would become a desert-wanderer like themselves. This difference in the sources of the narrative explains why it is that the figure of Abraham so largely overshadows that of his son Isaac. Isaac seems almost swallowed up in that darkness of antiquity through which the figure of his father looms so largely. Apart from his dispute with Abimelech of Gerar, which reads like a repetition of the dispute between Abimelech and Abraham, there is little told of the life of Isaac which is not connected with his more famous father or son. Between Abraham and Jacob, the great ancestors of Israel, Isaac seems to intervene as merely a connecting link. But the life of Isaac was that of a Bedâwi shêkh. The other side of his father’s life and character was lost. The forefather of Israel had ceased to be a Chaldæan, and had become simply a dweller in the desert, like the fugitive slaves from Egypt in after days. Even Hebron was left, and the life of Isaac was mainly passed on the northern edge of that desert in which his descendants were in later times to receive the Law. If he approached Canaan, it was only to Beer-sheba and Gerar on the southern skirts of Canaanitish territory, where the Bedâwin and their flocks still claimed to be masters. But his chief residence was further south, in the very heart of the wilderness. Isaac was thus essentially a Bedâwi, a fit type of the phase of life through which the Israelites were destined to pass before their conquest of the Promised Land. With the politics and trade of the civilised world, accordingly, he never came into contact. There was nothing in his existence for the historian to chronicle; nothing which could bring his name into the written history of the time. If his memory were to be preserved at all, it could be only through the unwritten traditions of the desert, through the tales told of him among the desert tribes. Once indeed, it is said, he had relations with a king. The king was one of those Canaanitish princelets with whose names the Tel el-Amarna tablets are filled. The dominions of Abimelech of Gerar were of small extent, and must have been barren in the extreme. The site of Gerar lies two hours south of Gaza,[74] and the territory of its king extended eastward as far as Beer-sheba. It was essentially a desert territory: during the greater part of the year the whole country is bare and sterile; only after rain does the wilderness break forth suddenly into green herbage.