Genesis 26:6-11

"And Isaac dwelt in Gerar: and the men of the place asked him of his wife; and he said, She is my sister: for he feared to say, My wife; lest, said he, the men of the place should kill me for Rebekah; because she was fair to look upon. And it came to pass when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out at a window, and saw, and behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife. And Abimelech called Isaac, and said, Behold, of a surety she is thy wife: and how saidest thou, She is my sister? And Isaac said unto him, Because I said, Lest I die because of her. And Abimelech said, What is this that thou hast done unto us? one of the people might easily have lain with thy wife, and thou wouldest have brought guiltiness upon us. And Abimelech charged all the people, saying, He that toucheth this man or his wife shall surely be put to death."

See the chapter introduction for the perspective on this event. This is the third event in which one of the patriarchs passed his wife off as his sister, but the circumstances are so widely different, and the details of each so necessary in context, that all efforts to make these events "doublets" or "triplets" of a single happening are unworthy of consideration.

In fact, the events of this episode presuppose and prove the similar happening in the days of Abraham, scores of years earlier. Note that Abimelech is suspicious of Isaac's allegation that Rebekah was his sister, that he investigated personally, that he discovered them in the process of lovemaking, etc. All of that says that Abimelech knew of the earlier event in the times of Abraham, and that he acted accordingly. In a similar way, it is virtually certain also that Isaac, remembering the rich rewards Abraham harvested by two such deceptions during his career, and remembering that God had just reassured him that he would be taken care of in Canaan, decided to practice the deception himself! Admittedly, Isaac does not appear in his best role here. To allege that these are simply variants of "an old folk story,"[3] is comparable in every way to the proposition that World War I and World War II, as found in our histories, are merely variants of the old struggle between Rome and the Huns! After all, were not the forces of Kaiser Wilhelm called "Huns"!

Another, somewhat humorous, thought that comes to mind here is that Rebekah, at the time, a woman approaching sixty, and with two grown sons at home looking after affairs that Isaac could not have brought with him on this trip, might not have been as beautiful and seductive in appearance as Isaac seems to have thought. At least, nobody bothered her. Again, the concern of Abimelech, remembering, either personally, or from the court records the case of Sarah, acted merely out of caution. Isaac continued to live in the vicinity of Gerar. That this is a variant of what happened to Abraham is impossible.

"Abimelech ..." This was a dynastic title of early Philistine kings, leaving it unclear whether or not he was the same monarch who took Sarah. The time lapse makes it highly probable that the two were different kings.

"The Philistines ..." We appreciate the rejection by Willis of the knee-jerk charges by the critics that "Philistines" in this passage is an anachronism, declaring that, "There is no reason why"[4] the Philistine ancestors of masses of those Philistines who became so powerful in the twelfth century B.C., were not already living in southwest Canaan in the times of the patriarchs. The Bible indeed affirms that they were there, speaks repeatedly of one of their kings, as in the narrative here, leaving no doubt whatever of the truth. "Groups of those people (Philistines) existed in southwestern Palestine for centuries before the arrival of the main body of them in the first quarter of the twelfth century B.C."[5] In this connection, however, we should keep in mind that the Bible does not need corroboration of the spade of the archeologist. We have no confidence that archeologists will ever be able either to dig up all the evidence, or to interpret it accurately if they should accidentally do so.