Where Is Mount Sinai?

Perhaps the Mount Sinai of the Bible is not the traditional site located in Egypt, but another mountain in modern Saudi Arabia, whose volcanic nature would help explain the miracles described in Exodus.

Last month it was reported that the ancient monastery of St Catherine at Mt Sinai is to be nationalized by the Egyptian government. The site was first occupied by Egyptian monks in the fourth century—the traditions asserting that the first chapel was built there by St Helena.

In the sixth century, the present complex was constructed by the Emperor Justinian and named after St Catherine of Alexandria. The monastery is famous not only for preserving her skull, but also for its collection of ancient icons and its library with thousands of priceless volumes including one of the oldest Bibles Codex Sinaiticus. The community today comprises about twenty five Greek Orthodox monks who maintain the monastic life, preserve the treasures and nurture the ancient bush claimed to be a descendent of Moses’ burning bush.

Mt Sinai is also known as Mount Horeb and Moses was not the only Old Testament hero to experience a theophany there. He may have experienced the Lord in thunder, lightning, earthquake wind and fire, but some five hundred years later the prophet Elijah—fleeing from the wrath of the wicked Queen Jezebel—also took refuge at the Holy Mountain. For Elijah the Lord did not speak through the earthquake, wind and fire, but in “the still small voice of calm.”

It is a wonderfully inspiring tradition, and based on the Bible stories I made my own pilgrimage to the site in the summer of 1987. I had been working in England as a priest in the Church of England and found myself with three months free before the start of my next appointment, so I made a hitch-hiking pilgrimage to Jerusalem from England staying in monasteries en route. (The story is recounted in my memoir There and Back Again) Once I got to Jerusalem it was an easy tourist bus ride to Egypt with a side trip to Sinai.

It is a pilgrim’s custom to climb the mountain in time to watch the sunrise across the Sinai desert. I set out and spent the night in a cave halfway up the mountain, wondering if this was Elijah might have experienced. I wish I could say that I heard the “still small voice of calm,” but at least I put myself in the right place.

Or was it the right place? Scholars and historians have debated the location of the events of Exodus for as long as they’ve had the time and inclination to do so. Where exactly did the Israelites cross the Red Sea? Was it really the “Reed Sea”? The Hebrew name is yam suph which means Sea of Reeds. Was it the mighty Red Sea or one of the shallow lakes a short distance East of Egypt? Cambridge scientist and Bible sleuth Colin Humphreys in his book, The Miracles of Exodus, thinks the waters at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba were blown back—and he traveled out there and found reeds growing in the right place. Others argue that the crossing was at Nuweiba Beach at the Gulf of Aqaba, where there is a land bridge that could have been exposed by a strong wind allowing God’s people to cross into Midian safely.

If the site of the Red Sea crossing is hotly debated, so is the location of Mount Sinai. Scholars dispute the traditional location of Jebel Musa (Mt Sinai) for several reasons. First, when Moses fled Egypt after committing murder, he fled to Midian. Midian is in Northwest Arabia on the Eastern side of the Gulf of Aqaba. He would have traveled on an ancient trade route that linked Southern Arabia to Egypt. It ran up the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, then north of both the Gulf of Aqaba and the Gulf of Suez, before running across the Sinai peninsula to Egypt.

This road was well traveled, and he would have been going in the direction of his ancestral territory, for Genesis tells us the brothers of the patriarch Joseph sold him to “traders from Midian who were going to Egypt”. There was therefore no reason for Moses to travel to the Southern tip of the barren Sinai peninsula. Exodus says that once he was in Midian working as a shepherd for his Father in-law Jethro, Moses went after some stray sheep to the holy mountain of Horeb (also known as Mt Sinai). Look at the map. Would he really have trekked back around the Red Sea then south into Sinai—some two hundred miles—looking for a lost sheep?

I don’t think so, and many others also doubt the Sinai location—citing a mountain in Midian instead, where, by the way, the mountains between the Gulf of Aqaba and the Arabian desert are called the Horeb mountains.

It is there that many believe the true Mt Sinai is to be located—and there is another telling argument in favor of the Midian location: All the wondrous signs at Mt Sinai indicate volcanic activity. In his study of the miracles of Exodus, Professor Humphreys points out that thunder, lightning, smoke, fire and earthquakes are all phenomena associated with volcanoes. What about trumpet blasts? When the gasses are forced out of cracks in the rock, witnesses from ancient to present times say it sounds like unearthly trumpets. The pillar of smoke and fire rising from the cone of a volcano also account for the cloudy pillar and pillar of fire that guided the Israelites.

If the holy mountain was a volcano might that resolve the debate about its location? I believe it does. Humphreys researched the question. Jebel Musa (the traditional Mt Sinai) is not now, nor ever has been, volcanic. In fact the Sinai peninsula is devoid of volcanoes. However, the territory of Midian is full of volcanoes large and small, and Humphreys and others have pinpointed Mt Bedr between of the city of Tayma and the settlement of Al-Bad in Western Arabia as the probable location of Moses’ holy mountain.

Humphreys argues his case in The Miracles of Exodus with detailed evidence combined with careful research, clever reasoning and, it must be admitted, a generous dose of speculation. Have his findings been accepted? Not generally. The scientific historians want “watertight evidence”—a fragment of the Ten Commandment tablets Moses broke, or perhaps an inscription on a stele at Mt Bedr saying “Mose wuz ‘ere” or some such.

Unsurprisingly, as I found with my book The Mystery of the Magi traditionally minded Christians also object to the new discoveries. They do not actually want modern science and detailed research to verify the historicity of the Biblical stories, preferring the more traditional tales bursting with supernatural wonders.

So I once asked a very well known Catholic scholar about the theory that the wondrous miracles of God’s holy mountain could be explained by it being a volcano. He shook his head, “No. Naturalistic explanations undermine the miraculous.”

“But” I demurred, “When confronted with claims of the miraculous are we not supposed to look for all natural explanations first?” He changed the subject.

This lead us to ponder the relationship between the natural and the supernatural. Since the scientific revolution we have been trained to see the natural world as cut off from divine intervention. A thing is either natural and explainable or it is supernatural and inexplicable.

However, The Hebrews (like all ancient peoples) did not see the exclusive division between natural and supernatural as we do. For them God worked miracles in and through the natural order. Thus psalm 77 which says,

You are the God who performs miracles;

you display your power among the peoples.

With your mighty arm you redeemed your people,

the descendants of Jacob and Joseph.

The waters saw you, God,

the waters saw you and writhed;

the very depths were convulsed.

The clouds poured down water,

the heavens resounded with thunder;

your arrows flashed back and forth.

Your thunder was heard in the whirlwind,

your lightning lit up the world;

the earth trembled and quaked.

Your path led through the sea,

your way through the mighty waters,

though your footprints were not seen.

You led your people like a flock

by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

If they are not excluding the divine, I have no problem with naturalistic explanations of miracles. They simply show that God’s mighty hand is seen in all His works. Time and again the Exodus account says, “God did this or God did that”…that he did so by timing and amplifying the natural causes reminds me that he is constantly working these kinds of miracles everyday and all around us. All we need is the grace to see them.

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The featured image, uploaded by Gerd Eichmann, is a photograph of Mount Sinai as seen from the southwest, taken April 14, 2009. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.