The land: Paran and Baca

The last blessing of Moses

Deuteronomy records “the blessing, wherewith Moses the man of God blessed the children of Israel before his death” (Deuteronomy 33:1). It opens thus:

The LORD came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands of saints: from his right hand went a fiery law for them. Yea, he loved the people; all his saints are in thy hand.

Deuteronomy 33:2-3

Here Moses sums up the history of prophecy up to the last mission, in three places (Ameri, p. 109-110; al-Saqqar, p. 81-85):

• Sinai, where he received the Torah;
• Seir, a mountain of Judah (Joshua 15:10), the land of the prophets of Israel down to Jesus;
• Paran, from which “he shined forth”, with “a fiery law”, coming “with ten thousands of saints” (Deuteronomy 33:2).

The verbs climb: “came” from Sinai, but “shined forth” from Paran. The last manifestation is the most radiant, and its law is of fire: it consumes the laws before it by abrogating them (Ameri, p. 110, 120).

Habakkuk takes up the same scene:

God came from Teman, and the Holy One from mount Paran. […] His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise.

Habakkuk 3:3

The Hebrew says “he will come”, as do the Septuagint and the Vulgate; and Teman means the south, where the Hijaz lies (Ameri, p. 112-115; al-Saqqar, p. 89-90).

Only the coming of Islam in the Hijaz brings these traits together: a revelation more radiant than that of Sinai, a new law for the peoples, tens of thousands of the faithful (Ameri, p. 140). The plural, the peoples, follows the French of Louis Segond, where the King James and the Arabic Van Dyck have the singular; and where the King James says “with ten thousands of saints”, Segond and the Van Dyck speak of coming out from holy myriads. Al-Saqqar puts the question: when did Paran see so many “saints”, if not with Muhammad ﷺ and his Companions (al-Saqqar, p. 89)? The reading is an old one: Amr ibn al-Layth put it forward around 900 (research file v1, part 1).

Paran, the land of Ishmael

The Bible gives the name Paran to more than one place. Sami Ameri chooses the surest landmark: Ishmael (Ameri, p. 124).

And he dwelt in the wilderness of Paran: and his mother took him a wife out of the land of Egypt.

Genesis 21:21

Ancient witnesses place these sites in the Hijaz:

• the Samaritan Arabic translation, in a manuscript of the John Rylands Library, writes “al-Hijaz” in place of Paran, in Genesis 21:21 and in Deuteronomy 33:2 (Ameri, p. 131-135; al-Saqqar, p. 83);
• Saadia Gaon renders Genesis 10:30 as “from Mecca to Medina” (Ameri, p. 124-130);
• Jerome, translating Eusebius, places Paran in Arabia Deserta, and the Armenian Sebeos has the conquerors, sons of Ishmael, set out from the wilderness of Paran (al-Saqqar, p. 84-85);
• Thomas Artsruni, in the ninth century, places Mecca in “Paran of Arabia Petraea” (Ameri, p. 101-102).

The rabbis themselves link Paran with the sons of Ishmael. The Sifre on Deuteronomy, which predates Islam, says that the Torah was given in four languages, Paran corresponding to Arabic; the Midrash Tanhuma, the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer and Rashi connect Paran with the Ishmaelites (Ameri, p. 117-120; al-Saqqar, p. 86-87). They add that God offered the Torah to the sons of Ishmael, who refused it. But the text speaks of no refusal: from Paran, “he shined forth” (Deuteronomy 33:2), more brightly than at his coming from Sinai (Ameri, p. 117-120).

Objections and their answers

“The text tells of Israel’s past.” Moses speaks like the dying Jacob, who told his sons “that which shall befall you in the last days” (Genesis 49:1), and Deuteronomy calls his discourse “the blessing” (Deuteronomy 33:1): it looks to the future. The prophets often tell the future in the past tense. And Israel never knew a manifestation at Sinai, then at Seir, then a more radiant one at Paran (Ameri, p. 110-116; al-Saqqar, p. 88-89).

“It is God himself who comes, and only once, at Sinai.” Coming, rising up, shining forth: these are the manifestations of the message sent to men. The Bible even gives the name of gods to those who represent God or stand before him (Psalm 82:1; 1 Samuel 28:13; Ameri, p. 120-121; al-Saqqar, p. 85-86).

“Paran is in Sinai, between Egypt and Canaan.” The spies of Israel do set out “from the wilderness of Paran” (Numbers 13:3). But reference works recognize more than one Paran; the Jewish Encyclopedia counts three (Ameri, p. 121-122). The Bible itself distinguishes the two wildernesses: “the children of Israel took their journeys out of the wilderness of Sinai; and the cloud rested in the wilderness of Paran” (Numbers 10:12). The Encyclopaedia Judaica doubts that the Paran of Deuteronomy 33:2 lies in Sinai (Ameri, p. 122-123). And what “saint” ever shone forth over that Paran (al-Saqqar, p. 87-88)? The landmark remains Ishmael (Genesis 21:21).

“The ten thousands of saints are angels.” The next verse shows these “saints” seated, receiving the word: “they sat down at thy feet; every one shall receive of thy words” (Deuteronomy 33:3), like disciples. And Daniel calls “the saints of the most High” the faithful who receive the kingdom (Daniel 7:18; Ameri, p. 136-139).

The valley of Baca

The Qur’an names Mecca by another name:

A psalm sings of the pilgrimage to the house of God:

Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: they will be still praising thee. […] Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the rain also filleth the pools. They go from strength to strength, every one of them in Zion appeareth before God.

Psalm 84:4-7

Christian commentators read it as a pilgrimage psalm (Ameri, p. 156). Its traits are found, one by one, at Mecca (Ameri, p. 157-159; al-Saqqar, p. 107-113):

• the House: “thy house”, says the psalm; “My House”, says the Qur’an (22:26);
• the name and the valley: Bakka (3:96), “a valley without cultivation” (14:37);
• the blessing: the Qur’an speaks of a blessed House (3:96); in the psalm, the Hebrew word that the King James renders “pools” is read “blessings” by Louis Segond;
• the well: Zamzam, which gushed forth for Hagar and Ishmael, and gives the pilgrims drink;
• the walk: some Arabic translations understand that they go “from height to height”, as between Safa and Marwa (2:158).

Rosenmüller, cited by the orientalist George Bush, saw no better illustration of this psalm than the pilgrims of Mecca (Ameri, p. 168-169).

The well has a history. In the twelfth century, Ibn Ezra identifies the well where the angel announced Ishmael to Hagar (Genesis 16:14) with the well “Zamum”, where the Ishmaelites held their feast each year; Ameri and al-Saqqar read in it Zamzam (Ameri, p. 169; al-Saqqar, p. 47-48).

The objections on Baca

Sami Ameri grants it: the Muslim use of this psalm is recent, and the early scholars did not cite it (Ameri, p. 159). But each objection has its answer.

“Baca means weeping: the Septuagint and the Vulgate translate valley of tears.” In Hebrew, the verb to weep ends with a he; the word in the psalm ends with an aleph. The great English translations, the King James among them, keep “Baca” with a capital letter, as a proper name (Psalm 84:6), and so does Louis Segond in French. The commentator Kirkpatrick, who nonetheless placed Baca near Jerusalem, notes that the word never means weeping; he thinks of the balsam tree, which abounds in the arid valley of Mecca (Ameri, p. 160-163; al-Saqqar, p. 108-113).

“Bakka is written with a doubled k; the psalm says bakha.” It is the same letter. The k is pronounced kh after a vowel, by a rule of Hebrew that Arabic does not have; the dot that marks the doubling was not written in the ancient manuscripts, and the vowels are a late addition (Ameri, p. 159-160; al-Saqqar, p. 114-115).

“The pilgrims go to Zion, and so to Jerusalem.” Without vowels, the word can be read Tsiyyon, Zion, or tsayon, dry land, which the King James elsewhere renders “a dry place” (Isaiah 32:2). The context, an arid land turned into a well, calls for this sense: the pilgrims appear before God in the valley without cultivation of the prayer of Abraham (Ameri, p. 166-167; al-Saqqar, p. 113-116).

“It is a valley near Jerusalem.” Some propose the valley of Rephaim, which Isaiah shows full of ears of grain (Isaiah 17:5); others, Bochim, which is never called a valley, nor Baca (Judges 2:5; Ameri, p. 163-164).

Readings to hold with caution

Al-Saqqar also reads Mecca in Isaiah: “Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; […] for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife” (Isaiah 54:1); the barren one would be Mecca, left without a prophet until the Prophet ﷺ. He reads it as well in Micah, where the nations go up to “the house of the God of Jacob” (Micah 4:2), and in the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John: “the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father” (John 4:21; al-Saqqar, p. 56-57).

We keep them as echoes, not as proofs: a single author defends them, and Micah names Zion and Jerusalem in the same verse. They add nothing that Paran and Baca do not already carry.

How this page connects to the others

• Ishmael in the wilderness of Paran, and the promise made to Hagar: page 1, The prayer of Abraham.
• Kedar, the same region named by Isaiah: page 3, The Servant of Kedar.
• The “saints” of Paran and the kingdom of the “saints” in Daniel: page 6, The time.
• The land among the threads of the convergence: page 8, The convergence, and the map of the prophecies.
• The objection about Paran, treated on its own: Objections answered.

Sources for this page

• Qur’an: Tanzil text (Uthmani); translation of the meaning by this site.
• Bible: King James Version. Psalm 84:6 in the King James is 84:7 in Bibles that count the title of the psalm as a verse, such as Louis Segond.
• Sami Ameri, al-Bishara bi-nabi al-islam fi kutub al-yahud wa-l-nasara, Takween, 2nd ed., 2021, p. 101-102, 109-140, 155-169.
• Munqidh al-Saqqar, Hal bashshara al-Kitab al-Muqaddas bi-Muhammad ﷺ?, al-Huda wa-l-Nur series, 5, 2023, p. 47-48, 56-57, 81-90, 107-116.
• Research file Annonces du Prophète ﷺ, v1.0, 14 October 2026, part 1.