Moses
called mount Sinai the Mountain of God.
Mount
Sinai
(Hebrew: הַר סִינַי, Har Sinai) is the mountain at which
the Ten Commandments were given to Moses by God, and is one of the most
significant of the Stations of the Exodus.[1] In the Book of Deuteronomy, these
events are described as having transpired at Mount Horeb. "Sinai" and
"Horeb" are generally considered to refer to the same place by
scholars.[2]
The
location of the Mount Sinai described in the Bible remains disputed. The high
point of the dispute was in the mid-nineteenth century.[3] Hebrew Bible texts
describe the theophany at Mount Sinai in terms which a minority of scholars,
following Charles Beke (1873), have suggested may literally describe the
mountain as a volcano.[4]
The
biblical Mount Sinai is one of the most important sacred places in the Jewish,
Christian and Islamic[5][6] religions.
Wikipedia
__________
Where
is Mt. Sinai? At a 2013 colloquium in Israel, an international group of
scholars debated the question. At the center of the debate was Har Karkom, a
mountain ridge in the Negev Desert that archaeologist Emmanuel Anati believes
to be the Biblical Mt. Sinai. Or could Mt. Sinai be in Saudia Arabia, where Moses
was thought to have fled after escaping Egypt? In “Where Is Mount Sinai?
The Case for Har Karkom and the Case for Saudia Arabia” in the
March/April 2014 issue of BAR, Hershel Shanks examines these candidates.
Emmanuel
Anati stands before Har Karkom, a ridge in the Negev that he believes inspired
the Biblical Mt. Sinai. Photo: Hershel Shanks.
Biblical
Mt. Sinai has never been identified archaeologically with any scholarly
consensus, though several sites have been considered. According to Shanks, none
of the scholars who attended the colloquium in Israel discussed the traditional
location of Mt. Sinai—the mountain called Jebel Musa looming over St.
Catherine’s Monastery in the southern Sinai. Jebel Musa’s identification as Mt.
Sinai developed in the early Byzantine period with the spread of monasticism
into the Sinai desert. Curiously, no Exodus-related archaeological remains
have been recovered in the Sinai Peninsula—through which the Israelites must
have traveled out of Egypt—dating to the traditional period of the Exodus,
around 1200 B.C.E