Genesis 22:14: A name given to a place, and the map is not allowed to say which place

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Genesis 22:2ESV

He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of , and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”

Genesis 22:14ESV

So Abraham called the name of that place, “The ”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.”

Genesis 22:19ESV

So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to . And Abraham lived at .

"So Abraham called the name of that place, 'The LORD will provide'; as it is said to this day, 'On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.'" Abraham names four things in Genesis and three of them are wells. This is the fourth, and it is a mountain: YHWH-yireh, the LORD will see to it — the same verb Isaac used two verses into the climb, when he asked where the lamb was and was told God would see to it himself. The ram is in the thicket by now, and the name is the answer coming back with a sentence attached: as it is said to this day, on the mount of the LORD it shall be provided. The gazetteer treats the name as a place, because it is a proper noun on a hill, and 151 of its 189 votes send it to the same rock they send Moriah to. That is the honest position for a map of the whole life, and /maps/abrahams-journey takes it. It is not the honest position here, because two pages ago this series looked at Moriah and refused to choose between a Jerusalem ridge with 283 votes and a Mount Gerizim with 14. A map that quietly pins the new name at the Temple Mount would be choosing after all, in a verse where nobody was looking. So the ring on this page sits on the ground the sources point at and is drawn open, with the reason on the card: this is the mountain of the last four verses, whichever mountain that was. The frame is Jerusalem's because that is where the weight of the votes falls and there is no point pretending otherwise; the card is what keeps the frame from being an argument. What the sentence is doing is turning an event into a saying. "As it is said to this day" is the narrator stepping forward to tell you that the phrase was still in use when he wrote — that people who had never met Abraham said the LORD will provide about their own troubles, and this hill is where the words come from.

Map of Genesis 22:14: A name given to a place, and the map is not allowed to say which place — 0 sites plotted
0 sites from Genesis 22:14 on one frame. The map at the top of the page is the same drawing, and it walks the verses with you.

Regions on this map

The fourth thing Abraham names in Genesis and the only one that is not a well. The name answers Isaac's question on the way up, and the narrator says it was still a saying in his own day.

  • Not a place so much as a name put on one: YHWH-yireh, the LORD will see to it, said over the mountain after the ram was found in the thicket. It is the same verb Isaac had used going up, and Genesis adds that the phrase outlived the day — "as it is said to this day, on the mount of the LORD it shall be provided". 151 of its 189 votes go to Mount Moriah and the rest to Shechem and Mamre, which is to say that the sources place the name exactly where they place the mountain, and they do not agree about the mountain.

    Not pinned. 151 of its 189 votes are for the Temple Mount, which is also where the majority reading of Moriah sits — and /maps/genesis-22-2 declined to choose between that reading and Mount Gerizim. Pinning the name here would decide that question two pages later and without saying so, and the name belongs to whichever mountain the last four verses happened on.

Genesis 22:14 in full

  1. Genesis 22:14So Abraham called the name of that place, “The ”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.”