The actual meaning of the name is not certain, nor indeed is the original signification of the proverb itself. Already in the time of the Septuagint translation the meaning of the latter was doubtful, and the Greek translators have made the divine name the subject of the verb, reading, ‘In the mountain the Lord was seen.’ But the fact that the Chronicler calls the temple-mount Moriah shows that such a rendering was not accepted in Jerusalem. It may be that the name ‘mount of the Lord’ goes back, at all events in substance, to patriarchal times. Among the places in Southern Palestine conquered by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Thothmes III., of the eighteenth dynasty, and recorded on the temple walls of Karnak, is Har-el, ‘the mountain of God.’[62] The names found in immediate connection with Har-el indicate that its site is to be sought in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem; and as the name of Jerusalem itself does not occur in the Pharaoh’s list of his conquests, it is probable that we are to see in it the future capital of Judah. As we now know from the Tel el-Amarna tablets, Jerusalem was an important city of Canaan long before the Mosaic age; it was, moreover, the centre of a district which had been conquered by the Egyptians, and its ruler was a vassal of the Egyptian monarch. It is therefore difficult to account for the omission of any reference to it in the catalogue of the conquests of the Pharaoh except upon the supposition that it is really mentioned among them, though under another name. The distance that separates Jerusalem from Beer-sheba would correspond with the three days’ journey of Abraham to the destined place of sacrifice. It was on the third day that Abraham lifted up his eyes ‘and saw the place afar off.’ The main, in fact, the only, argument of any weight that has been urged against the identification is the fact that the place of sacrifice seems to have been a desert spot. No spectators are mentioned as present, and close to it was a thicket in which a ram was caught by the horns. How can such solitude, it is asked, be reconciled with the existence of a city in the same spot? How can the deserted high-place whereon the patriarch raised the altar of sacrifice for his son be identical with the fortress-city of which Melchizedek was king?