FEW geographical terms are more vaguely used by ancient writers than “Arabia,” and some have seen the explanation of St. Luke’s silence about the retirement of St. Paul, in the possibility that he may scarcely have gone beyond the immediate region of Damascus. Justin Martyr challenges Trypho to deny that Damascus “belongs and did belong to Arabia, though now it has been assigned to what is called Syrophœnicia.” Some shadow of probability may be, perhaps, given to the view that St. Paul did not travel far from Syria, because the Arabic translator of the Epistle to the Galatians renders the clause in Gal. 1:17, &c., “Immediately I went to El Belka;” and in Gal. 4:25, mistaking the meaning of the word συστοιχεῖ (which means “answers to,” “corresponds with,” “falls under the same row with”), he says that “Mount Sinai or El Belka is contiguous to Jerusalem.”1 But since Sinai is certainly not in the El Belka with which alone we have any acquaintance— namely, the region to the north and east of the Dead Sea— this curious version does not seem worthy of any further notice. Doubtless, in the then disturbed and fluctuating relations between the Roman Empire and the various Eastern principalities, St. Paul might have found himself far beyond the range of interruption by taking but a short journey from the neighbourhood of Damascus.
But is it not more probable that when St. Paul speaks of his visit to Arabia, he means Arabia in that Hebrew sense in which the word would be understood by the majority of his readers? We cannot, indeed, accept the proof of his familiarity with these regions which is derived from the reading of our Received text, “for this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia,” and from the supposition that Hagar was a local name for the mountain itself.2 For the true reading of that verse seems to be, “for Sinai is a mountain in Arabia;” and, as Dr. Lightfoot has shown, there is no adequate authority for the assertion—perhaps originally a mistake of St. Chrysostom—that Mount Sinai was ever called Hagar. Moreover, it is doubtful whether, even by way of allegoric paronomasia, St. Paul would have identified Hagar, “a wanderer,” with chadjar, “a stone;” especially since Philo, who also has an allegory about Hagar and Sarah, had already extracted a moral meaning from the correct derivation. But setting this ancient argument aside, nothing can seem more natural than that St. Paul, possibly already something of a fugitive, almost certainly a sufferer in health and mind, driven by an imperious instinct to seek for solitude, should have turned his lonely steps to a region where he would at once be safe, and unburdened, and alone with God.