MORIAH. – Region ('eres ham-Môrijjâh), to which ABRAHAM went from BEERSHEBA in order to sacrifice his son ISAAC on the mountain which the Lord would show him (v.). After three days of travel he saw the mountain of sacrifice, called “the Lord will see” (Gen. 22:1, 4, 14). The vague indications and the divergence of the versions in the form of the name (Septuagint: “high land”; Aquila: “evident”; Symmachus: “of vision”; Vulgate: “land of vision”) do not allow for a certain identification. The reading of the Peshitta, “land of the Amorites,” is preferred.
The Samaritans identify “the terebinth of Moreh” near SICHEM (Gen. 12:6) with the land of MORIAH and point to Mount GERIZIM as the mountain of sacrifice, but the etymology of the two names is different and the identification is tendentious. An ancient interpretation, reported by Flavius Josephus (Antiquitates Judaicae, I, 13, 1–2), by the Targum of Onkelos, and also by St. Jerome (Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim, 22:2: PL 13, 699), has conflated the place of Isaac’s sacrifice with the hill of the Temple in Jerusalem and the rabbinic speculation represented in 2 Chron. 3:1 (har ham-Môrijjâh = Mons Moriah), an extremely ancient interpolation, earlier than the Septuagint version which records II.
This proper name is never mentioned in the texts recounting the construction of the Temple (2 Sam. 24:25; 1 Chron. 21:26; 2 Kings 6; 2 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.