1. besides the former famine. The writer (some would say, the editor) signals at the outset that this story comes after, and explicitly reenacts, what happened before to Abraham.

king of the Philistines. In this version, the anachronistic identification of Gerar as a Philistine city, not strictly intrinsic to the Abimelech story in chapter 20, is insisted on. There is no obvious literary purpose for this difference; one suspects it simply reflects the historical context in which this version was formulated, in which the western Negeb would have been naturally thought of as Philistine country.

2. Do not go down to Egypt. That is, emulate the pattern of Abraham’s second sister-wife episode, not the first. Following a coastal route, Isaac could well have used Gerar as a way station to Egypt, and Abraham’s pact with Abimelech (chapter 21) would have provided some assurance that the Gerarites would grant him safe transit.

4. all these lands. “lands” occurs in the plural in this version of the promise because Isaac is in the land of the Philistines.

7. the men of the place. The sexual threat against the matriarch is displaced in this final version from the monarch to the local male populace. The likely reference of “one of the people” in verse 10 is what it seems to say, any male Gerarite, despite an exegetical tradition (influenced by the earlier Abimelech story) that construes it as an epithet for the king.

she is comely to look at. Isaac’s interior monologue uses the identical epithet invoked by the narrator in introducing Rebekah in chapter 24.

8. as his time there drew on. Rashi, with his characteristic acuteness of response to nuances of phrasing, construes this as a suggestion that Isaac became complacent with the passage of time (“From now on I don’t have to worry since they haven’t raped her so far”) and so allowed himself to be publicly demonstrative with Rebekah.

looked out the window. This is the most naturalistic of the three versions of the story. The matriarch’s marital status is conveyed not by divine plagues, nor by a dream-vision from God, but by ocular evidence.

playing. The meaning of the verb here is clearly sexual, implying either fondling or actual sexual “play.” It immediately follows the name “Isaac,” in which the same verbal root is transparently inscribed. Thus Isaac-the-laugher’s birth is preceded by the incredulous laughter of each of his parents; Sarah laughs after his birth; Ishmael laughs-mocks at the child Isaac; and now Isaac laughs-plays with the wife he loves. Perhaps there is some suggestion that the generally passive Isaac is a man of strong physical appetites: he loves Esau because of his own fondness for venison; here he rather recklessly disports himself in public with the woman he has proclaimed to be his sister.

10. One of the people might well have lain with your wife. Though Abimelech’s words approximately mirror those of the indignant king in chapter 20, this version is pointedly devised to put the woman first announced as Isaac’s beautiful, strictly virgin bride in less danger than Sarah was in chapters 12 and 20: Rebekah is never taken into the harem; it is merely a supposition that one of the local men might seize her for sexual exploitation.

12. And Isaac sowed. In keeping with the emphasis of this version on human action, the bounty that comes to the patriarch after the deflection of the sexual danger to his wife is not a gift from the monarch but the fruit of his own industry as agriculturalist and pastoralist. There is a continuity between his sojourning in the western Negeb near Gerar and his movement somewhat to the east, to Beersheba, where his father had long encamped. All this creates a direct connection between the sister-wife episode and the theme of Isaac inheriting and growing prosperous in the land.

14. and the Philistines envied him. The jealousy over Isaac’s spectacular prosperity and the contention over precious water resources that follows lay the ground for the story of the two brothers struggling over the blessing of land and inheritance in the next episode. Isaac’s being “sent away” by the Philistines adumbrates Jacob’s banishment to the east after having procured the blessing by stealth.

17. wadi. The Arabic term, current in modern English and Hebrew usage, designates, as does the biblical naḥal, a dry riverbed that would be filled with water only during the flash floods of the rainy season. But the floor of a wadi might conceal, as here, an underground source of water.

20. Esek. Roughly, “contention,” as in the verb that follows in the etiological explanation of the name.

21. Sitnah. The transparent meaning is “accusation” or “hostility,” though the sentence lacks an etiological clause.

22. another well. The struggle over wells, which replays an episode in the Abraham stories but is given more elaborate emphasis, works nicely as part of the preparation for the next round of the Jacob–Esau conflict: a water source is not easily divisible; the spiteful act of the Philistines in blocking up the wells expresses a feeling that if we can’t have the water, nobody should; at the end, Isaac’s workers discover a new, undisputed well and call it Rehoboth, which means “open spaces.” We are being prepared for the story in which only one of the two brothers can get the real blessing, in which there will be bitter jealousy and resentment; and which in the long run will end with room enough for the two brothers to live peaceably in the same land.

27. sent me away from you. It is a mistake to render the verb, as several modern translations do, as “drive away.” The verb Isaac chooses is a neutral one, even though the context of the sentence strongly indicates hostile intention. Abimelech in his response (verse 29) uses exactly the same word, adding the qualifier “in peace” in order to put a different face on the action: this was no banishment, we sent you off as a reasonable act of goodwill. The narrator then uses the same verb and qualifier—which might conceivably be a formula for parting after the completion of a treaty—in verse 31, “and Isaac sent them away, and they went from him in peace.” (Compare David and Abner in 2 Samuel 3.)

33. Shibah. Though the word in this form means “seven,” the etymology of the name intimated by the narrative context obviously relates it to shevuʿah, “oath,” whereas the earlier story about Beersheba (chapter 21) appears to link the name with both “seven” and “oath.”

34. And Esau . . . took as wife. This brief notice about Esau’s exogamous unions obviously is distinct from the preceding stories about Isaac. It is probably placed here to remind us of his unworthiness to be the true heir (thus forming a kind of envelope structure with the spurning of the birthright in the last verse of chapter 25), and in this way serves to offer some sort of justification in advance for Jacob’s stealing the blessing in the next episode. It also lays the ground for the end of the next episode in which Rebekah will invoke the need for Jacob to find a wife from his own kin as an excuse for his hasty departure for Mesopotamia.

35. provocation. Some commentators construe the first component of the compound noun morat-ruaḥ as a derivative of the root m-r-r, “bitter”—hence the term “bitterness” favored by many translations. But the morphology of the word points to a more likely derivation from m-r-h, “to rebel” or “to defy,” and thus an equivalent such as “provocation” is more precise.