The story of the sacrifice of Isaac was a practical illustration of the lesson. Abraham was called upon to slay with his own hand his only child, the son through whom he had believed that he would become the ancestor of a mighty nation. He was summoned to lead him to one of those high-places of Canaan where the deity seemed nearer to the worshipper than in the plain below, and there, like the Phœnician god El, to offer him up to his God. We are told how he set forth from Beer-sheba, on the borders of the desert, and on the third day reached the sacred mountain on whose summit the Canaanitish rite was to be celebrated. It was in ‘the land of Moriah,’ according to the reading of the Hebrew text, a name which the chronicler (2 Chron. iii. 1) transfers to the temple-mount at Jerusalem. But the Septuagint changes the name in the books of Chronicles into that of ‘the mountain of Amoria’ or the Amorites; while in Genesis the Greek translators must have read Moreh, since the Hebrew word is rendered by ‘Highlands.’ Moreh is the Babylonian Martu, the land of the Amorites, so that we need not be surprised at finding the Syriac version boldly substituting ‘Amorites’ for the Masoretic ‘Moriah.’ In any case, the belief that the scene of Abraham’s sacrifice was the spot whereon the Jewish temple afterwards stood went back to an early date. When the book of Genesis assumed its present form it had already become fixed in the Jewish mind. This is clear from the proverb quoted to explain the name of Yahveh-yireh. ‘To this day,’ we are told, it was said: ‘In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen.’ For the Jew there was but one ‘mount of the Lord,’ that mountain whereon Yahveh revealed Himself above the cherubim of the ark. It was ‘the hill of God,’ wherein He desired to dwell (Ps. lxviii. 15), the seat of the sanctuary of Yahveh the God of Israel. When the Samaritans set up on Gerizim their rival temple to that of Jerusalem, it was necessary that the scene of the sacrifice of the Hebrew patriarch should be transferred to the new site. It was a proof how firm was the conviction that the temple-mount had been consecrated to the sacrifice of the firstborn by the great ancestor of the Israelitish family. The spot whereon the victims of the Jewish ritual were offered up was the very spot to which Abraham had been led by God that he might offer there the terrible sacrifice of his only son. Its name had been given to it by Abraham, and this name found its explanation in a saying that was current at Jerusalem about the temple-mount.