Deuteronomy 4:47-48

Here is one place that has three names. You are subject to this at any time in the Bible. Any one of those three names might be used: Hermon, Sirion, or Shenir. So that is a very clear statement of what I am talking about here. You have to be aware that God allows the authors to use different names. Anybody who has done any kind of studying into geography ought to understand that this is very common. Every ethnic group of people on earth does this, because languages change, things and events occur within nations, and because of that event they will change the name of whatever it was where that event took place because of that event. The same place it was called before by a different name, but the name became changed.

There is a mountain now with four different names, and all in the space of a couple of chapters. This is what I meant about cross-referencing. These are things you have to hold in your mind and know that over time a name may have changed, but we are talking about the same place. It can be confusing and it can get one mixed up.

Mount Hermon is the dominating geographic feature in that area of the world. It is a very high mountain. You might be interested to know that the Mount of Olives, Mount Zion, and the Temple Mount are all individual small peaks, all in the area of Jerusalem, and all of them are actually part of the very long shoulder of Mount Hermon. The peak of Mount Hermon is all the way up around Damascus, which is on the side of Mount Hermon, but that long mountain reaches all the way down to Jerusalem and beyond south.

The problem for us in all of this is that many times the Bible does not warn us as we are reading along—"Watch out! I'm going to use a different name for that person or location than I used before." You have to hold this in your mind. Oftentimes Bible translators have put a little letter beside a name-place, and they will refer you to where that place was called something different in some other part of the Bible, so you have to make use of those little references. This information is discovered by cross-referencing within the Bible, and sometimes from secular histories as well.

This is really not all that confusing, because if one is careful in organizing pieces of information gathered from here and there in the Bible, the geographic picture actually becomes quite clear. We will be focusing on one small area within the vicinity of Jerusalem that in turn is located on the very much larger shoulder of Mount Hermon.