How Abraham Found Mount Moriah Without Being Told Where It Was

Click for full size

The Instruction Without a Destination

Take your son, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I will tell you of.

Not which mountain. Not how far. Not what it looks like when you arrive. The destination is promised but withheld, and the only navigational information Abraham has is that God will tell him when the time comes. He woke early the next morning and saddled his donkey himself, which the tradition in Bereshit Rabbah reads as the mark of a man undone by love and urgency: he could not wait for servants.

Three days of travel. Three days of walking with his son and his servants toward a mountain he could not yet identify, in a direction he was following by instruction rather than by knowledge. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the early medieval narrative midrash from Palestine, records that Abraham asked God directly which mountain, and the answer was not a name or a location. It was a promise of recognition: you will see my glory abiding there, and that is how you will know.

What Abraham Saw on the Third Day

On the third morning Abraham lifted his eyes. On a specific peak, a column of fire rose from the earth to the sky.

He turned to Isaac and asked whether he saw it. Isaac said yes. Abraham turned to the two servants who had made the trip with them and asked whether they saw it. They saw nothing.

This detail carries enormous weight in the tradition. The servants were capable men, loyal members of Abraham's household, trustworthy enough to accompany him on the most important march of his life. They could not see the pillar. The sign that marked the mountain was visible only to those who could receive it, and the fact that Isaac could see it was the tradition's answer to one of the questions the Akedah (the binding of Isaac) always raises: did Isaac know what was happening.

He did. He could see the fire.

Where the Mountain Came From

Midrash Aggadah preserves a tradition about Mount Moriah's origin that begins before the valley that would become Jerusalem was a mountain at all. In the beginning, it was a valley. God summoned the surrounding mountains to converge, to fuse, to become the abode appropriate for the Shechinah (the presence of God dwelling in the world). They came together and rose, and what had been separate peaks became one place.

The Book of Jubilees, the Second Temple-era expansion of Genesis, records the summit itself: the angel stopped Abraham's hand over Isaac. The angel confirmed that the fear of God had been demonstrated. Then the ram caught in the thicket by his horns was offered in Isaac's place. Abraham named the mountain God will see, which became the mountain of the Lord's seeing, which would later become Jerusalem.

The Three Days Abraham Did Not Speak

Josephus, writing in his Antiquities in the late first century CE, gives Isaac a speech that does not appear in the Torah. Isaac, twenty-five years old in Josephus's account, told his father he was not worthy to have been born if he would reject the determination of God and of his father. He did not resist. He helped arrange the wood and lay down on the altar.

Bereshit Rabbah records that Abraham saddled the donkey himself, getting up before the servants were awake, because love disrupts ordinary habit: the more urgent the devotion, the less willing the one who feels it is to delegate. He moved faster than any servant could have moved because no servant could have moved at all with what Abraham was carrying in his chest for three days and three nights as he walked toward a mountain he would recognize only when fire descended from heaven to mark it.