The earliest Bible reference to a specific covenant between individuals, is in the mention, at Genesis 14 : 13, of Mamre, Eshcol, and Aner, the Amorites, who were in covenant with--literally, were “masters of the covenant of”--“Abram the Hebrew.” After this, comes the record of a covenant between Abraham and Abimelech, at the wells of Beer-sheba. Abimelech sought that covenant; he sought it because of his faith in Abraham’s God. “God is with thee in all that thou doest,” he said: “Now, therefore, swear unto me here by God, that thou wilt not deal falsely with me, nor with my son, nor with my son’s son: but according to the kindness that I have done unto thee, thou shalt do unto me, and to the land wherein thou hast sojourned. And Abraham said, I will swear.”[570] Then came the giving of gifts by Abraham, according to the practice which seems universal in connection with this rite, in our own day.[571] “And Abraham took sheep and oxen, and gave them unto Abimelech.” And they two “made a covenant,”--or, as the Hebrew is, “they two cut a covenant.” This covenant, thus cut between Abraham and Abimelech--patriarchs and sovereigns as they were--was for themselves and for their posterity. As to the manner of its making, we have a right to infer, from all that we know of the manner of such covenant-making among the people of their part of the world, in the earliest days of recorded history. Herodotus, who goes back more than two-thirds of the way to Abraham, says, that when the Arabians would covenant together, a third man, standing between the two, cuts, with a sharp stone, the inside of the hands of both, and lets the blood therefrom drop on seven stones which are between the two parties.[572] Phicol, the captain of Abimelech’s host, was present, as a third man, when the covenant was cut between Abimelech and Abraham; at Beer-sheba--the Well of the Seven, or the Well of the Oath.[573] Instead of seven stones as a “heap of witness”[574] between the two in this covenanting, “seven ewe lambs” were set apart by Abraham, that they might “be a witness”[575]--a symbolic witness to this transaction. In the primitive rite of blood-covenanting, as it is practised in some parts of the East, to the present time, in addition to other symbolic witnesses of the rite, a _tree_ is planted by the covenanting parties, “which remains and grows as a witness of their contract.”[576] So it was, in the days of Abraham. “And Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beer-sheba, and called there on the name of the Everlasting God. And Abraham sojourned [was a sojourner] in the land of the Philistines many days”[577]--while that tree, doubtless, remained and grew as a witness of his blood-covenant compact with Abimelech the ruler of the Philistines.[578] Abimelech was, as it were, the first-fruits of the “nations”[579] who were to have a blessing through the covenanted friend of God.