Conflicts and Covenants in the Middle East

T HE FIRST CONFLICTS AND FIRST covenants over water in the Land of Canaan were between Abraham, and later his son Isaac, and Abimelech, the King of the Philistines.' These conflicts were about the ownership of wells of water somewhere in the region between Gaza and Beer-Sheva. From a hydrogeological point of view, I think that Isaac acted wisely when he acceded to King Abimelech's request to remove himself and his people from the Gaza Coastal plain to the area of Beer-Sheva. There, with experience gained by trial and error exploration and digging, he was able to locate a buried river bed in which his servants were able to dig wells of fresh water.2 What would have happened if Isaac had not found usable water? It is quite obvious that a series of quarrels would have led to hostilities between his and Abimelech's servants, which might have decided the future fate of Isaac's people. The discovery of good water, however, was neither the first nor the last time that the fate of a nation was decided by the discovery of water along the margins of the deserts of the Middle East. In modern times, this has certainly been the case of Zionist settlement in Eretz Israel. One of the many examples is that of Professor Leo Picard's discovery in 1936 of water in the limestone rocks north of Kibbutz Genigar,3 which made possible the introduction of intensive agriculture in what was then called the Valley of Esdarelon (Emek Yezreel or Ha'Emek), the diamond in the crown of Zionist agricultural settlements. As a matter of fact, one can hardly imagine the development of the modern state of Israel if not for the exist

Covenant · Middle East · Political science · Sociology · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Transboundary Water Resource Management