Meanwhile Abraham had quitted Mamre and again turned his steps towards the south.  This time it was at Gerar, between the sanctuary of Kadesh-barnea and Shur the “wall” of Egypt that he sojourned.  Kadesh has been found again in our own days by the united efforts of Dr. John Rowlands and Dr. Clay Trumbull in the shelter of a block of mountains which rise to the south of the desert of Beer-sheba.  The spring of clear and abundant water which gushes forth in their midst was the En-Mishpat—­“the spring where judgments were pronounced”—­of early times, and is still called ’Ain-Qadis, “the spring of Kadesh.”  Gerar is the modern Umm el-Jerar, now desolate and barren, all that remains of its past being a lofty mound of rubbish and a mass of potsherds.  It lies a few hours only to the south of Gaza.

Here Isaac was born and circumcised, and here Ishmael and Hagar were cast forth into the wilderness and went to dwell in the desert of Paran.  The territory of Gerar extended to Beer-sheba, “the well of the oath,” where Abraham’s servants digged a well, and Abimelech, king of Gerar, confirmed his possession of it by an oath.  It may be that one of the two wells which still exist at Wadi es-Seba’, with the stones that line their mouths deeply indented by the ropes of the water-drawers, is the very one around which the herdsmen of Abraham and Abimelech wrangled with each other.  The wells of the desert go back to a great antiquity:  where water is scarce its discovery is not easily forgotten, and the Beduin come with their flocks year after year to drink of it.  The old wells are constantly renewed, or new ones dug by their side.

Gerar was in that south-western corner of Palestine which in the age of the Exodus was inhabited by the Philistines.  But they had been new-comers.  All through the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth Egyptian dynasties the country had been in the hands of the Egyptians.  Gaza had been their frontier fortress, and as late as the reign of Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Oppression, it was still garrisoned by Egyptian troops and governed by Egyptian officers.  The Pulsata or Philistines did not arrive till the troublous days of Ramses III., of the twentieth dynasty.  They formed part of the barbarian hordes from the shores of Asia Minor and the islands of the AEgean, who swarmed over Syria and flung themselves on the valley of the Nile, and the land of Caphtor from which they came was possibly the island of Krete.  The Philistine occupation of the coastland of Canaan, therefore, did not long precede the Israelitish invasion of the Promised Land; indeed we may perhaps gather from the words of Exod. xiii. 17 that the Philistines were already winning for themselves their new territory when the Israelites marched out of Egypt.  In saying, consequently, that the kingdom of Abimelech was in the land of the Philistines the Book of Genesis speaks proleptically:  when the story of Abraham and Abimelech was written in its present form Gerar was a Philistine town:  in the days of the patriarchs this was not yet the case.