Abraham's Well

The story

Abraham's Well lies on the bank of Nahal Be'er Sheva, at the gates of the Old City. At the center of the site is an ancient water well, attributed by early tradition to Abraham our father, and it is a heritage site. The depth of the well is 13.5 meters, of which about five meters are hewn in rock, and its diameter is 3.75 meters; it is lined with dressed stones down to its bottom, and is fed by groundwater that seeps through the loess soil and gathers at a shallow depth close to the streambed. Next to it is another well, dug apparently later. With the founding of Ottoman Beersheba the well was included within the gates of the city, which was later called the Old City. In the 19th century the archaeologists Edward Robinson and Henry Tristram determined that the well is more than a thousand years old and already existed at the beginning of the Crusader period; one of the finds concerning it is an inscription carved in stone in the Arabic language from the year 1112. In 1948, with the entry of the IDF into Beersheba in Operation Yoav, the well was left as a public archaeological area, and the Beersheba municipality developed its surroundings, added paving to the plaza that leads to it and enclosed it with a wall. In October 2013 a visitor center was inaugurated at the place, designed by the architect Eli Armon and built on the foundations of the courtyard of the ancient well; its form evokes the tent of Abraham, and it combines the colors of the desert with the color of copper. The site deals with the figure of Abraham, and an exhibition of photographs on the history of the city is displayed in it.

• Biblical
• Water and wells
• Archaeology
• People
• Beersheba