Genesis 26:1: The second famine, and a son taking the same road for the second time

"Now there was a famine in the land, besides the former famine that was in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went to Gerar to Abimelech king of the Philistines." Genesis says "besides the former famine" because it expects you to remember the first one. That one is on this map's sister page: the hill country lives on rain, the rain failed, and Abram went down to Egypt and came back with his wife's honour barely intact. Everything about the sentence in front of you is set up to be read against it. Isaac does what his father did, up to a point. The land dries, and he moves west and south off the high ground toward the coastal plain, where the wadis run and a king with granaries lives. He is starting from Beer-lahai-roi, which is where the last verse of his father's walk left him, and the line on this map is about fifty miles of it — not a journey anyone describes, just the distance between the well he was living at and the town he arrives in. Neither end of that line is a detail the verse gives; it names Gerar and takes the rest for granted. Gerar is the best-fixed place in this chapter and the only one that is. 628 of its 695 votes are for Tel Haror, a large mound on the north bank of the Nahal Gerar about fifteen miles north-west of Beersheba, with a handful of rival tells scattered a few miles either side of it. Everything else Isaac does in Genesis 26 happens within a day's walk of this dot, and almost none of it can be put on the ground with anything like the same confidence. Abimelech is the same name as the king Abraham dealt with six chapters earlier and the story is about to run through the same misunderstanding again, wife and all. Whether it is the same man, his son, or a title the Philistine kings all carried is a question the text does not answer and a map cannot. The one thing Isaac does not do is his father's last move. Abram went down to Egypt; the very next verse tells Isaac not to.