Mount Nebo

Begin with the grave, because it is the one thing a reader most wants located and the one thing the text says cannot be located. There is no tomb of Moses on this ridge or anywhere else, and there never has been one. Deuteronomy 34:6 states it about itself: no one to this day knows the location of his grave. The most obvious thing archaeology could look for here is the thing Scripture says is not there to be found. Two early readings of why the grave was hidden are quoted further down this page. Aphrahat the Persian Sage, writing about 345, gives two reasons: that his enemies could not throw his bones out of the tomb, and that his own people could not make the tomb a place of worship. Adam Clarke, in 1832, gives the second reason in almost the same words and adds that almost all the gods of antiquity were deified men. Scripture supplies four locating facts and no more. The mountain belongs to the Abarim range. It stands in the land of Moab, across from Jericho. Its head is called Pisgah, and Pisgah has slopes running down toward the Arabah and the Salt Sea. From it a person sees Gilead in the north, the Western Sea, the Negev, and the Jericho basin as far as Zoar. Everything past those four points is identification rather than text. Measured from this site’s own stored coordinates, the traditional site lies about nineteen miles from Jericho and about thirty-one miles from Jerusalem. The ridge that carries the tradition has two heads, and the literature names both. Ras Siyagha is the western spur, the point nearest the valley, with the widest view down over the basin, and it holds the ruin of the memorial church. The coordinate on this site’s own row for Mount Nebo falls there. Khirbet el-Mukhayyat lies behind it to the southeast and holds the remains of a settlement, and it is the point most often identified with the Moabite town of Nebo. Some readers make Mukhayyat the summit of Deuteronomy 34 and Siyagha the viewpoint, and others read it the other way round. Neither identification follows from the four facts the text gives, and this page names both heads and settles nothing. Ras Siyagha stands about seven hundred ten meters above sea level. Khirbet el-Mukhayyat, though it sits further from the valley, is the higher of the two, at about seven hundred ninety meters. No distance between the two heads could be confirmed to the precision this page requires, so none is printed. The memorial church is a tradition with a long history and it is presented as one. A church built to remember the death of Moses stood on the western head and was rebuilt and enlarged over centuries into a monastic and pilgrimage complex, and its floors carry mosaic pavements. The Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land holds the site, and the Franciscan archaeologists Sylvester Saller and Michele Piccirillo excavated and published it. Egeria, a pilgrim who visited about 383 to 384, already found a small church standing on the summit; she described the view from its door reaching to the mouth of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and across the river to Livias and Jericho, with most of the land of promise in sight. Her witness puts a church on this ridge by the late fourth century, before any of the excavated masonry can be dated on its own. Saller directed the first excavation, three seasons from 1933 to 1937, uncovering the basilica and its monastery on Ras Siyagha and three further mosaic churches at Khirbet el-Mukhayyat, and published the find in 1941 as The Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo. Michele Piccirillo continued the Franciscan work decades later and uncovered the basilica's Diakonikon-Baptistery mosaic in 1976. One thing marks this tradition off from the grotto at Bethlehem or the house of Peter at Capernaum: the tradition on this ridge never claimed to hold a grave, because Scripture had already said no one knows where the grave is. The Mesha Stele, the Moabite victory inscription of about 840 BC now in the Louvre, names Nebo. That puts the place inside a ninth-century royal inscription written independently of the Bible. The inscription is a king’s own account of his own victory and is read as such rather than as neutral corroboration. In a standard scholarly translation, lines fourteen through eighteen read: "Chemosh said to me, Go, take Nebo from Israel. I went in the night and fought against it from the break of dawn until noon. I took it and killed everyone in it, seven thousand men, boys, women, and pregnant women, because I had devoted it to Ashtar-Chemosh. And I took from there the hearth-altars of Yahweh and dragged them before the face of Chemosh." It is an enemy king's own war report, and it names Israel's God by His own name in a hostile mouth, which is why this page prints it rather than paraphrasing around it. Albert Barnes places the town of Nebo a few miles from Heshbon among the Reubenite settlements, and Jerome about 420 reports the idol Chemosh consecrated there under a second name. Each of those is the commentator’s own claim rather than a measured modern datum. This site’s lexicon carries one head-word covering the Babylonian deity, the mountain in Moab and the settlement. Whether the mountain took its name from the deity, or the resemblance is accidental, is not settled by anything here, and this page asserts no derivation. The gloss "that which fructifies" is Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s own. What is not disputed is short. Moses died outside the land, east of the Jordan, before the crossing. The place of his grave was unknown when Deuteronomy 34 was written and has never been identified since. Israel mourned him thirty days on the plains of Moab. A ridge on the western edge of the Moabite plateau has carried the memory of that death in Christian tradition for many centuries. And Nebo names a Moabite town and a Babylonian god as well as this mountain. No image on this site shows Moses on the summit, the sight of the land, the death or the burial, and no unrelated engraving is dressed up to stand in for them.