Moriah

Start with what nobody argues about. Genesis says the mountain lay three days' travel from where Abraham was, that it stood in a district called Moriah, and that God chose it rather than Abraham. 2 Chronicles says Solomon's temple stood on a Mount Moriah at Ornan's threshing floor in Jerusalem. Those two statements are the whole biblical dataset for this place, and everything else, including the identification of the one mountain with the other, is inference. Moriah is harder than most sites on this site in one specific way: the single place that could settle the question is the one place that has never been excavated. Four readings of the name are on the table and the Hebrew alone decides none of them. Albert Barnes set most of the field out in one note. The first reading takes it from ra'ah, to see, which is the reading the chapter's own wordplay at verse 14 supports and the one Aquila and Symmachus followed when they translated the name as the visible and the vision. The second builds it from the divine name Yah plus a word for seeing, teaching or fearing. The third is the classical rabbinic association with the Temple, chosen or appointed, which also produced place of teaching and place of myrrh as homiletical readings. The fourth is a modern philological proposal reading it as the land of the Amorites, which has the merit of explaining why Genesis calls it a land. Barnes allowed that it might even mean rebellious, which is a fair reminder that the etymology is open. On the identification of the mountain there are four positions and this page names each with its holders. The Temple Mount identification leads, because its evidence is not weak: 2 Chronicles 3:1 is the only other use of the name in Scripture and it puts Solomon's temple on Mount Moriah; the same verse uses ra'ah for the LORD appearing to David, the verb Genesis 22:14 twice puts in Abraham's mouth about the same place; Josephus states the identification outright in Antiquities 1.13.2; Jerome glosses Mount Moriah as the site of the temple; and the rabbinic tradition, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and Genesis Rabbah among them, is unanimous on it. The second position is Mount Gerizim. The Samaritan Pentateuch does not read ha-Moriah at Genesis 22:2 but a form usually given as the land of vision, which the Samaritan tradition links to the oak of Moreh that Genesis 12:6 places at Shechem, putting the binding on the Samaritan holy mountain. That is a variant in an ancient manuscript tradition rather than an argument invented to win a point, and it is presented here as such. The third position is an unidentified mountain further south or east, held by readers who weigh the three days heavily, H. E. Ryle among them, and by those who note that Genesis 22:2 speaks of a land and one of the mountains, which is the language of a district. The fourth extends the land of Moriah to the whole ridge running north from the temple hill and observes that the crucifixion happened on that ridge outside the wall. What can be said honestly is that the two events happened close together in Jerusalem, that Hebrews 13:12 makes the outside-the-camp geography deliberate, and that no verse identifies Golgotha with Moriah. The rock at the center of the platform is called es-Sakhra in Arabic and the Foundation Stone in Jewish tradition. It is an exposed outcrop of the hill's natural bedrock, irregular, roughly 18 m by 13 m and about 1.5 m proud of the floor, with a small cut chamber beneath it about 6 m across. Those are the commonly published figures and the word roughly belongs on all of them. Jewish tradition from the Mishnah onward identifies a foundation stone in the Holy of Holies, and the identification of this outcrop with the temple's own bedrock is the leading position rather than a proven one. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown reported the same connection in 1871, citing W. H. Bartlett's Walks about Jerusalem: the exposed surface is the natural rock of Mount Moriah and is thought by many to be the rock of the threshing floor of Araunah. That is a nineteenth-century observation about geology rather than a recent claim. One supporting argument is worth stating with its limits marked. Threshing floors were sited on exposed, level, wind-swept rock, high enough to catch the breeze that carries the chaff away, so a bare limestone summit above a valley is the textbook location for one. That reasons from how threshing worked and not from an excavated find, and this page labels it as such. The retaining walls that define the present enclosure are Herodian in their lower courses, from the enlargement Herod the Great began in about 20 BC and Josephus describes in Antiquities 15 and The Jewish War 5. The enclosure runs roughly 480 m along its eastern wall, roughly 485 m along its western wall and roughly 315 m along its northern wall, taking in on the order of 150,000 square metres. Those are the commonly published survey figures and this page carries them as approximate. The excavation history stops where it does for a reason that is documented. Charles Warren surveyed Jerusalem for the Palestine Exploration Fund from 1867 to 1870. The Ottoman authorities of the day did not permit him to excavate on the platform itself, so he sank shafts outside the walls and tunnelled to reach their buried courses, recording the masonry levels, Robinson's Arch and the Herodian street beneath it. The Fund published fifty of his plans and drawings in 1884, still known as the Warren Atlas. Everything learned about the platform since has come the same way: from the outer walls, from below and beside them, from cisterns and vaults recorded by observation rather than by digging, and from material displaced from the surface. The platform has never been archaeologically excavated, and no stone of Solomon's temple has been recovered. Where the temple stood inside the enclosure is a live dispute with three named positions. Leen Ritmeyer argues from a step cut in the bedrock and from the platform's own geometry that the rock lay inside the Holy of Holies, which puts the building on or immediately around the outcrop; see his article in Biblical Archaeology Review 18:2 (1992) and The Quest (2006). That is the majority position. Asher Kaufman argued in Biblical Archaeology Review 9:2 (1983) for a location north of the rock, near the small domed structure known as the Dome of the Spirits, on the alignment of a rock-cut surface there. Ernest L. Martin argued in The Temples That Jerusalem Forgot (2000) that the temple stood over the Gihon spring in the older settlement to the south and that the platform is a Roman fort, a minority position and named as one. The argument is old. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown recorded it in 1871, quoting James Turner Barclay: all topographers agree the temple stood somewhere within the enclosure, although not the slightest vestige of it remains, and the greatest diversity of sentiment prevails as to its exact position within that large area.