Genesis 26:33: The same town gets the same name a second time

"He called it Shibah; therefore the name of the city is Beersheba to this day." The chapter that began with a famine ends with a name, and the name is not new. Abraham stood on this ground, dug a well, argued with a king called Abimelech about it, gave him seven ewe lambs as a witness, and called the place Beersheba — the well of seven, or the well of the oath, the Hebrew carrying both at once. That was Genesis 21. Here Isaac's servants strike water on the very day his father's quarrel has been settled a second time, and he names it Shibah, which is that same word, and the narrator says: therefore the name of the city is Beersheba. Two namings of one town, a generation apart, over two wells and two oaths with two kings of the same name. Readers have taken that as a seam where two tellings of one story were sewn together, and readers have taken it as the point being made — that Isaac's life is his father's life run through again, the famine, the wife called a sister, the wells, the treaty, in the same country and mostly on the same ground. The chapter gives him one thing Abraham never got said to him in these words: I am the God of Abraham your father. Fear not, for I am with you. The frame is tight because there is nothing to travel to. 382 of the town's 544 votes are for the tell at Tel Be'er Sheva, where the Hebron and Beersheba wadis meet, and 162 for the wells at Bir es-Seba three miles west under the modern city; the map pins the tell and names the other. Deep wells have been found at both, and the one cut into bedrock inside the tell's gate is among the deepest in the country. Isaac has been given room. The rest of his story is what his sons do with it, and the next verse begins to spoil it.