David Faiman
Too Many Theories—Why?
There are many theories about where the Biblical Mt. Sinai was located. Among scholarly books on the subject I would draw attention to three which arrive at extremely different conclusions: Davies (1979), who concludes that it is in the south of the Sinai peninsula, at the traditional location of Jebel Musa; Har-El (1983), who locates it in the northwest of the peninsula at Jebel Sin Bishr, and Anati (1986), who identifies it with Har Karkom in the Negev, just beyond the eastern edge of the peninsula. There are also many other candidate peaks scattered throughout the Sinai peninsula, but these three represent the extremes of this triangular land mass. Furthermore, “extreme” as these conclusions might seem relative to one another, they are conservative compared to other scholars who have located the mountain of the theophany entirely outside of the Sinai peninsula—in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even beyond.
In order to understand how it is possible for large numbers of serious scholars to reach totally different conclusions about what appears to be such a basic element of our Biblical heritage, it is necessary to appreciate two facts.
First, the Bible is not a geography book. Rather, it is a theological treatise, some of whose message happens to be set within a geographical framework and one, moreover, which was taken as being self-evident to the book’s ancient readers. To this end, the narrative concerning the Exodus of the ancient Israelites from Egypt, their arrival at Mt. Sinai and their subsequent peregrinations until their ultimate entry to the Promised Land—i.e. everything of a merely geographical interest—is told with scant detail, and with frequent interruptions for the more basic theological message. Furthermore, the geographical details are often repetitive and, in many cases, seemingly contradictory. (For example, Numbers 20:28 and 33:38 tell us that Moses’ brother, Aaron, died on Mt. Hor, whereas Deuteronomy 10:6 says it happened at Moserah.)
Second, presumably because of the seeming contradictions in the geographic narrative, many scholars permit themselves the freedom to be selective as to which Biblical verses they consider to be the “important” ones. Unfortunately, since there is no universal agreement about which verses are the most relevant, different choices will lead to different conclusions, and this could be the reason why there are so many theories about the location of Mt. Sinai.
A Self-Consistent Approach
Some years ago, I tried a different approach. Not being a Biblical scholar I did not feel that I could safely allow myself to ignore any verses whatsoever in the Bible. Instead I asked myself the question: “Is it possible to find a geographical route which is consistent with everything the Bible has to say about the matter?” To do so it was necessary to take on trust that the author (or, in modern scholarly terminology, the last redactor) of the Biblical text had a clear geographic picture in his mind and that, for reasons best known to himself, he chose sometimes to refer to a single place by more than one name.
In fact, this multiple naming scheme is so essential to my approach that I must justify it with a few examples.
The most familiar example is, of course, Mt. Sinai, which in some places is referred to as Horeb and in others as the mountain of God. Another quite well-known example is Kadesh-Barnea, which is also referred to, simply, as “Kadesh” (Nm 20:1 et seq.), but also as “Ein-Mishpat” (Gn 14:7), “the wilderness of Zin” (Ex 33:36) and several other names that I need not mention here. Once one accepts, via these clear examples, that the Bible does refer to places by a multiplicity of names then we may return to the Mt. Hor/Moserah “puzzle,” cited above as a seeming contradiction, and dismiss it as yet another example of a place with more than one name.
These then were my self-imposed ground rules: I was looking for a route of the ancient Exodus that is consistent with everything the Bible says or implies about it. I was not allowed to reject any verses whatsoever. Instead, if I encountered a seeming contradiction, either I had to reconcile it in a justifiable (i.e. not arbitrary) manner, e.g. by invoking a multiplicity of names if these could be justified. Otherwise, my route would be wrong and I would have to start with a new one. I believe that I was able to find a totally consistent route but since, in the present article, my purpose is merely to identify the location of Mt. Sinai, I shall restrict myself to showing, via this technique, how amazingly explicit the Bible is about this mountain’s whereabouts. I naturally use the original Hebrew Bible for my studies, but in the present article
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I have chosen to use the King James Version which preserves something of the antiquity of these magnificent texts. Where necessary, an explanation of a Hebrew term will be added for purposes of clarification.
The Mt. Sinai Example
If one is in a hurry, one need look no further than the book of Exodus in order to obtain an almost perfect set of map coordinates for Mt. Sinai. Exodus 3:1–2 says:
Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
Verse 1 is extremely significant as it tells us that “the mountain of God” and “Horeb” are one and the same, or, at the very least, that the mountain of God is situated at a place called Horeb.
The next important verses in our quest are Exodus 3:11–12:
And Moses said unto God, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?” And He said, “Certainly I will be with thee; and this shall be a token unto thee, that I have sent thee: When thou hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain.”
The significance of v. 12 lies in the fact that it establishes that the mountain of God is no mere mountain but the one on which the Ten Commandments would later be given, i.e. Mt. Sinai.
Yet rich as this harvest already is—and the book of Exodus has scarcely begun—we are not yet finished with chapter 3, for verse 18 provides the first piece of quantitative information about where the mountain of God is located:
And they shall hearken to thy voice: and thou shalt come, thou and the elders of Israel, unto the king of Egypt, and ye shall say unto him, “The Lord God of the Hebrews hath met with us: and now let us go, we beseech thee, three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.”
Now we need a second coordinate and, remarkably, this is provided in chapter 4. The reader will recall that Moses had been forced to flee to the land of Midian after killing an Egyptian. Accordingly, Exodus 4:19 tells us, “And the Lord said unto Moses in Midian, ‘Go, return into Egypt: for all the men are dead which sought thy life’.”
Meanwhile, back in Egypt, according to verse 27 of this same chapter:
And the Lord said to Aaron, “Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.” And he went, and met him in the mountain of God, and kissed him.
So there we have it. As complete a set of map coordinates as one could wish, without a map: Mt. Sinai is situated on the road from Egypt to Midian, three days journey from the former. Moreover, the Bible tells us all of this before the Hebrews have even left Egypt!
Har-El (1983) has given a detailed discussion of the various routes in the Sinai peninsula—there not being very many in this mountainous terrain—and presents persuasive evidence that the route in question is the Darb el Haj (Arabic: way of the pilgrimage), which goes from Suez to Aqaba on modern maps.
When I first realized how explicit the Bible is on this subject I consulted a contour map of Sinai and quickly found two interesting candidates of my own: Jebel Jiddi, a towering peak which overlooks the Mitla pass, and Ras al Jundi, a table mountain upon which there is an ancient castle with a commanding view over the Wadi Sudr road and not far from where the latter meets the Darb el Haj. I wondered why Har-El had chosen the seemingly insignificant peak, Jebel Sin Bishr, which seemed to me considerably off the main road. I therefore went to see Dr. Har-El about the matter. He knitted up his wizened eyes and said:
Young man: From your question, it is clear to me that you have never been a shepherd! If you had been, you would realize that there is not enough water or pasture in the vicinity of Ras al Jundi to have sustained the Israelites for the year, which according to the Bible, they encamped there.
And when I asked Har-El why Aaron the priest would have chosen the seemingly indirect path via Jebel Sin Bishr rather than to take the more direct road over the Mitla pass, the professor of geography patiently explained that the pass is fine for modern motorized vehicles but in Biblical times the main route would have arced southward via the easier Wadi Sudr road and hence passed directly by the foot of Jebel Sin Bishr.
Naturally, I bow to Har-El’s superior wisdom in this matter. In fact, on many occasions in the course of my researching this fascinating subject, I have sought the advice of Bedouin friends and other people with first-hand knowledge of the terrain. So if Menashe Har-El has concluded that Jebel Sin Bishr is the most probable Mt. Sinai candidate in that region, then I should certainly not wish to disagree. However, it is important to emphasize that the Bible only points to the general area of Jebel Sin Bishr: Any other mountain in that vicinity would be a serious candidate of Mt. Sinai. However, no mountain that has been suggested by any other scholar falls within this region, hence, none fits the Biblical description anywhere near as accurately as Jebel Sin Bishr.
“But what about all those other confusing Biblical references,” I am sure you are wondering. Well, I believe that I have checked them all out and found no inconsistencies with what we have learned from Exodus 2 and 4. If you want to see whether or not you agree with me you will have to read my previous articles (Faiman 1986; 1989; 1994) since space does not permit me to enter into all of the details here. I will, however, end with an explanation of perhaps the most puzzling
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feature of what the Bible tells us about Mt. Sinai’s whereabouts.
Map of the route of the Exodus according to Har-EL (adapted from Har-El 1983: 357).
Twenty Camps in Eleven Days?
Deuteronomy 1:2 tells us:
There are eleven days’ journey from Horeb by the way of mount Seir unto Kadesh-Barnea.
And this fits nicely with the picture we discovered above from the book of Exodus, as it would require an average rate of progress of approximately 15 km (9 mi) a day, since, as we can also infer from the Bible, using this technique (Faiman 1986), Kadesh-Barnea is the relatively fertile region of the Sinai peninsula in and around Quseima.
However, by way of contrast, Numbers 33 presents an enormous list of stations, 20 of which are named between Mt. Sinai and Kadesh-Barnea. Specifically, verses 16–36, in suitably abridged form, tell us:
And they removed from the desert of Sinai and pitched at Kibroth-Hattaavah … Hazeroth … Rithmah … Rimmon-Parez … Libnah … Rissah … Kehelathah … mount Shafer … Haradah … Makheloth … Tahath … Tarah … Mithcah … Hashmonah … Moseroth … Bene-Jaakan … Hor-Hagidgad … Jotbathah … Ebronah … Ezion-Gaber … the wilderness of Zin which is Kadesh.
No fewer than 20 camps between Sinai and Kadesh! How are we to understand this?
The answer, I believe, is that the 11-day march was actually from the Rithmah to Hashmonah section of the list (indicated in bold print). The name Rithmah, as Har-El (1983) has pointed out, is philologically related to modern Ein Retama, a spring near Jebel Sin Bishr, and I would identify Hashmonah, also because of a similarity in sound, with modern Quseima in the Kadesh-Barnea region (Faiman 1994).
An interesting corollary of these two identifications is that Mount Shafer may then be identified with Ras Abu Qurun. The later is not only the highest peak in northern Sinai but it contains a water source known as Bir Abu Qurun. Both the mountain and the well may be philologically related to the Biblical name Mount Shafer: Qurun, which means “horns” in Arabic, could be a translation of the Hebrew “shofarot,” singular “shofar” = “shafer” in the Bible’s vowelless Hebrew (Faiman 1994).
But what of the Desert-of-Sinai to Rithmah part of the list? Here, I have argued (Faiman 1994) that the rebellious Israelites first tried to return to Egypt rather than, after having spent a comfortable year encamped at Mt. Sinai, wanting to undertake the arduous 11-day march through that “great and terrible wilderness,” as Deuteronomy 1:19 calls it. Only after God’s punishment by fire at Taberah (Nm 11:1), followed by the deadly after-effects of over-indulgence in quail flesh at Kibroth-Hattaavah (Nm 11:34), and, finally, Miriam’s leprosy at Hazeroth (Nm 12:10), was Moses able to turn the Israelites around and get them back to Rithmah which, as already indicated, is in the vicinity of Mt. Sinai.
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Jebel Sin Bishr, the westernmost of the candidates for Mt. Sinai, located ca. 30 mi southeast of the northern end of the gulf of Suez. As author David Faiman points out, the identification is based on the assumption that Mt. Sinai was a three-day journey from Egypt.
And the Hashmonah to wilderness-of-Zin part of the list? That section of the route took the Israelites another 38 years. But that is another story.
Conclusions
We have seen how, by accepting the direct evidence of the Bible that certain places have several names, one can obtain an accurate location for Mt. Sinai using only Exodus 2 and 4. Specifically, Mt. Sinai must have been at or near Jebel Sin Bishr, the mountain first suggested as the mountain of God by Har-El (1983). Furthermore, by extending this technique to the other books of the Bible one can then discover that all Biblical references to Mt. Sinai are geographically consistent. Indeed, in many cases, the technique even enables one, as it were, to “read between the lines.” This consistency indicates that the author or last redactor of the Old Testament had a clear picture in his mind of where Mt. Sinai was and where precisely the route of the Exodus ran. If we have faith in the Bible’s integrity then we too can unfold many of its secrets.
Bibliography
Anati, E.
1986 The Mountain of God. New York: Rizzoli.
Davies, G.I.
1979 The Way of the Wilderness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Faiman, D.
1986 The Route of the Exodus. Dor-le-Dor 14: 209–19
1989 Where Was the Mountain of God? Dor-le-Dor 17: 211–21.
1994 From Horeb to Kadesh in Eleven Days. The Jewish Bible Quarterly 22: 91–102.
Har-El, M.
1983 The Sinai Journeys: The Route of the Exodus San Diego: Ridgefield.