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Quarantana

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In the mountainous wilderness between Jerusalem and Jericho, in which, according to tradition, our Lord's temptation took place, there is a very high mountain, one of the highest in Judaea, called Quarantana (by the Arabs Kuruntul), in allusion to the forty days' fasting of Jesus, and which is supposed to be the mount alluded to in Matthew 4:8 (see Thomson, Land and Book, 2, 450; Wilson, Bible Lands, 2, 12); but by some it is identified with the Rock of Rimmon, where the defeated Benjamites took refuge (Judges 20:47). "The mountain rises precipitously, an almost perpendicular wall of rock, twelve or fifteen hundred feet above the plain, crowned with a chapel on its highest point. The eastern front is full of grots and caverns, where hermits are said once to have dwelt in great numbers. At the present day, some three or four Abyssinians are said to come hither annually to pass the time of Lent upon the mountain, living only upon herbs. There is nothing else remarkable about this naked cliff to distinguish it from the other similar ones along the Ghor and the Dead Sea farther south. The tradition which regards the mountain as the place of our Lord's temptation, as well as the name Quarantana, appears not to be older than the age of the Crusades" (Robinson, Bib. Res. ii, 303).