MORIAH, MOUNT

Biblical name of a hill in Jerusalem, which, by tradition, is the place where Abraham prepared Isaac for sacrifice on a rock. The hill is known to Jews as the Temple Mount. At the top of the hill is Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), an enclosure containing the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, enclosing Abraham's rock, which Muslims also believe is the place to which the Night Journey of the prophet Muhammad brought him, and from which he was taken to receive a message from God. It is the third holiest site in Islam. The Dome of the Rock, which replaced the earlier Mosque of Omar, is built upon what is said to be the site of the Temple of Solomon and the Second Temple, or Temple of Herod, of which the Western Wall, or Kotel, is believed by pious Jews to be the remnant.

SEE ALSO Abraham;Aqsa, al-;Haram al-Sharif;Western Wall Disturbances.

MORIAH

MORIAH , Hebrew publishing house. In 1901 Ḥ.N. *Bialik, together with Y.H. *Rawnitzki, S. Ben-Zion, and others, founded the Moriah publishing house in Odessa, their primary intention being the printing of educational material for modern Hebrew schools. Up to 1914 they issued a large amount of such literature, including Bialik-Rawnitzki's famous anthology Sefer ha-Aggadah. Moriah's activities were expanded (under E.L. Lewinsky) to include the best in modern Hebrew literature, such as works by Mendele Mokher Seforim, Shalom Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, S. Asch, and D. Frischmann; poetry by Bialik, Tchernichowsky, and Z. Shneur; and scholarly works by M.L. Lilienblum, D. Neumark, and S. Krauss. Moriah became the leading house for modern Hebrew publishing, but World War i and the Russian Revolution caused the end of this remarkably successful enterprise. It was succeeded by the *Dvir publishing house, set up in Berlin after the war by some of the founders of Moriah.

bibliography:

Ḥ.N. Bialik, Devir u-Moriyyah (1926).

MORIAH

MORIAH (Heb. מוֹרִיָּה), an unidentified locality mentioned in the Bible. Abraham was ordered to offer Isaac as a burnt offering in the "land of Moriah," which was three days' distance from Beersheba and visible "[from] afar" (Gen. 22:2–4). Early tradition identifies "mount" Moriah with the place where Solomon built the Temple. Josephus also locates the sacrifice on the mountain where David [sic] later built the Temple (Ant., 1:226). Talmudic scholars explain the name Moriah as derived from the "the mountain of myrrh" (in Song 4:6; Mekh., Be-Shallah 3; Gen. R. 50:7). The Septuagint, in translating "Amoria" (Amorite) for Moriah, offers another explanation. The assumption that Abraham intended to sacrifice Isaac on the threshing floor of Jebus (Jerusalem), in full view of the Canaanite city, is farfetched; nor is the Temple Mount visible from afar, as it is hidden by the higher mountains around it. It seems more probable that the biblical story left the location of Moriah deliberately vague; the importance of the sacrifice of Isaac in the series of covenants between God and Israel made it natural that at an early time this supreme act of faith was located on the site destined to become the most holy sanctuary of Israel, the Temple of Solomon, just as the Samaritans transferred the act to their holy mountain, Mt. Gerizim.

bibliography:

Abel, Geog, 1 (1933), 374–5; em, 4 (1962), 741–2.

[Michael Avi-Yonah]

MORIAH

Name of a small ultra-Orthodox Israeli party, created in 1990 by Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz-Haim, a dissident from SHAS. For the Knesset elections of June 1992, this party joined with the electoral bloc of United Torah Judaism and won a seat in the Knesset.

SEE ALSO Knesset;SHAS;United Torah Judaism Party.