Genesis 12:6

6. Passed through the land Descending, probably, by way of Damascus as we find afterwards that the steward of his house is a native of that city thence southward and along the valley of the Jabbok by the route afterwards followed by Jacob, and across the Jordan unto the place of Sichem, or Shechem, the region in which afterwards, and in the writer’s time, the town of Shechem was situated. (Neapolis and Nablus in subsequent time.) Yet the name, meaning shoulder, was probably given the locality from its being the water shed between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and from the place passed to the man Shechem, son of Hamor. The particular spot of Abram’s halt was the oak or oak grove (not plain) of Moreh, the name of its owner or planter. The town of Shechem, which we find here in the time of Jacob, lay in a beautiful sequestered valley between Mount Ebal on the north and Gerizim on the south. These mountains are in the narrowest place only sixty rods apart, and rise in bold bluffs to the height of about one thousand feet. Groves of evergreen oak and terebinth, as well as luxuriant orchards of orange and citron, vocal with birds and running waters, are a delightful feature of the valley of Nablus to-day. In this lovely valley, beneath and between these bold crags, which more than four centuries afterwards echoed with the solemn blessings and cursings of his descendants as they covenanted with God at their entrance into the land of promise here, near the spot where, more than nineteen centuries afterwards, Jesus sat on the well of Jacob and made “this mountain” a stepping-stone to the spiritual kingdom in which men shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth it was fit that here the father of the chosen people should first pitch his tent and build his altar. But the oak grove under which he encamped belonged to Moreh the Canaanite. The land whose very earth and air were to be saturated with his name was the possession of idolatrous strangers, the Canaanite was ( even) then in the land, as he was when this narrative was written. This remark seems to have been added to show why it was impossible at that time for Abram to take possession. This handful of pilgrims, when they arrived in the vale of Shechem, found a widely-spread nation already in possession of the land of promise.