Mount Sinai

Exodus calls the mountain Sinai, “God’s mountain” and, at the call of Moses, Horeb (Exodus 19:18–20) (Exodus 3:1); Deuteronomy regularly calls it Horeb (Deuteronomy 5:2). Moses is called there, Israel receives the law there, and Elijah later flees to it (1 Kings 19:8). The Bible places it eleven days’ journey from Kadesh-barnea (Deuteronomy 1:2), and Paul speaks of “Mount Sinai in Arabia” (Galatians 4:25), but no passage says exactly where it stood.

The identification with Jebel Musa, a peak in the south of the Sinai peninsula, is a Christian tradition. It is described in detail by the pilgrim Egeria in the 380s AD. She climbed the mountain that the local monks showed her as Sinai and found a small church on its summit (Egeria, Itinerary 3.2–3.3). At the head of the valley below she was shown the burning bush, in a garden beside another church (Egeria, Itinerary 4.6–4.7). Her editors identify the peak she climbed as Jebel Musa and the place of the bush as the site where Saint Catherine’s Monastery now stands (introduction to the translation cited, pp. xviii–xix). No trace of an Israelite camp has been identified there or elsewhere, and other mountains in Sinai and in north-western Arabia have been proposed. The candidates are reviewed by James K. Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai (2005). The coordinates are those of Jebel Musa.