Genesis 25:11: The story goes on without him, at the well a runaway slave named
Read it →"After the death of Abraham, God blessed Isaac his son. And Isaac settled at Beer-lahai-roi." This is the end of the walk. It began at Genesis 11:2, on a plain in Shinar with a migration stopping on it, and it ends here, seventy miles south of the grave, at a spring in the western Negev with a sentence that has no Abraham in it. The blessing passes and the address changes. Isaac does not stay at Hebron on the ground his father bought and is buried in; he goes down into the dry country and settles at Beer-lahai-roi — the well of the Living One who sees me, which is not a name anybody in his family gave it. Hagar gave it. She was a pregnant Egyptian slave running from Sarai when the angel of the LORD found her at this spring, and she said "You are a God of seeing", and it is the only place in Genesis named by a woman. Isaac has been in and out of it before: he was coming from Beer-lahai-roi, in the evening, when he lifted his eyes and saw the camels bringing Rebekah. So the last page of Abraham's map is not Abraham's ground and not his name on it. It is his son living at the well his slave named, two verses after his sons buried him, and the chapter goes straight on into the generations of Ishmael. The well is the weakest identification in the series and the map does not pretend otherwise: six sources have an opinion at all, and 72 of the 106 votes go to the spring at Ain Muweileh, with the rest scattered thirty and fifty miles off. /maps/genesis-16-14 draws the trouble in detail — the sentence that fixes the well between Kadesh and Bered puts it six miles from one of them. The Negeb is on this map for a reason worth stating plainly: the gazetteer indexes this verse under it, but only one of the ten translations it tracks actually prints the word here, and the ESV beside this map is not that one. It is on the frame as the country the well is in, ringed at the tell the sources anchor the whole region to, and not as a word in the verse.
Regions on this map
The well of the Living One who sees me, named by a runaway Egyptian slave and lived at by the son of the household she ran from. It is the last address in Abraham's story and it is not his.
The well of the Living One who sees me, named by Hagar when the angel of the LORD found her running from Sarai — "You are a God of seeing" — and the only place in Genesis named by a woman. Isaac was coming from here in the evening when he lifted his eyes and saw the camels bringing Rebekah, and here is where he settles once his father is in the ground. The sources are thin: six of them have an opinion, and 72 of 106 votes go to the spring at Ain Muweileh. /maps/genesis-16-14 draws how badly the verse that fixes it holds up.
Today: Ain Muweileh, western Negev
The dry country under the Judean hills, anchored by every source at the tell Beersheba stands on. It is on this frame as the well's country, not as a word in the verse — one translation of the ten the sources track prints it here, and the ESV is not that one.
The dry country south of the hills, where Abraham spent more of his life than anywhere but Hebron and where Isaac is living when Rebekah arrives. It is on this map because the gazetteer indexes this verse under it — though only one of the ten translations it tracks, the NLT, actually prints the word here, and the ESV beside this map does not. The region is where the well is either way.
no point of its own; every source anchors the Negeb at Tel Be'er Sheva, which is the tell Beersheba stands on and forty miles north-east of the well this verse settles Isaac at
Genesis 25:11 in full
- Genesis 25:11After the death of Abraham, God blessed Isaac his son. And Isaac settled at .