Genesis 21:14: Bread, a skin of water, and a country given instead of a destination

"So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba." One place name, and it is not a place she is going to. The wilderness of Beersheba is the open country round the town — the verse names the town in order to say which stretch of nowhere this is, and then the verb it gives her — wandered — has no object. Abraham hands her a day's food and a skin of water and points her at it. This is Hagar's second time in this country and the second map she has in this series. The first time she ran, out of Sarai's reach and down the road to Shur, and was found at a spring and sent back. This time she is sent, and there is a child on her shoulder as well as the bread. The map draws the town as a dot and the walk as a line that stops without arriving, because that is the whole of what the sentence gives it. The town is named here before it has its name. Beersheba does not get called Beersheba until seventeen verses further on, when Abraham and Abimelech swear an oath over seven ewe lambs and the well is named for it; the narrator is using the name his reader already knows. Where it stood is the one open question on this frame, and it is a small one: 382 of its 544 votes go to the tell at Tel Be'er Sheva, at the junction of two wadis, and 162 to the wells at Bir es-Seba three miles west, where the modern city is. Either way the wilderness begins about where the map's line does. "Rose early in the morning" is a phrase Genesis keeps for the mornings a man does not argue with. It is used here, and it is used again in the third verse of the next chapter, when he saddles the donkey for Moriah. Both times it is a son he is walking away with, and both times he does not speak.