Please note the location of the wilderness of Beersheba (28 miles south of Hebron) on the map above. More on this link.

Now let's consider what springs from Islamic so-called "tradition" on the matter: "Abraham took Hagar and her son, Ishmael to a place near the Kabah; he left them under a tree at the site of Zamzam. No one lived in Makkah back then, yet Abraham made them sit there, leaving them with some dates, and a small water-skin. Thereafter he set out towards home."

So Muhammad's followers are taught to believe that the "well of water" referenced in verse 19 above, is the well of Zamzam in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. That would mean that between verse 14 when they were sent away and 15 when the bottle of water Abraham gave them ran out, rather than wandering 28 miles as scripture records, Hagar and Ishmael would have had to travel across more than 1,400 kilometers (or 886 miles) of largely harsh, uncharted, unknown, untraveled waterless desert wasteland, from Hebron to Mecca, over a thousand years before the first caravan route was established along the Red Sea in Arabia.

Then if Abraham were included (contrary to scripture), he is supposed to have abandoned Hagar and Ishmael under a tree in an uninhabitated desert place that eventually became Mecca, with no other inhabitants and thus no farming, pasture, or food except some dates he left them with, and no water except that in a small water-skin he gave them - and thus obviously no chance for survival - and then after abandoning them in a vacant Arabian desert place is supposed to have simply "set out" on his 1,400 kilometer wander back home!

Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Yet in order to address the insurmountable geographical and demographic impossibility, Islam's 7th to 10th century A.D. "tradition" creators suggested the preposterous notion that Abraham regularly commuted back and forth between the Holy Land and Mecca, on a flying donkey-mule or Buraq. The idea was originated by Ibn Ishak as per Tarikh al-Tabari, I, page 165



.....we find that while other ancient Arabian towns are well attested in the historical and archaeological records, Mecca is conspicuously absent from those records.

This is because there is no evidence whatsoever that suggests that Mecca ever existed before the 4th century AD when Yemeni pagans migrated to, and settled, the area.