Isaac planted crops in that land and the same year reaped a hundredfold, because the Lord blessed him” (Genesis 26:12).
The younger generation always does things differently. After Abraham died and Isaac became patriarch of the clan, a few gears began to shift. Oddly, the younger generation slowed down the pace.
Insofar as we know, old Abraham never plowed ground, planted a crop, and sat around waiting for it to mature. He had the true nomad’s freedom to pull up tent stakes and strike out on a moment’s notice. He could afford the best of whatever was on the market, so no doubt his camel caravans could keep pace with the best of them. He could travel far and fast. Abraham fulfills our romantic notions of the free nomadic prince of the desert. We don’t visualize him behind a plow.
When Isaac planted this crop, he gave up some of the freedom his father had known. Whether he had thought it through or not, he would soon learn that you can’t travel as conveniently with a wheat field as with a flock of goats. Maybe Isaac just didn’t like living permanently out of a suitcase, and so enjoyed, literally and figuratively, putting his roots down. But considering that there was a famine at that time, his motive in farming was probably just to make sure there was grain for baking bread.
Abraham had been a true nomad. Isaac became a semi-nomad, and so began to change the life-style of his clan. They still lived in tents and were migratory, but the “good old days” were on the way out.
Isaac planted his crop on borrowed land. But in the next generation of this family, we find Jacob buying land. The change is gradual, but certain. There will come a time when a life such as Abraham’s will be but a distant memory.
So began the changes in this family when Isaac decided to
try his hand at gardening. They will leave their tents and learn to live in
houses made of wood and stone and begin to live in villages. They will finally
become such townspeople that one of them will be a carpenter in