Genesis 26:20: The first well, named for the argument about it

"…the herdsmen of Gerar quarreled with Isaac's herdsmen, saying, 'The water is ours.' So he called the name of the well Esek, because they contended with him." His servants have just dug into the bed of the wadi and hit spring water — living water, the text says, not a cistern catching runoff but a source. In a country where the difference between grazing and not grazing is one well, that is the most valuable thing anyone in this chapter owns, and the herdsmen of Gerar are at it before the sentence ends. So he names it after the row. Esek means contention, and it is the first of three wells in five verses that get their names from whether or not anyone fought over them. Genesis does this a great deal — a place is what happened at it — and this run of three is the clearest example in the book, because it is the same man digging the same kind of hole down the same wadi three times and getting a different name each time. Where it was, nobody can say. Nine sources have an opinion; the largest block of them, 194 votes, declines to name a site at all and puts it "between Gerar and Beersheba", which is a bearing and not a place. The rest put it in the Nahal Gerar itself, ten miles west. So the map gives it an open ring on the leading bearing rather than a pin, and the ring is the honest answer: somewhere along this wadi, on this side of the hills. Gerar is on the page because the verse names it — but as whose herdsmen these are, not as anywhere anyone goes. It is drawn in the colour this atlas keeps for a name that is not a stop. The claim the herdsmen make is worth reading twice. The water is ours. It is not the digging they dispute; it is the ground. Isaac does not argue. He moves, and digs again.