The promise passes to the son. A famine sends Isaac south, just as one sent his father — but where Abram went down to Egypt (12:10), Isaac is told plainly, "Do not go down to Egypt." He is the patriarch of staying. And there God re-grants him the entire oath sworn to Abraham — seed like the stars, all the nations blessed in his seed (22:17) — the whole Aqedah promise handed to the next generation. Its ground is striking: "because Abraham obeyed my voice" (the obedience of the binding of Isaac, 22:18), and "kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws." That last line is remarkable — the vocabulary of the Torah (mitzvot, chuqqim, torot) laid on Abraham centuries before Sinai. Some read it as later covenant language reaching back; others as the narrator's way of saying the man of faith already kept, by trust, the heart of what the Law would later spell out. Either way, Isaac inherits the covenant not on his own record but on his father's.

The sister-ruse, a third time. For the third time in Genesis a patriarch passes his wife off as his sister for fear of a foreign king — Abraham did it in Egypt (ch. 12) and at Gerar (ch. 20), and now Isaac repeats it in the very same town. The threefold telling is one of the book's most-discussed features: some read three real episodes (the ruse being a known survival tactic), others one old tradition told three ways. This translation lets all three stand as the text gives them and marks the pattern rather than smoothing it away.

Caught by a caress. What gives Isaac away is a single verb: Abimelech looks out a window and sees Isaac metsacheq with Rebekah — KJV "sporting," here "caressing," the affectionate play of a husband, not a brother. And the verb is his own name: metsacheq is from tsachaq, "to laugh, play" — the root of Yitschaq, "Isaac." He is literally caught Isaac-ing. (It is the same participle used of Ishmael "laughing/mocking" that got Hagar sent away, 21:9 — the word cuts warm here, cold there.) Then the blessing shows: Isaac sows and reaps a hundredfold, grows "greater and greater until he was very great," and the Philistines' envy stops up his father's wells.

Three wells, and a man who keeps yielding. Isaac's whole character is in this quiet sequence. He does not fight for the wells the Philistines filled in; he re-digs his father's wells and gives them back their father's names — a life of restoration, not conquest. When his men strike fresh water, the herdsmen of Gerar seize it, and he names the well Esek, "Contention." He digs again; they seize that one too, and he names it Sitnah, "Enmity" — the same root, satan, that will one day name the accuser himself. He does not draw a sword; he simply moves on and digs a third, and this one no one fights over — Rehoboth, "Room": "for now Jehovah has made room for us, and we will be fruitful in the land." Contention, enmity, room — a small parable of the patience that outlasts a fight. At Beersheba God meets him in the night with the word given his father before him: "Do not fear, for I am with you" (15:1), and Isaac builds an altar and calls on the Name.

The treaty, twice. Abimelech comes with Phicol, captain of his army, to cut a covenant — and the reader has watched this exact scene before: Abraham made a pact with an Abimelech and a Phicol at this same Beersheba (21:22-32), some eighty years earlier. Same king's name, same commander's name, same place, same sworn oath. Most take "Abimelech" and "Phicol" as dynastic titles (like "Pharaoh") worn by father and son; a few read one remembered tradition told of both patriarchs. What the pagan king says is the point either way: "We have seen plainly that Jehovah is with you" — the blessing is visible from outside. And the well dug that very day gives the city its name a second time: Isaac calls it Shibah — "oath" (and "seven," the same pun, since "to swear" in Hebrew is "to seven oneself") — re-founding the Beersheba his father had named for the same sworn word (21:31).

A bitterness that sets the next scene. The chapter ends on a sour domestic note: Esau, at forty, marries two Hittite women, and they are "a bitterness of spirit" (morat ruach; KJV "grief of mind") to Isaac and Rebekah. It is a small line with a long fuse — Rebekah's disgust at Hittite daughters-in-law is exactly the pretext she will use, one chapter on, to send Jacob away to the old country (27:46), the journey on which the whole rest of Genesis turns.