Mount Sinai (Horeb)

Start with what is not in dispute. There is a granite massif in the southern Sinai peninsula. There is a monastery at the foot of one of its peaks that has been lived in continuously since the sixth century AD. There is a Christian pilgrim tradition attaching that peak to Exodus 19 that is attested by the late fourth century. And there is no inscription, no excavated altar and no artefact at any candidate site that names the mountain of the covenant. Every identification on offer is an argument from geography, from route, from tradition, or from some mix of the three. The traditional site is Jebel Musa, the mountain of Moses, about 2,285 m, with Saint Catherine's Monastery at its northeastern foot at about 1,570 m. Its case is the age of the tradition, and the tradition is genuinely old. Egeria climbed it around AD 381 to 384 and wrote about it, Justinian fortified the church there between about AD 548 and 565, and the site went on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2002. That is a tradition with an early witness, named and dated, and it is not the same thing as proof. Five other proposals are argued. Edward Robinson put the mountain at Ras Safsafeh in Biblical Researches in Palestine (1841), the northwestern peak of the same massif, on the ground that Exodus 19:17 needs a plain big enough for a nation to stand in and see the mountain, and the plain of er-Raha is such a place while the valleys under Jebel Musa's summit are not. Albert Barnes carried that reading into his Notes, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown set out both peaks and declined to choose. Karl Richard Lepsius argued for Jebel Serbal in the 1840s, about 2,070 m and roughly 30 km northwest, where the early monastic settlement clustered in the Wadi Feiran oasis, though Serbal has no plain at its base for an assembly. Menashe Har-El argued for Jebel Sin Bishar, about 620 m in western Sinai, in The Sinai Journeys (1983), mainly on the route and the day counts. Emmanuel Anati proposed Har Karkom in the Negev, about 847 m, in Har Karkom (1986), on a heavy concentration of rock art, cultic platforms and standing stones; the objection, which Anati in part conceded, is that the cultic material clusters in the third millennium BC and earlier, which is far too early for any proposed Exodus date. The sixth proposal is Jebel al-Lawz in northwestern Saudi Arabia, about 2,580 m. Charles Beke argued for a mountain east of Aqaba in the 1870s, and the modern popular form comes from Ron Wyatt in the 1980s and from Robert Cornuke and Larry Williams, who published In Search of the Mountain of God in 2000. The case rests on Galatians 4:25 saying Sinai is in Arabia, on Midian lying east of the Gulf of Aqaba, on Paul's own retreat into Arabia, and on features reported at the site including a blackened summit, a large split rock and a stone enclosure with cattle carvings. James Hoffmeier answered it at length in Ancient Israel in Sinai (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Gordon Franz answered the popular version in Bible and Spade in 2000. Their reply has three parts: Arabia in Greek and Roman usage was wide, and the Roman province of Arabia Petraea took in the Sinai peninsula and the Negev, so the word does not by itself move the mountain; Midianites were tent-dwelling caravaneers whose range is attested well west of Aqaba; and the crossing points and day counts fit a route inside the peninsula better than one that puts a whole nation across the Gulf of Aqaba in the first days out of Egypt. Two things belong beside that exchange so a reader knows what he is weighing. The Arabian case in its popular form is largely made by people outside the field and outside peer publication, and Associates for Biblical Research, which published Franz, is a confessional body. Neither fact settles anything. The evidence does the work, and here it does not close the question. The harder problem is not which peak but the absence of any camp at all. The peninsula was surveyed intensively after 1967, notably by Eliezer Oren in the north and Itzhaq Beit-Arieh in the south. There is no Late Bronze Age encampment at Jebel Musa or at any other candidate site, no cemetery for a nation that spent about eleven months in one place, and nothing at Kadesh-barnea, Tell el-Qudeirat, earlier than roughly the tenth century BC. What the surveys did find is a chain of Egyptian forts and way stations along the northern coastal road that Egyptian texts call the Ways of Horus. Hoffmeier's answer has two halves. Tent-dwelling pastoralists on the move leave almost nothing a survey can recover or date, and the same surveys recover very little from any known nomadic population of that period, so the silence is not specific to Israel. And the northern forts fit the text rather than embarrassing it, because Exodus 13:17 says God deliberately did not lead the people by the way of the land of the Philistines, which is that fortified road. His wider argument for the tradition is linguistic: the Egyptian place names in Exodus and the Egyptian personal names among the Levites, Moses, Merari, Hophni, Phinehas and Assir among them, which he reads as marks of a tradition formed in Egypt. Many archaeologists take the same silence, with the Kadesh-barnea gap, as evidence that the wilderness itinerary reached its present form long after the events it describes. That reading is named here with its ground. The evidence is thin in both directions and this page does not pretend either side has closed it. Two Egyptian sites in the region carry weight of a different kind. At Serabit el-Khadim in west-central Sinai, an Egyptian turquoise mining settlement with a temple of Hathor, Flinders Petrie excavated in the 1904 to 1905 season and found short inscriptions in a script that was neither hieroglyphic nor cuneiform. Alan Gardiner read a recurring group in 1916 as a phrase meaning to the Lady, and the script has been called Proto-Sinaitic since. It is the earliest alphabetic writing known, usually dated between about 1900 and 1500 BC, and Orly Goldwasser has argued since the 1990s that Canaanite workers in these mines invented it because they could not read Egyptian but could see that a picture might stand for a sound. That is not proof of anything about Moses. It answers a fair question. Semitic-speaking workers were writing alphabetically in the Sinai mines centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus, which makes Exodus 24:4, where Moses writes down all the words of the LORD, an ordinary sentence rather than an anachronism. Timna sits in the Arabah about 30 km north of the Gulf of Aqaba, not in the Sinai peninsula, and it belongs here as background rather than as a dig at the mountain. Beno Rothenberg directed the Arabah Expedition there from 1959 at copper mines worked by Egypt in the New Kingdom, where a Hathor shrine was later reused, on the excavators' reading, as a Midianite tent shrine holding a small copper serpent. Erez Ben-Yosef's radiocarbon programme from 2013 onward redated much of the smelting to the eleventh through ninth centuries BC, later than Rothenberg had it. The tent shrine is the closest excavated parallel to a portable desert sanctuary of the kind Exodus 25 to 40 describes. The most consequential thing ever carried off this mountain, after the tablets, is a book. Tischendorf took 43 leaves of a fourth-century Greek Bible from Saint Catherine's in 1844, returned empty-handed in 1853, and in 1859, under Russian patronage, was given the main body, which reached Saint Petersburg and then the British Museum in 1933. Further leaves were found at the monastery in 1975. Codex Sinaiticus is one of the two oldest surviving near-complete Greek Bibles, and the monastery has disputed the terms of that transfer ever since. Both facts stand here, and this page does not rule on the dispute. One question about the mountain is textual rather than archaeological. Exodus uses Sinai for the mountain of the covenant but says Horeb at 3:1, 17:6 and 33:6. Deuteronomy uses Horeb throughout, though its closing poem says the LORD came from Sinai. Kings, Chronicles, Malachi and Psalm 106 say Horeb; Judges 5, Psalm 68, Nehemiah 9 and the New Testament say Sinai. Three readings are held. The oldest and most common is one mountain under two names, whether two summits of one mountain, as John Wesley put it, or Horeb the massif and Sinai the peak, which is how Strong's glosses the Hebrew. The standard source-critical reading assigns the two names to different Pentateuchal sources, so the doubling reflects transmission rather than topography; that position is named here without being adopted, and this site holds to Mosaic authorship. A minority reading takes them as two different places, usually on the strength of Exodus 17:6, where the rock is at Horeb while the camp is at Rephidim. What the narrative itself does is treat them as one place. Moses meets God at Horeb in Exodus 3:1 and is told he will bring the people back to this mountain, which Exodus 19 then calls Sinai.