Genesis 16:14: A well fixed by two landmarks, and the sources put it on top of one of them

"Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi; it lies between Kadesh and Bered." This is the only kind of sentence in Genesis that is written the way a map is: a place, and then two other places to find it by. The narrator does it because the well matters — Hagar names God here, the only person in the Bible who does, and Isaac is coming back from this well when he first sees Rebekah and settles at it again in the verse after his father is buried. The name is hers. "You are a God of seeing," she says, and the well is called the well of the Living One who sees me. She is a pregnant Egyptian slave who has run away, and she is the only woman on this map who names anything on it. What the map shows is that the fix does not quite work. The sources put Beer-lahai-roi at the spring of Ain Muweileh and Kadesh at Ain el-Qudeirat, and those two are six miles apart — near enough to see, and not what "between" is usually taken to mean. Bered is thirty miles the other way, at Haluza, on a quarter of the votes; the next candidate for it is a hill fifty miles further south, which would put the well north of both landmarks rather than between them. Six sources in the whole dataset have an opinion about the well at all. So the honest reading of this verse is that it was written for somebody who already knew the country. Kadesh and Bered were names you could steer by in the western Negev, and the well was somewhere in the triangle they make, and three thousand years later the triangle is all anyone has. The map draws it as it is — three dots that do not sit in a line — rather than moving one to make the sentence come out.