidnapping Sarah, it must have been even more obvious after ninety-year-old Sarah had a baby and Abraham sent his strong young son—who was now a grown man—packing. That isn’t something that any sane person would do in the ancient world. You didn’t give up a grown up son when you were that old and put all your hopes in a toddler unless you were very certain that toddler would live to become a man himself—and most kids didn’t live that long. Sure Ishmael was the son of a slave, but he was now at the age where he would probably live to be an old man. Isaac was a risky choice with no backup just in case he died of a childhood disease or whatever. Honestly, it would have been a seen as more than a bit strange and maybe Abimelech is wondering what kind of a man would do such a thing. And if he would send his own grown son away, what else might he do? Of course, Abimelech wouldn’t have any idea that this was God’s decision and not Abraham’s. It probably just seemed incredibly foolish and irresponsible. But because of all this, Abimelech decided he needed to make a covenant with Abraham and his family. A covenant is much different from a friendship. In a covenant, each of the people involved would swear an oath in the names of their gods to not harm the other person at all and to always be loyal to them and fair. So, no lying or stealing or attacking or any of that nonsense. Because they made this solemn promise in the names of their gods, they believed that the gods would take revenge on anyone who broke their half of the promise. That’s what God was telling Moses with the third commandment not to use God’s name in vain. It didn’t only mean not using God as a swear word but not making God look bad by agreeing to something and not following through and doing it after using His name as a character reference. That’s why the commandment says that God isn’t going to let people get away with doing that. If you “swear to God” then you had better be totally serious.
What Abimelech wants Abraham to promise is that he won’t ever hurt Abimelech or his family ever, forever. Maybe Abimelech wanted a covenant just in case they went off to war and was afraid that Abraham would gather all his own fighting men and take over their city while the men were all gone. Abimelech reminds Abraham that this isn’t his property or his own country, and that he is living there as a guest. He wasn’t invited, he just showed up one day with all his people and critters and he was only invited to stay because Abimelech had to get on Abraham’s good side after stealing his wife. Abimelech calls Abraham a resident alien, although some other Bibles will say foreigner or sojourner. In other words, Abraham is staying there but it wasn’t because Abimelech wanted him there in the first place. When God gives the children of Israel the commandments that He wants them to begin living by after being slaves in Egypt, one of the things most important to God is that they are kind and generous to foreigners who are living in their lands. Because, after all, they would have all died if the Egyptians hadn’t allowed them to live in their country during the seven-year famine and hadn’t fed them. They were Israelites, not Egyptians. They never became Egyptians, and when the Egyptians stopped being good hosts and the new Pharaoh didn’t let them go, God punished them for taking their Israelite neighbors for slaves and being cruel to them. The Egyptians were scared of them, and so they used them as slaves and hated them. That isn’t ever okay with God and He wants us to trust Him enough to share and be kind to any foreigners living near us. The world, after all, belongs to God and we are just living here!
Before they go ahead and make the covenant by killing critters and burning their insides up and eating food together, Abraham has a complaint to make. His people had dug a well so they could water their goats and sheep and cows and camels, and that was really hard work. They would die without wells when it wasn’t the rainy season. I mean, after all, they were living down in the Negev desert! They get like 8” of rain there all year. I also live in a desert here in Idaho Falls, and we get 10” a year but we have a huge river running through our city and we get our water from the mountains in Wyoming. But without electricity, we’d pretty much all have to move away because there isn’t enough water for everyone. So, when Abraham complains that Abimelech’s people took his well, it’s like if someone dammed up the water coming from the mountains so we couldn’t get to it or making it so the river doesn’t come through our city anymore. Taking someone else’s well was like trying to kill them. This was serious business and Abimelech said that he didn’t know anything about that. However, throughout the Bible, the Philistines are always taking stuff that doesn’t belong to them—like Sarah, and the Ark of the Covenant. So maybe Abimelech did know. He probably knew. But maybe he got nervous about having done that once Abraham sent his first-born son away forever and decided to make permanent peace between them.
So now that Abimelech has been told about the well, Abraham takes sheep and goats and bulls and they make a covenant. Actually, the Bible says that they “cut” a covenant. That was the word used, cut, because animals would always be sacrificed. In the ancient world, they saw blood as very sacred and holy—which is way too complicated to talk about here and we will do that when we get to Exodus. The Israelites weren’t allowed to drink it even though it could be a valuable source of salt and water in an emergency. Blood belonged to God. It was His and no one else’s. Blood was for special ceremonies and for cleaning things—which sounds totally strange, but we will talk about that some other time.
Abraham takes seven of his very valuable ewe lambs, which are young females who will make a lot of babies and give a lot of milk and wool over their lives and sets them in front of Abimelech. Abimelech is confused and he asks Abraham what this is all about. Abraham says that he is giving these to Abimelech as proof that the stolen well is his, that he dug it, and by paying Abimelech for the well, that it is his to use forever. Now, Abimelech has to tell his servants to leave the well alone or else he will be breaking the covenant agreement they were making. Abraham could have just believed that Abimelech would be honest and give the well back but now he had to give it back because there were witnesses and Abraham had paid for it fair and square even though the land the well was on didn’t belong to him. You see, even though Abraham’s people had dug the well, the land the well was on didn’t belong to them. So, technically, Abimelech could take it and say there’s nothing wrong with it. Really, when he said he didn’t know anything about it, what he was probably actually saying is this, “Oh gosh, I had no idea it was yours, I mean, the well is on my land, right? Why wouldn’t I think it was mine or that I didn’t have the right to use it?” Abraham wasn’t just giving Abimelech money, he was giving him sheep that would become more and more and more sheep and would keep paying Abimelech more and more for the well forever. It was a very clever way to prove the well was his.
In case you are curious how many sheep we are talking about, a ewe has about six years where she will have babies every year—sometimes twins and sometimes just one. She might have like nine lambs before she dies. Some of those lambs will be boys but they aren’t as useful as the girls so they were used for wool and meat. The sacrifices were usually the boys, called rams. If each of these seven ewes had five girls over the years, that’s 35 more ewes who will also have nine babies each and their babies will keep having babies forever too. Twenty years later and that’s a ton of critters. That’s why they didn’t usually eat them until they were old, because they were too valuable. And they used their skins to hold water and wine, make tents, and much later to write things down on. So, Abraham is saying that every spring when they have babies, you will remember that the well is mine and not yours. And your shepherds taking care of them will know too, and the shearers, and everyone.
Because of this, they named the place Beersheba. And that’s an interesting name. Be’er means well and shevua means oath but shevua also has the same letters as the Hebrew word meaning seven, sheba. So it can mean the well of the oath and it looks like the well of seven. And since both of those make sense, I guess it means both. Abraham and Abimelech made a covenant there, and Abraham took an oath never to attack Abimelech or his people or his country. And Abraham gave Abimelech seven ewe lambs. So, it really is a well of the oath and a well of the seven. The Bible seems to like names like that with clever meanings. Even though the spelling of the name is closer to the meaning “well of the seven,” the Bible actually says it is called that because of the oath, so there’s that, clear as mud, right?
Happy that they no longer have to worry about Abraham attacking them, Abimelech and Phicol ride off into the sunset and we never hear from them again. Abraham decides to do something very important in ancient Canaan—he plants a tamarisk tree. Now, in my country, there are trees all over the place but not in the Negev desert. Just not enough water to keep trees alive but they were very valuable for shade. Remember that his friend Mamre had oak trees on his property, probably planted by his ancestors, and Abraham entertained God and the two angels under one of those trees. It takes a long time for a tree to get big enough to be useful and once they were big they were like landmarks. Man, if you were traveling and it was hot and you saw a tree, you headed straight for it. But trees were for people who were settling down and were often planted as memorials of important events. Ancient kings would steal trees and seeds and all sorts of plants from the lands they conquered and would bring them home to their gardens.
Tamarisk trees were very valuable out in the desert because they could grow up to thirty feet tall, had very deep roots, and needed very little water once they got to be a certain size. And believe me, no one would cut it down for any reason. Of course, one of the reasons that Abraham might have planted this tree was to make a monument to God. A monument is like “hey, look at this place, something big happened here!” Although celebrating getting the well back is a big deal, Abraham might have planted it there to honor God and thank Him and in fact, the Bible says that Abraham called on the Name of the Lord there. And that’s something we haven’t seen him do in over twenty-five years, since chapter thirteen. Now, don’t get me wrong, the Bible doesn’t tell us everything and in fact, for someone who is going to live to be almost 180 years old, it really doesn’t tell us much about Abraham at all, right? So, maybe it is better to say that this is the first time the Bible has mentioned it for a long time. If you remember, all through the Bible, calling on the Name of the Lord is what people would do when they wanted God to keep His promises. At first, they were doing it because they wanted God to keep His promise to send the one who would crush the head of the serpent who was the enemy in the Garden in Eden. They were working hard and dying and they wanted things set right again. Abraham was the beginning of the answer to those prayers but Abraham also knew that he was only the beginning. God had promised Abraham a son with his wife Sarah, and that had happened, and that the great-great-grandchildren of Isaac would have all the land of Canaan. But God had also told Abraham that they would be held as slaves for a very long time somewhere else. I imagine he prayed about that and also about the promises God made about his son Ishmael.
Sometimes, it is good to remind God about His promises to us not because He forgets but because He loves it when we remember. Remembering His promises means that we are putting our hope in Him to fix all that is terrible and evil in the world. For hundreds and hundreds of years, the descendants of Abraham prayed for the coming of the Messiah, who would crush the head of that nasty serpent. But it wasn’t until they were exiled all over the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires that they really started to make a point of praying it three times a day. Have you ever heard that prayer?
Please have mercy on us and come back to Jerusalem Your city and live in it with us as You have promised; quickly give us back a king from the line of David (aka the Messiah, King of the Jews), and rebuild Jerusalem, soon in our days, as an eternal city. Blessed are You oh Lord, who rebuilds Jerusalem. Hurry and bring us the son David Your servant (again, the Messiah, King of the Jews), and give him more and more power by Your salvation, because we hope for Your salvation all day every day. Blessed are You Lord, who makes the power of Your salvation grow and grow.
Of course I changed it to make it more understandable. The prayers of the Amidah are very flowery and fancy and they can be a bit difficult to figure out if you aren’t already in the know and if you don’t have a huge vocabulary of fancy words. This prayer is to remind God of His promises that there was going to be a forever King from David’s family. When things were very difficult, they would pray and talk about the Messiah a lot. They wanted a new Jewish king who would smash all of the cruel empires of the world who had hurt them and they wanted him now! Just like us, right? We always want what we want when we want it and that’s usually right now. And Abraham, now very old with a three year old son who still needs to be trained to take over the family when Abraham would die (which he knew could be any day), there was a long road ahead and because he was living among the Philistines who liked to steal everything from wives to wells, I bet He was calling on the Name of the Lord to remember them and to never forget His promises.
I love you. I am praying for you. You know, even today we are still asking for the Messiah, the King of the Jews to come. Only we’re wanting Him to come back for good as King of the world! Until He is here with us, nothing else will ever be good enough and we need to call on the Name of the Lord to send Jesus back to us. We need to remind God that we remember and we are looking forward to it.