MORIA. - Region ('ereq ham-Mōrijjāh), where Abraham went from Beersheba to sacrifice his son Isaac (v.) on the mountain that the Lord would show him. After three days of travel he saw the mountain of the sacrifice, called "the Lord sees" (Gen. 22:1, 4, 14). The vague indications and the divergence of the versions in the form of the name (Septuagint: "exalted land"; Aquila: "evident"; Symmachus: "of the vision"; Vulgate: "terra visionis") do not permit a certain identification. Preferred is the reading of the Pēlīṭā, "land of the Amorites."
The Samaritans identify "the terebinth of Mōreh" near Shechem (Gen. 12:6) with the land of M. and point to Gerizim as the mountain of the sacrifice, but the etymology of the two names is different and the identification is tendentious. An ancient Jewish interpretation reported by Flavius Josephus (Antiq. Iud., I, 13, 1-2), by the Targum of Onkelos and also by St. Jerome (Quaest. Hebr. in Gen., 22, 2: PL 13, 699) has combined the place of Isaac's sacrifice on the hill of the Temple in Jerusalem and the rabbinic speculation represented in II Chron. 3:1 (har ham-Mōrijāh = Mons Moriah), a very ancient interpolation, earlier than the Septuagint version that reports it.
This proper name is never mentioned in the texts that recount the construction of the Temple (II Sam. 24:25; I Chron. 21:26; II Kings 6; II Chron. 3), and moreover the hill of the Temple, the lowest among those surrounding it, could not have been seen from afar as Gen. 22:4 supposes.
Bibliography
Donato Baldi