El Olam: Why God Was First Called Eternal at a Disputed Well (Genesis 21)

A Hebrew listener heard Beersheba as two words, and the second one has two meanings. Be'er (H875) is a well. Sheva is the number seven, sheba (H7651), and it shares its three consonants with shaba (H7650), the verb for swearing an oath. English has to choose between well of seven and well of the oath. The Hebrew never chooses, and the story is built so that a listener hears both.

Why does swearing an oath sound like seven in Genesis 21?

Follow the root through the scene. Abimelech asks Abraham to swear (verse 23). Abraham answers with the same verb (verse 24). Then come the seven ewe lambs, three times over in verses 28 to 30, and in verse 31 the place is named Be'er Sheva (H884) "because it was there that the two of them swore an oath" (Genesis 21:31). The listener hears oath, oath, seven, seven, seven, and then a name that holds both. The number Abraham counted out and the promise he spoke are one sound.

The same verb carries the land promise through the rest of the Bible. Abraham later says the LORD "spoke to me and promised me on oath, saying, 'To your offspring I will give this land'" (Genesis 24:7). God tells Isaac, "I will confirm the oath that I swore to your father Abraham" (Genesis 26:3). Joseph, dying in Egypt, says God will bring them "to the land He promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" (Genesis 50:24). Deuteronomy calls Canaan "the land that the LORD swore He would give to your fathers" (Deuteronomy 1:8). An English reader meets swore in those verses and thinks of a solemn promise. A Hebrew reader heard Beersheba in every one of them. The first scrap of the promised land Abraham ever secured, he secured with this verb, and the whole land would come to his children by the same verb in God's mouth.

What did an oath and seven lambs mean in Abraham's world?

Treaties in the ancient Near East were sworn before gods. Hittite treaties end with long lists of them, called to witness and to punish whichever side broke faith. Abimelech asks for the same protection in one line: "swear to me here before God" (Genesis 21:23). And he wants it to reach to his children and descendants, three generations, which is exactly what a king's treaty tried to do.

A gift accepted in public was the other half of the ancient legal toolkit. When Abraham later buys the field at Machpelah, it is deeded to him "in the presence of all the Hittites who had come to the gate of his city" (Genesis 23:18). Here the lambs do the work of the crowd at the gate. Abraham calls them edah (H5713), a witness or testimony, and the word belongs to the same family Jacob uses for the heap of stones he and Laban build: "this mound is a witness between you and me" (Genesis 31:48). Joshua sets up a stone under an oak and says, "It will be a witness against us, for it has heard all the words the LORD has spoken to us" (Joshua 24:27). In this world people made a promise last by tying it to something others could see, a heap of stones, a standing stone, seven lambs a king had to take home and feed.

What does El Olam mean?

Then Abraham plants an eshel (H815), a tamarisk, and calls on "the LORD, the Eternal God" (Genesis 21:33). The title is El (H410) with olam (H5769), and this is the only place in the Bible God is called by exactly that name. Olam is time stretched so far that its end is out of sight, in either direction. Isaiah reaches for the same word when he answers exiles who thought God had lost track of them: "The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary" (Isaiah 40:28).

Put the name beside Abimelech's request and the scene turns. The king asked a mortal man to swear for three generations. Abraham could swear and mean it, and he would be dead long before Abimelech's grandson grew old. He had been told so: "You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a ripe old age," while his descendants waited four hundred years (Genesis 15:13–15). Every oath sworn at that well reached only as far as the men who swore it. So Abraham called on the one God whose oath reaches past every grave.

The tamarisk appears only twice more in Scripture, both times with Saul. He sits "under the tamarisk tree on the hill at Gibeah, with his spear in hand" (1 Samuel 22:6), hunting David, and later his bones are buried "under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh" (1 Samuel 31:13). Abraham planted his tree and called on the Eternal God. Saul sat under his holding a spear, trusting what he could grip, and his story ends under the same kind of tree.

The Greek translators of Genesis rendered El Olam with aionios (G166), the Greek word for eternal. Paul uses the same title at the end of Romans, where the gospel is "made known through the writings of the prophets by the command of the eternal God" (Romans 16:26). The name Abraham called on beside a well is the name under which the good news goes out to every nation.

How did Israel first hear Genesis 21:22–34?

Israel heard this chapter from inside the land. Their country ran "from Dan to Beersheba" (Judges 20:1), so every time they named their own borders they said the well of the oath at the southern end. They held that land because God had kept His word. Joshua's summary uses Beersheba's verb twice: "the LORD gave Israel all the land He had sworn to give their fathers," and "Not one of all the LORD's good promises to the house of Israel had failed" (Joshua 21:43–45). Abraham secured one well by oath and called on El Olam to keep the rest. Israel, hearing Genesis read, was standing in the rest.

They also heard a warning in it. By the prophet Amos's day, people at Israel's shrines were swearing by the place itself, "As surely as the way of Beersheba lives" (Amos 8:14), and Amos told them not to "journey to Beersheba" at all (Amos 5:5). They had kept the site and the habit of swearing, and lost the God Abraham called on there.

Abraham came to know God by holding a promise longer than his own life and naming God by what that promise needed. The same God has sworn to you, through the Son who is "a priest forever" by an oath that "will not change" (Hebrews 7:21). Keep what He has said where you can find it again, dated and named the way Abraham named a well; the Doxa app keeps it for you and for whoever comes to dig it out after you.

This goes with today's Doxa Daily Lift: Why Abraham Planted a Tree at Beersheba.