Thus began the precious months in which Jacob and Rebekah copied the scriptures, reading aloud to Isaac as they did. He would interrupt them and explain what Abraham had told them this or that passage meant, and when they copied it out, they would add Isaac’s explanations and read them back to him. They would sometimes interrupt with questions, and Jacob often discussed doctrine with his father while Rebekah kept on writing.

It was wonderful to see Jacob and Isaac sharing the holy writings this way. To hear how Jacob’s voice was the same as Isaac’s, how his tone echoed his father’s inflections. And gradually Jacob began adding his own insights and speculations about the implications of the scriptures, as Isaac nodded encouragement or offered countersuggestions.

Through all of this, Esau came once or twice, early on, but he quickly lost patience and left, and then stopped coming in the first place. Rebekah never bothered to point out Esau’s absence to Isaac. Why provoke a quarrel, when the point was so obvious that even a blind man could see it? Especially a blind man.

But if Isaac saw, he gave no sign.

Meanwhile, Isaac’s people had prospered so much in the land near Gerar that he needed more servants to tend his flocks and fields and orchards, until he had as many servants as he had had before he sent half of them with Eliezer. The people of Gerar began to be envious, and then frightened. “How do we know they won’t decide they want to possess our city?” they said, and there began to be quarrels between men of Gerar and Isaac’s men over the use of the wells. Of course Abimelech denied any knowledge of what his citizens were doing, and of course Isaac and Rebekah pretended to believe his protestations. But they understood that Abimelech did not dare to stop his people from what they were doing, or he would be accused of already being under Isaac’s control, and one of his many rivals would rally support against him.

Since Abimelech was helpless to stop the fighting, Isaac’s answer was to send his men to dig another well farther from the city, and even as they were digging it, men of Gerar came to harass them, claiming that any water that came out of it should belong to them because it was on land within sight of the walls of Gerar. Isaac named the well Esek, meaning “strife,” and they used it for a few months, till a new well even farther away could be dug, at Sitnah.

But even that one became a point of contention, until Isaac had his men dig yet another well in poorer land that was so far from Gerar that it would take half a day for the men of Gerar to reach them to cause trouble. And at this well, Rehoboth, there was no more contention.