Bible Location
Meaning: dispute; quarrel · 5 cross references · Modern-day map available
Meribah was the wilderness water-place near Kadesh where Moses and the people contended and where Moses failed to honor God rightly. It is important because it became a lasting symbol of dispute, testing, and the serious consequences of unbelief. First appears in Num 20:13.1
AI summary: Meribah is one of the Bible's most charged wilderness names because it condenses complaint, provision, and failure into a single place. The people quarrel for water, God provides, but Moses' response there leads to judgment on him as well. The Psalms later remember Meribah as a warning against hard-heartedness and strife before God. The cross references present Meribah as a desert place where divine provision and human rebellion meet with lasting consequence.1
Another fountain having a similar origin in the desert of Zin, near to Kadesh (Num. 27:14). The two places are mentioned together in Deut. 33:8. Some think the one place is called by the two names (Ps. 81:7). In smiting the rock at this place Moses showed the same impatience as the people (Num. 20:10-12). This took place near the close of the wanderings in the desert (Num. 20:1-24; Deut. 32:51). 3
AI-assisted summary prepared for ai-BIBLE and stored as page content, based on dictionary material, place metadata, and linked Bible cross references.
Alistair de Blacquiere-Clarkson, “ai-BIBLE Bible Names JSON Factsheet Aggregating Material from Smith’s Bible Dictionary & Hitcocks’s New and Complete Analysis of the Bible.” ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
M.G.Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary, ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
Robert Rouse, “Theographic Bible Information,” Theographic-Bible-Metadata, 2020, https://github.com/robertrouse/theographic-bible-metadata.