(1.61) We have now explained, then, what Charran is, and why the man who left the well of the oath came there. We must now consider the third point, which comes next: what the place is to which this man came; for it is said, "He met him in the place." (1.62) Place is considered in three ways: firstly, as a situation filled by a body; secondly, as a divine word which God himself has filled wholly and entirely with incorporeal powers; for the scripture says, "I have seen the place in which the God of Israel stood," the only place in which he permitted his prophet to offer sacrifice to him, forbidding him to do so anywhere else. For he is ordered to go up into the place which the Lord God shall choose, and there to sacrifice burnt offerings and sacrifices for salvation, and also to bring other victims without spot. (1.63) According to the third signification, God himself is called a place, because he surrounds the universe and is himself surrounded by nothing whatever,⁠a because he is the refuge of all people, and because he is his own district, containing himself and resembling himself alone. (1.64) I am not a place, but I am in a place, and so is every existing being. So what is surrounded differs from what surrounds it; but the Deity, being surrounded by nothing, is necessarily itself its own place. And there is evidence for my view of the matter in the following sacred oracle about Abraham: "He came to the place of which the Lord God had told him: and having looked up with his eyes, he saw the place far off." (1.65) Tell me, then, did the one who had come to the place see it far off? Or perhaps it is a single expression used for two different things, one of which is the divine word, and the other, God, who existed before the world. (1.66) But the one guided by wisdom comes to the first place, having found that the main part and end of propitiation is the divine word, and whoever is fixed in it does not yet rise high enough to penetrate to the essence of God, but sees him far off; or rather, he cannot even behold him far off, and discerns only this fact, that God is at a distance from every creature, and that any comprehension of him is far removed from all human intellect. (1.67) Perhaps, however, the historian, in this allegorical expression, does not mean the Cause of all things by the word "place,"; but the idea he intends to convey may be something like this: --he came to the place, and looking up with his eyes he saw the very place to which he had come, which was a very long way from the God who may not be named or spoken of, and who is in every way incomprehensible.