Meribah

Meribah is the second of the two names Moses gave to the watering place at Rephidim where Israel quarreled over water in the first months after the Exodus of 1446 BC. The congregation had moved by stages from the wilderness of Sin and "camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink" (Exodus 17:1). The people quarreled with Moses and demanded water, and he answered, "Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?" (Exodus 17:2). Soon he was telling the Lord, "They are almost ready to stone me" (Exodus 17:4). The Lord sent him ahead with some of the elders and the staff with which he had struck the Nile, saying, "I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it" (Exodus 17:5-6). Moses struck the rock in the sight of the elders, and "he called the name of the place Massah and Meribah, because of the quarreling of the people of Israel, and because they tested the Lord by saying, 'Is the Lord among us or not?'" (Exodus 17:7). Massah means testing and Meribah means quarreling or strife, the two charges in Moses' question of verse 2.

Two Meribahs

The name belongs to two separate incidents nearly forty years apart, and the Old Testament keeps them distinct. This entry covers the first, at Rephidim, one stage short of Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:2; Numbers 33:14-15). The second is the quarrel at Kadesh in the wilderness of Zin in the fortieth year, when Moses was told to speak to the rock, struck it twice, and was barred with Aaron from entering the land (Numbers 20:1-13). That later site is called "the waters of Meribah" (Numbers 20:13, 24; Psalm 106:32) and, in full, "Meribah-kadesh" (Deuteronomy 32:51; Ezekiel 47:19; 48:28); it is covered by the Waters of Meribah and Kadesh-Barnea entries. At Rephidim the double name is used and the people are faulted; at Kadesh only Meribah is used, the place is fixed by "the wilderness of Zin" (Numbers 27:14; Deuteronomy 32:51), and the fault falls on Moses and Aaron. Deuteronomy 6:16 ("as you tested him at Massah"), Deuteronomy 9:22 (Massah listed with Taberah and Kibroth-hattaavah), and Psalm 95:8-9 ("as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness") look back to Rephidim. Deuteronomy 33:8, where God is said to have tested Levi "at Massah" and quarreled with him "at the waters of Meribah", pairs the two names, and its second clause may refer to either incident. Psalm 81:7, "I tested you at the waters of Meribah", stands in a recital of the deliverance from Egypt but uses the fuller phrase, and the psalm does not say which incident it means.

Geography and Identification

Meribah is not a settlement but the name of a spring or rock at the Rephidim camp, so its location is Rephidim's, and that depends on where Mount Sinai is placed. Exodus 17:6 puts the rock "at Horeb", Exodus 17:8 puts the battle with Amalek at the same camp, and Exodus 19:2 records that Israel "set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai". On the traditional southern route, with Sinai at Jebel Musa, two candidates are proposed. The older one is the Wadi Feiran oasis, the best watered valley of the southern peninsula, about 40 km northwest of Jebel Musa; the identification goes back to the nineteenth century surveyor E. H. Palmer, who called the valley the most fertile part of the peninsula. On this reading the Amalekites had every reason to hold the oasis against an incoming people. The other is the Wadi Refayid (also spelled Rufaid) in the southwest of the peninsula, favoured chiefly for the resemblance of its name to Rephidim. Proposals that place Sinai near Kadesh-barnea or in Midian east of the Gulf of Aqaba move Rephidim with it. This identification is debated among biblical archaeologists; no inscription or excavation has fixed the site, and the identification is possible rather than probable. The coordinates given here mark the Wadi Feiran candidate as a working location only.

Theological Significance

Meribah became a byword. Moses set the memory of Massah in the law as a standing warning, "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test" (Deuteronomy 6:16), and Psalm 95:8-9 turns the place name into an appeal to a later generation: "do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work." The staff that struck the rock at Horeb was the staff that had struck the Nile (Exodus 17:5), the same instrument turned from judgment on Egypt to provision for Israel.