Desert of Paran

Located (we say) beyond Arabia on the south, three days journey to the east of Aila (in the desert Pharan) where Scripture affirms Ismael dwelled, whence the Ishmaelites.

[5] The Arab geographer Al-Maqdisi (d. 991) mentioned in his book that the Red Sea branches into two "at the extremity of al-Hijaz at a place called Faran".

[6] The association of Paran in Genesis 21:21 with Ishmael and the Ishmaelites is affirmed by the Muslim geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi (d. 1229) who writes "Faran, an arabized Hebrew word, one of the names of Mecca mentioned in the Torah.

Haggai Mazuz asserts that Muslim polemicists' (like the Jewish convert Samawʾal al-Maghribī, 1125–1175 CE) appropriation of Deut.

[14] in 1989, Professor Haseeb Shehada, in his translation of the Samaritan Torah, suggested an identification of the wilderness of Paran with the desert of Western Arabia, which is known today as the Hijaz.

[15] More recently, Uzi Avner has argued that the biblical Desert of Paran was located in the southern mountain region of the Sinai Peninsula, encompassing the Wadi Feiran.

Avner argues that inscriptions from the Nabatean period bearing the first or surname "Paran" indicate that the local population has preserved the biblical geographical name of this area for centuries.