In Arabic, the name of this stream is Asluj, which means suckling. According to a legend, when Abraham lived in Beersheba and sent his maidservant Hagar away, she took a camel and her son Ishmael, and when she arrived here her water ran out. Hagar then put her son down in the wadi. The thirsty boy kicked with his heels, and water sprang out wherever he broke the earth.
Bedouins of the Azazma clan settled around the Bir Asluj well, and during World War I the Turks built a train station on the side of the Sorek River – Beersheba – Kseima (Sinai) rail line. The site became a military logistics center.
Students from the Mikve Yisrael School of Agriculture, who were drafted into the Turkish army as a tree planting brigade, planted a grove of eucalyptus trees here. Later the British established a terminal for the Desert Police, who rode on camels. During World War II a large army base was established, which served as a stop on the way from Suez to the center of the country.
In December 1947, a Kibbutz Revivim car was ambushed and three members of the kibbutz were killed. In June 1948, the soldiers of the 8th Regiment of the Palmach Brigade attacked the Egyptian force that occupied the abandoned British police station. The conquest was completed in December during Operation Horev. Thirty-four soldiers fell in the battles. A memorial was built here in honor of those who fell in local battles during the War of Independence.
Mitzpe Revivim
On a chalkstone hill about half a kilometer from south of the kibbutz is Mitzpe Revivim, the outpost where the pioneers of the kibbutz lived until 1950. The outpost was refurbished and includes several buildings surrounded by a wall. Among them is a museum that reconstructs the life of the founders.
The outpost is surrounded by communication trenches and defense positions, and in the courtyard there is an aircraft that brought arms and supplies to Revivim in the time of the siege on the community.
Next to the outpost there is a large cistern from the Byzantine period called "The Cave", in which the first pioneers lived. In Revivim River, near the outpost, there are pools for storing floodwater, which were constructed in 1945 by the founders of Kibbutz Revivim in their vain attempts to develop intensive agriculture in the region.
Revivim was cut off during the War of Independence. The siege was lifted during Operation Horev at the end of December 1948. The permanent location was established in 1950, and the original site of the pioneers was turned into a museum that tells the story of the early years of the Negev pioneers.
The Negev outposts functioned as stations for agricultural experimentation whose goal was to investigate possibilities for developing agricultural enterprises in the Negev, through studying problems related to the climate, the soil and the vegetation unique to the area. The outposts helped a lot in the various research studies undertaken in the Negev, which was then an unknown region. They also fulfilled a very important role in land acquisition and protection, not just in their vicinities but in many other places. The region became much more defensible as a result of these outposts.