Abraham's Well International Visitor Centre

Edward Robinson came up out of the desert on his way from Aqaba to Jerusalem in 1838, crossed a wide watercourse he calls Wady es-Seba', and found two deep wells close on the northern bank. He recorded them as circular and stoned up very neatly with solid masonry, and gave the numbers: the larger twelve and a half feet in diameter and forty-four and a half feet deep to the surface of the water, sixteen feet of which at the bottom is excavated in the solid rock; the other fifty-five rods to the west-south-west, five feet in diameter and forty-two feet deep. The water in both, he wrote, was pure and sweet and in great abundance, the finest he had found since leaving Sinai. Stone troughs for camels and flocks stood around them, and the curb stones were deeply worn by the friction of the ropes.

Conder's account from the 1870s is the useful one because he looked harder. He put the principal well at twelve feet three inches in diameter and over forty-five feet deep, lined with masonry to a depth of twenty-eight feet, a second five feet across about 300 yards to the west, and a third to the east standing dry at twenty-three feet deep and nine feet two inches across. He counted nine stone troughs at the larger well and five at the lesser. And then, in his own word, came the disappointing discovery: the masonry is not very ancient. The dated stone fifteen courses down was, on his reading, 505 AH, and he judged it at least as old as the stones at the mouth, which carried more than a hundred rope channels cut by what he estimated as seven centuries of water-drawers.

The modern figures given for the well the centre is built around are 13.5 metres deep with about 5 metres cut in rock and a diameter of 3.75 metres, lined with dressed stone to the bottom. Converted, Robinson's forty-four and a half feet is 13.6 metres, his twelve and a half feet is 3.8 metres, and his sixteen feet in rock is 4.9 metres. Two accounts taken 175 years apart agree to within the width of a hand. The water was never deep-lying either: it comes from groundwater percolating through the loess and collecting at shallow depth beside the stream bed, which is why a watering place existed at this spot at all.

The biblical material behind the name is thin and it is doubled. Genesis 21:25 has Abraham complaining to Abimelech about a well of water that Abimelech's servants had seized; Genesis 26:25 has Isaac's servants digging a well at Beersheba a generation later. The name of the town itself is built from the Hebrew for a well and for either an oath or the number seven, and Britannica ties it to the covenant Abraham made with Abimelech of Gerar. There are two wells in the text and there are two or three shafts in the ground, and the tradition that picks one of them out is a tradition rather than a finding.

Where archaeologists put biblical Beer-sheba is somewhere else. The Iron Age town identified with it is Tel Sheva, the mound a few kilometres east of the modern city, excavated as an Israelite and Judahite settlement and inscribed by UNESCO in 2005 as part of the Biblical Tels alongside Megiddo and Hazor. Conder noticed the relationship in the 1870s without drawing the modern conclusion: he climbed the Tell of Seb'a, which he places two and a half miles east of the wells, and rode back down to camp beside the shafts.

Robinson is the honest witness against himself here. Standing at the wells in 1838, with no ruins visible and the desert behind him, he wrote that this was the place where the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob often dwelt, and that Abraham dug perhaps this very well. Then, methodical man that he was, he walked up the low hills to the north, found the foundations of a scattered settlement, and matched what he saw against Eusebius and Jerome, who describe the place as a large village with a Roman garrison. Conder, looking at the same hills, said only the foundations of a flourishing fourth-century town remained. Neither of them found anything of the patriarchal age, and neither claimed to.

None of that makes the site fraudulent. What the visitor centre presents is Abraham as the shared ancestor of the three monotheistic religions, and the well as the place a long tradition attaches to him. Take the tour on those terms and it delivers what it says.

When Robinson reached the wells in 1838 there was nothing here. Arabs were pasturing camels across the open country, he noted, but no trace of dwellings was anywhere visible. Conder, camped by the principal well decades later, described a pasture land beautiful in spring and desolate in November, with not a tree anywhere near the wells.

The town arrived last. Britannica dates Ottoman efforts at town planning and development here to around 1900, and notes that even then the place stayed largely a watering station and a trading centre for the Bedouin tribes of the surrounding desert. That is the sequence worth holding on to: the wells did not appear in a city, the city was laid out around the wells, and the grid of streets a visitor now walks through to reach Derech Hevron is younger than the shaft at the end of it by at least seven hundred years. English-language reference accounts add that a local sheikh built a house over the well in 1897.

The British took Beersheba in 1917, and Britannica notes that the capture opened the way to their conquest of Palestine and Syria. Israeli forces took the town in October 1948, during Operation Yoav, and the well was thereafter left as public archaeological ground rather than built over. The municipality developed the surroundings, paving the plaza that leads to the shaft and walling the area, which is the arrangement the 2013 visitor centre replaced. The well is one of the few fixed points in Beersheba older than Beersheba, and the courtyard is the clearest place to see why a city was put in this patch of ground rather than five kilometres in any direction.

The line between the two is unusually easy to draw here, because almost everything a visitor touches was finished in the last fifteen years. The old fabric is the shaft, its dressed stone lining, the second well that appears to have been sunk later, and whatever survives of the troughs and rope-worn curb stones the surveyors described. Even that has a date rather than an age: Conder's inscribed stone gives the lining a twelfth-century floor, and he was explicit that the masonry did not look older.

Everything above ground is Armon's. The architectural intent is stated rather than left to be guessed at: the form imitates the tent of Abraham, the palette combines desert colours with copper, and the copper is there to point at the Middle Bronze Age, the period the exhibition is about. The building sits on the foundations of the ancient well courtyard, which is a considered decision rather than an accident of the plot, and it holds the route, the presentation hall and the 150-seat auditorium.

The other made object worth naming is on the outside. The wall facing Derech Hevron carries the Peace Mosaic, a project led by the artist David Wakstein in which Jewish, Christian and Muslim pupils made roughly 105 square metres of mosaic carrying portraits and the names of the participants. It is a community art commission of the 2000s, not a historic surface, and it is one of the more interesting things at the address.

Armon is not an outsider to the city. He was Beersheba's city engineer between 1989 and 1992, through the largest wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union, and later designed the Beer Sheva Central railway station. Whether the tent form works is a matter of taste; that it was drawn by someone who had already spent years deciding what Beersheba should look like is not.

• Ancient, or at least medieval: the main shaft and its dressed stone lining, the second well to the west, the inscribed stone Conder dated 505 AH
• Nineteenth-century record, not necessarily still visible: nine stone troughs at the larger well and five at the lesser, and the rope channels cut into the curb stones
• Twentieth-century municipal work: the paved plaza leading to the well and the wall enclosing it, laid out after 1948
• Built in 2013: the tent-form building, the audiovisual route, the presentation hall and the auditorium seating about 150
• Community commission: the Peace Mosaic on the Derech Hevron frontage, about 105 square metres, led by David Wakstein