Where was Abraham's well at Beersheba?

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Accepted Answer

At Beersheba in the northern Negev, about 70 km south-west of Jerusalem in a straight line, but the exact well cannot be pointed out. The map point stands on Tel Beer Sheva, the mound of the biblical town about 4 km east of the modern city, where a deep well was found outside the city gate; the excavators dated the town to the Iron Age, long after the patriarchs, so no surviving well can be shown to be Abraham's. In the modern city an old well by the stream bed near the Old City, described by Edward Robinson in 1838, is shown as Abraham's Well, by tradition only. Genesis tells of a quarrel over water with Abimelech, king of Gerar, about 27 km to the north-west: “Abraham reproved Abimelech because of a well of water, which Abimelech's servants had violently taken away.” Abraham gave him seven ewe lambs as a witness “that I have digged this well”, and “he called that place Beer-sheba; because there they sware both of them.” Then he “planted a grove in Beer-sheba, and called there on the name of the LORD, the everlasting God.” The Hebrew name allows both readings, “well of seven” and “well of the oath”, and the story plays on both. A generation later the Philistines had stopped Abraham's wells, and Isaac dug them again. On the day he made his own oath with Abimelech his servants came and said, “We have found water”, and “he called it Shebah: therefore the name of the city is Beer-sheba unto this day.” Eusebius in the fourth century knew Beersheba as a large village with a Roman garrison and noted that many wells of the patriarchs were still pointed out in the district of Gerar.