been found again in our own days by the united efforts of Dr. John
Rowlands and Dr. Clay Trumbull in the shelter of a block of mountains
which rise to the south of the desert of Beer-sheba. The spring of clear
and abundant water which gushes forth in their midst was the
En-Mishpat--"the spring where judgments were pronounced"--of early
times, and is still called 'Ain-Qadîs, "the spring of Kadesh." Gerar is
the modern Umm el-Jerâr, now desolate and barren, all that remains of
its past being a lofty mound of rubbish and a mass of potsherds. It lies
a few hours only to the south of Gaza.

Here Isaac was born and circumcised, and here Ishmael and Hagar were
cast forth into the wilderness and went to dwell in the desert of Paran.
The territory of Gerar extended to Beer-sheba, "the well of the oath,"
where Abraham's servants digged a well, and Abimelech, king of Gerar,
confirmed his possession of it by an oath. It may be that one of the two
wells which still exist at Wadi es-Seba', with the stones that line
their mouths deeply indented by the ropes of the water-drawers, is the
very one around which the herdsmen of Abraham and Abimelech wrangled
with each other. The wells of the desert go back to a great antiquity:
where water is scarce its discovery is not easily forgotten, and the
Beduin come with their flocks year after year to drink of it. The old
wells are constantly renewed, or new ones dug by their side.

Gerar was in that south-western corner of Palestine which in the age of
the Exodus was inhabited by the Philistines. But they had been
new-comers. All through the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth
Egyptian dynasties the country had been in the hands of the Egyptians.
Gaza had been their frontier fortress, and as late as the reign of
Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Oppression, it was still
garrisoned by Egyptian troops and governed by Egyptian officers. The