MORIA. - The region ('ereq ham-Mōrijjāh) to which Abraham went from Bersabes, in order to sacrifice, on the mountain that the Lord would show him, Isaac (v.). After three days’ journey he caught sight of the mountain of 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: “elevated land”; Aquila: “visible”; Symmachus: “of the vision”; Volgena: “terra visionis”) do not permit a certain identification. The reading of the Pēlīṭā, “land of the Amorites,” is preferred.
The Samaritans identify “the terebinth of Mōreh” near Sichem (Gen. 12, 6) with the land of M. and indicate Garizim as the mountain of sacrifice, but the etymology of the two names is different and the identification 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) combined the place of Isaac’s sacrifice on the Temple hill in Jerusalem with the rabbinic speculation represented in II Par. 3, 1 (har ham-Mōrijāh = Mons Moriah), a very ancient interpolation, prior to the Septuagint version which records II.
This proper name is never mentioned in the texts recounting the construction of the Temple (II Sam. 24, 25; I Par. 21, 26; II Reg. 6; II Par. 3), and moreover the Temple hill, the lowest among the surrounding hills, could not have been seen from afar as Gen. 22, 4 supposes.