The Lord Will Provide
The Lord Will Provide is an ancient city mentioned in the Old Testament, located in the region of Samaria in modern-day Israel. Known today as Mount Moriah. It appears across 1 verse in Scripture.
Biblical History
The Lord Will Provide, in Hebrew Yahweh Yireh, is the name Abraham gave to the mountain where God intervened to spare his son Isaac from sacrifice (Genesis 22:14). Having traveled three days from Beer-sheba to the place God directed him, Abraham bound Isaac on the altar and raised his knife, only for the angel of the Lord to halt him and provide a ram caught in a nearby thicket as a substitute. Abraham named the place Yahweh Yireh, 'The Lord Will Provide' or 'The Lord Will See,' with the narrator adding that it is still said, 'On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.' This account is one of the most theologically dense narratives in the entire Old Testament, prefiguring the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. The site is identified with Mount Moriah, the same location where Solomon later built the Jerusalem temple (2 Chronicles 3:1), drawing a continuous theological line from Abraham's sacrifice to Israel's central sanctuary. The binding of Isaac, the Akedah, became foundational for Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology alike, each tradition reading the event through its own interpretive lens.
Archaeological & Historical Notes
The Lord Will Provide is associated with Mount Moriah, the rocky outcrop in Jerusalem upon which both Solomon's temple and the Second Temple were built, and which today is occupied by the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. Archaeological investigation of the Temple Mount itself has been severely restricted due to its religious sensitivity, though work in the surrounding area, including the Temple Mount Sifting Project, which analyzes debris removed from the mount, has recovered artifacts from the Bronze Age through the Ottoman period. The great rock beneath the Dome of the Rock, known in Islamic tradition as the Foundation Stone, has been venerated since antiquity as the site of both Abraham's near-sacrifice and the altar of the Jerusalem temple.
Verse Appearances (1)
Gen
References
- Orr, J. (ed.) (1915) The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Chicago: Howard-Severance Company. [Public Domain]
- OpenBible.info (n.d.) Bible Geocoding. Available at: https://www.openbible.info/geo/. [CC BY 4.0]
- Bagnall, R. et al. (eds.) (n.d.) Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places. Available at: https://pleiades.stoa.org. [CC BY 3.0]
- Wikidata contributors (n.d.) Wikidata. Available at: https://www.wikidata.org. [CC0]
- Lawrence, D. et al. (2025) Villages to Empires: a settlement dataset for the Southern Levant. doi:10.5281/zenodo.15111732. [CC BY 4.0]
- Church of England (1769) The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version. [Public Domain]