In the story of Isaac’s dispute with Abimelech the writer of Genesis calls him ‘king of the Philistines,’ and speaks of his subjects as ‘Philistines.’ This, however, is an accommodation to the geography of a later day. In the age of the patriarchs the south-eastern corner of Palestine has not as yet been occupied by the Philistine immigrants. We have learned from the Egyptian monuments that they were pirates from the islands and coasts of the Greek Seas who did not seize upon the frontier cities of Southern Canaan until the time of the Pharaoh Meneptah, the son of Ramses II. Up to then, for more than three centuries, the frontier cities had been garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and included in the Egyptian empire. It was not till the period of the Exodus that the district passed into Philistine hands, and the old road into Egypt by the sea-coast became known as ‘the way of the Philistines.’ In speaking of the ‘Philistines,’ therefore, the writer of the book of Genesis is speaking proleptically. And in reading the narrative of Isaac’s dealings with Abimelech by the side of that of Abraham’s dealings with the same king, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that we have before us two versions of the same event. Doubtless, history repeats itself; disputes about the possession of wells in a desert-land can frequently recur, and it is possible that two kings of the same name may have followed one another on the throne of Gerar. But what does not seem very possible is that each of these kings should have had a ‘chief captain of his host’ called by the strange non-Semitic name of Phichol (Gen. xxi. 22; xxvi. 26); that each of them should have taken the wife of the patriarch, believing her to be his sister; or that Beer-sheba should twice have received the same name from the oaths sworn over it. When we compare the two versions together, it is not difficult to see which of them is the more original. It is in the second that Abimelech is called ‘king of the Philistines’; in the first he is correctly entitled ‘king of Gerar.’ Abraham was justified in calling Sarah his sister; there was no ground and no reason for Isaac doing the same in the case of his own wife. Moreover, Beer-sheba had already received its name from Abraham, who had planted there an _êshel_ or tamarisk, and ‘called on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God.’ The wife of Isaac was brought from Harran, from the members of Abraham’s race who had settled in Northern Syria, and there become an Aramæan family. She was the daughter of Bethuel, ‘the house of God,’ a proper name which is found in the Tel el-Amarna letters, where it also belongs to a native of Northern Syria.[75] Bethuel is the older form of Bethel, that anointed stone which, according to Semitic belief, was the special residence of divinity. There was something peculiarly appropriate in such a name at Harran, where the great temple of the Moon-god, the ‘Baal of Harran,’ was itself a Beth-el on a large scale.