Mount Hor

Mount Hor is unusual among the mountains of the Bible. The argument about where it stands runs inside Scripture, over what a mountain "on the outskirts of the land of Edom" can mean, and each side reaches for the ground afterward. The ground has not answered either of them. The traditional site is Jebel Harun, the mountain of the prophet Aaron, in the Edomite mountains on the east side of the Arabah, a few kilometres southwest of the centre of Petra in southern Jordan. It is twin-peaked, which is the feature every nineteenth-century traveller remarked on. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown call it "the most striking and lofty elevation in the Seir range" and add that "It is conspicuous by its double top." This site's own coordinate for Mount Hor, taken from OpenBible.info's geocoding, is a pin on that mountain. The map therefore already carries the traditional identification, and this page says so rather than presenting the pin as neutral ground. The identification is not modern. Josephus, writing at the end of the first century AD, places Aaron's death at the site the Arabians called Petra. In William Whiston's translation of the Antiquities of the Jews, Book 4, chapter 4, section 7, the place is encompassed with high mountains, Aaron goes up one of them in the sight of the whole army, puts off the priestly garments, gives them to Eleazar, and dies while the multitude looks on at the age of 123, which is Numbers 33:39 exactly. Every later tradition about this mountain stands downstream of him. The strongest single piece of evidence is a document rather than a ruin. A sixth-century archive was found in 1993 in the Byzantine Church at Petra and published by the American Center of Oriental Research with teams from the University of Helsinki and the University of Michigan. One document, dated AD 573, calls the place "the House of our Lord the Saint High-Priest Aaron." It is an administrative text written by people living at Petra, naming the monastery on this mountain by Aaron's own priestly title. Zbigniew T. Fiema published the Byzantine monastic and pilgrimage centre of St Aaron near Petra in 2002, and Paivi Miettunen studied the veneration itself in a University of Helsinki thesis of 2004. The veneration changed hands and never stopped. A small white domed building stands on one of the two summits and is called the tomb of Aaron. It is a Mamluk shrine of the early fourteenth century, built on Byzantine remains, so the Christian and the Islamic traditions on this mountain are one continuous line of veneration rather than two rival claims. Aaron is Harun in Arabic and a prophet in Islam, and the mountain carries his name in that form. From the middle of the nineteenth century a line of scholars rejected the Petra identification, and their reason came out of the text rather than out of the ground. Numbers 20:23 puts Mount Hor near the border of the land of Edom, Numbers 33:37 puts it on the outskirts of the land of Edom, and Numbers 20:21 has just reported that Edom turned out an army to keep Israel out. Jebel Harun does not sit on the outskirts of Edom. It sits inside the Edomite mountains, beside Edom's principal site. On that reading, a camp of the whole congregation there would mean Israel walked into the country it had just been barred from. The alternative most often proposed is Jebel Madara, a peak about fifteen miles northwest of Ain Kadis, close to Kadesh and on the northwestern edge of Edomite territory rather than inside it. Edward Wilton argued for it in The Negeb in 1863, Henry Clay Trumbull in Kadesh-Barnea after his expedition of 1881, and Frants Buhl in Die Geschichte der Edomiter in 1893. Bruno Baentsch and G. B. Gray followed in their commentaries. Those who keep Jebel Harun answer that the border language in Numbers is loose, that Israel could reach the mountain's western flank up the Arabah without entering the settled country Edom was defending, and that the tradition here is early, documented and unbroken. Those who prefer Jebel Madara answer that an early tradition is still a tradition, that Josephus was reading the same text rather than reporting independent knowledge, and that no camp material has been identified at either site. The commentators were not united either, which shows a reader that the uncertainty is old rather than new. Albert Barnes and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown both give Jebel Harun. Barnes also fixed the distance from Kadesh, "about 10 miles north of the place in which Mount Hor abuts on that valley", which is his figure resting on his own identification of Kadesh with Ain-el-Weibeh, itself a disputed nineteenth-century proposal rather than a measurement. Adam Clarke gives Jebel Harun on Numbers 33:37 and, on the verse immediately before it, says Israel turned aside to a Mount Hor the Arabs called Accaba, which is a different place. What nobody disputes is that Aaron died before Israel entered the land and that Eleazar succeeded him, that a mountain by Petra has carried his name for many centuries, and that no physical trace of an Israelite encampment has been identified at Jebel Harun, at Jebel Madara, or anywhere else proposed. This page prints the positions and stops.