And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them.
Issac digged again. The naming of wells by Abraham, and the hereditary right of his family to the property-the change of the names by the Philistines to obliterate the traces of their origin-the restoration of the names by Isaac, and the contests between the respective shepherds to the exclusive possession of the water, are circumstances that occur among the natives in those regions as frequently in the present day as in the time of Isaac. Trench ('Notes on Par.') quotes Origen on this verse, to which that father gives a deeper and allegorical interpretation in addition to that lying on the surface-namely, that those stopped wells are the fountains of eternal life, which the Philistines, i:e., Satan and sin, had choked, but which our Isaac, the son of gladness, opened anew for us.