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It may be, therefore, that in the Har-el of the Egyptian list we have the name of the mountain whereon the temple of Solomon was afterwards to be built. However this may be, the names which follow it show that we are in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. We may see in it an evidence that the memory of the patriarch was kept alive in the south of Palestine.
We now know that Jerusalem was already an important city in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and that it formed one of the Egyptian conquests; it would be strange therefore if no notice had been taken of it by the compiler of the list. May we not see, then, in the Har-el of the Egyptian scribe the sacred mountain of Israelitish history?
So, too, at Jerusalem, the altar is called "the mount of God" by Ezekiel only because it represents that greater "mount of God" upon which it was built. The temple-hill itself was the primitive Har-el. The list of conquered localities in Palestine recorded by Thothmes III. at Karnak gives indirect testimony to the same fact.
The discovery is of high importance when we remember that Abraham migrated from Ur of the Chaldees, and adds another to the many debts of gratitude due to Mr. Pinches from Biblical students. Three names further on we find another compound with el, Har-el, "the mount of God."
The name of Rabbah of Judah is immediately preceded in it by that of Har-el, "the mount of God." The position of this Har-el leads us to the very mountain tract in the midst of which Jerusalem stood.
It is hard to believe that "the mount of the Lord" can mean anything else than that har-el or "mountain of God" whereon Ezekiel places the temple, or that the proverb can refer to a less holy spot than that where the Lord appeared enthroned upon the cherubim above the mercy-seat. It is doubtful, however, whether the reading of the Hebrew text in either passage is correct.
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