Aggada -- Translations into English; Bible. Old Testament -- Legends; Jewish legends; Midrash -- Translations into English
Thereafter the king invited Isaac to settle in his domains, and he
assigned fields and vineyards to him for cultivation, the best the land
afforded.[59] But Isaac was not self-interested. The tithe of all he
possessed he gave to the poor of Gerar. Thus he was the first to
introduce the law of tithing for the poor, as his father Abraham had
been the first to separate the priests' portion from his fortune.[60]
Isaac was rewarded by abundant harvests; the land yielded a hundred
times more than was expected, though the soil was barren and the year
unfruitful. He grew so rich that people wished to have "the dung from
Isaac's she-mules rather than Abimelech's gold and silver."[61] But his
wealth called forth the envy of the Philistines, for it is
characteristic of the wicked that they begrudge their fellow-men the
good, and rejoice when they see evil descend upon them, and envy brings
hatred in its wake, and so the Philistines first envied Isaac, and then
hated him. In their enmity toward him, they stopped the wells which
Abraham had had his servants dig. Thus they broke their covenant with
Abraham and were faithless, and they have only themselves to blame if
they were exterminated later on by the Israelites.
Isaac departed from Gerar, and began to dig again the wells of water
which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father, and which the
Philistines had stopped. His reverence for his father was so great that
he even restored the names by which Abraham had called the wells. To
reward him for his filial respect, the Lord left the name of Isaac
unchanged, while his father and his son had to submit to new names.[62]
After four attempts to secure water, Isaac was successful; he found the
well of water that followed the Patriarchs. Abraham had obtained it
after three diggings. Hence the name of the well, Beer-sheba, "the well
of seven diggings," the same well that will supply water to Jerusalem
and its environs in the Messianic time.[63]
Isaac's success with his wells but served to increase the envy of the
Philistines, for he had come upon water in a most unlikely spot and,
besides, in a year of drouth. But "the Lord fulfils the desire of them
that fear Him." As Isaac executed the will of his Creator, so God
accomplished his desire.[64] And Abimelech, the king of Gerar, speedily
came to see that God was on the side of Isaac, for, to chastise him for
having instigated Isaac's removal from Gerar, his house was ravaged by
robbers in the night, and he himself was stricken with leprosy.[65] The
wells of the Philistines ran dry as soon as Isaac left Gerar, and also
the trees failed to yield their fruit. None could be in doubt but that
these things were the castigation for their unkindness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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