Toldot

All the wells which his father’s servants had dug in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines stopped them up, and filled them with earth.

26:15

Water means life for man, land and animal, for the immediate place and the whole neighborhood. But the Philistines thought otherwise…Surely they were cutting off their nose to spite their face and withholding benefits from both themselves and their cattle. But, in addition to stopping the wells up, they filled them with earth so that no one would be able to know that there had been a well at that spot and that no water should flow again from there…There must be something more to the matter than what is literally stated.

Nechama Leibovitz (20^th Century)

(Isaac became fabulously wealthy during the famine)…As long as his wealth was such that it could be stored hidden from public view it did not arouse the envy and jealousy of his neighbours. Only after it comprised also livestock and servants who could not be hidden did the Philistines become jealous of him. The process was gradual and cumulative. Avimelech did not have nerve to tell Isaac outright to leave his country; he therefore arranged for economic harassment to make Isaac’s continued presence there uncomfortable…When Avimelech saw that indirect methods did not achieve his objective, he was forced to tell Isaac to leave the country and to admit that he himself felt uncomfortable in the presence of a man who had become so powerful in his domain.

Moshe Alshich (16^th Century)

The king said to him, “I too, who am the king do not have in my home such flocks and domestics as you, and it is a disgrace to us that your household is greater than that of the king.”

Ramban (13^th Century)

Some commentators claim that the wells are allusions to converts who had been converted in Abraham’s time to monotheism. The allusion would symbolize that conversion was as easy as accepting a source of water which the earth provides for free. Opening a heart which had been closed to belief in God is compared to “digging.” This is why the Torah describes the Philistines as having stopped up the hearts of these converts, i.e. filled them with dust…The Torah reports that after a while Isaac made the effort to reconvert these converts his father had made…

Rabbeinu Bachya (14^th Century)

The whole history of the Jewish people is marked by expulsions from their homeland, from one exile to another from one town to another, from village to village, from one quarter of a city to another, and this can also be paralleled in the history of the Patriarchs. In our sidra we have, therefore, the first expulsion.

Nechama Leibovitz.