Genesis 26:23-25

"And he went up from thence to Beersheba. And Jehovah appeared unto him the same night, and said, I am the God of Abraham thy father: fear not, for I am with thee, and will bless thee, and multiply thy seed for my servant Abraham's sake. And he builded an altar there, and called upon the name of Jehovah, and pitched his tent there: and there Isaac's servants digged a well."

Perhaps out of fear of the continued hostility of the Philistines, Isaac gave ground and went all the way to Beersheba. That he did the right thing in this was at once confirmed by a reassuring appearance of Jehovah to the patriarch the very same night he arrived there. The "Fear not!" from God Himself might indicate that fear had encroached upon Isaac's peace of mind.

With this vision, Isaac knew that all was well, He at once "pitched his tent" there, an idiom meaning that he established his residence there, just as Abraham had done following the treaty with Abimelech I.

"And he builded an altar there, and called upon the name of Jehovah ..." One should certainly reject the false notion that, "Isaac is the real founder of the Beersheba sanctuary."[11] Long previously, "Abraham built an altar at Beersheba,"[12] and everything that Isaac might have known about altar-building he learned from his father Abraham. Only the evil purposes of critics can be served by the allegation that Isaac founded "the sanctuary" at Beersheba. What "sanctuary"? In fact, the very necessity that Isaac found for building an altar probably resulted from the envious hatred of the Philistines who had filled up the water wells of Abraham with dirt. Would they not also have destroyed the altar which Abraham had built there? There are some things so self-evident that the Bible did not need to record them. What Isaac did, then, was to rebuild the altar his father had erected there on the occasion of the sacrifices marking the treaty with Abimelech I.

At this place in the narrative, a totally unexpected thing took place, when Abimelech with his chief advisor and the general of his military force arrived seeking to execute a treaty of peace. Several things had led to this. The strife between Isaac's men and the servants of Abimelech was of long standing, and had been resolved only when Isaac withdrew farther south to the Beersheba region, and even then, not concluded, only diminished. Also, Isaac's tremendous wealth, provisions, and manpower were of such great dimensions that Abimelech decided that the security of his own land required that the treaty between Abimelech I and Abraham, should at once be renewed between him (Abimelech II) and Isaac.