Eastern Hospitality

Centuries before the magi visited Bethlehem bringing exquisite gifts fit for a king, a desert sheik spotted three strangers lingering a short distance from his tents. With the vigor characteristic of middle-eastern hospitality, he hurried over to them and offered them a quick drink of water.

In the conventions of hospitality, you make the initial offer so small that to refuse would be an insult. Then,

A Large Family Circle

In the previous two posts Fertile Crescent and Beer-sheva, we have followed the journey of Abraham from the rich waters of Mesopotamia to the arid land of the Negev where Abraham settled in response to the call of God. He named his settlement Beer-sheva, ‘the well of the oath’ to commemorate both his treaty with the resident king who recognized Abraham’s legitimacy and his ownership of a contested well that Abraham’s servants had dug.

Gerar Valley

It turns out this was not the only well Abraham dug to sustain his herds and flocks. A generation later when Abraham’s son Isaac settled in the Gerar Valley, 15 miles west of Beer-sheva (about 10 miles east from modern day Gaza) the locals harassed him by plugging all his wells with dirt and debris, ‘wells that his father's servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham,’ Genesis 26:15.

Wells and cisterns were crucial in the Negev for economic survival, and clearly Abraham had invested considerable effort to acquire them as means for prosperity. Wells were an important

Beer-sheva

The previous post, Fertile Crescent, told how Abraham responded to the call of God to leave the good life of Mesopotamia and travel to a place God would show him. Genesis 12 tells how “he set out for the land of Canaan and arrived safe and sound.”

After traveling through the land he settled in the Negev. Why he chose that challenging terrain we’re not told; perhaps because it was more sparsely settled than other areas.

Before long a severe famine in the area forced Abraham to travel east to Egypt in search of food, but he returned when he could to the Negev, settling in the eastern region near Beer-sheva. See Genesis 21:22-34. And to support his cattle and sheep-herding enterprise in an arid land like this, Abraham needed a significant amount of water, which meant he needed wells. So Abraham’s servants did a lot of digging.