:
where water is scarce its discovery is not easily forgotten, and the
Beduin come with their flocks year after year to drink of it. The old
wells are constantly renewed, or new ones dug by their side.

Gerar was in that south-western corner of Palestine which in the age of
the Exodus was inhabited by the Philistines. But they had been
new-comers. All through the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth
Egyptian dynasties the country had been in the hands of the Egyptians.
Gaza had been their frontier fortress, and as late as the reign of
Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Oppression, it was still
garrisoned by Egyptian troops and governed by Egyptian officers. The
Pulsata or Philistines did not arrive till the troublous days of Ramses
III., of the twentieth dynasty. They formed part of the barbarian hordes
from the shores of Asia Minor and the islands of the AEgean, who swarmed
over Syria and flung themselves on the valley of the Nile, and the land
of Caphtor from which they came was possibly the island of Krete. The
Philistine occupation of the coastland of Canaan, therefore, did not
long precede the Israelitish invasion of the Promised Land; indeed we
may perhaps gather from the words of Exod. xiii. 17 that the Philistines
were already winning for themselves their new territory when the
Israelites marched out of Egypt. In saying, consequently, that the
kingdom of Abimelech was in the land of the Philistines the Book of
Genesis speaks proleptically: when the story of Abraham and Abimelech
was written in its present form Gerar was a Philistine town: in the days
of the patriarchs this was not yet the case.

At Beer-sheba Abraham planted a tamarisk, and "called on the name of the
Lord, the everlasting God." Beer-sheba long remained one of the sacred
places of Palestine. The tree planted by its well was a sign both of the
water that flowed beneath its soil and of its sacred character. It was
only where fresh water was found that the nomads of the desert could
come together, and the tree was a token of the life and refreshment they
would meet with. The well was sacred; so also was the solitary tree
which stood beside it, and under whose branches man and beast could find
shade and protection from the mid-day heat. Even Mohammedanism, that
Puritanism of the East, has not been able to eradicate the belief in the
divine nature of such trees from the mind of the nomad; we may still see
them decorated with offerings of rags