“It just doesn’t fit,” I told my son in 2007. At the time, he was a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During a break in his classes, we decided to explore a coastal town in the Sinai Peninsula. One night, after a long, cold climb to a somewhat distant mountain peak, we witnessed a beautiful sunrise illuminating the desolate landscape of rock-strewn mountains with the golden hue of morning light.
The mountain we had climbed is the conventional location for Mount Sinai deep in the south-central part of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. What we saw that morning was stunning.
In the unforgiving desert light of day, what we did not see was perplexing.
In Israel, most ancient sites have left abundant evidence of the events that happened there. An outline of the 2,000-year-old site of Roman encampment around Masada is clear. Even older is the Jordan Valley footprint site, where Israelites gathered shortly after entering the land about 3,400 years ago.
In stark contrast, and in a place where there has been virtually no human activity for three and a half millennia, there was nothing to suggest that a large group of people had populated the area: no encampment outlines, no petroglyphs, and no apparent place where a large number of people and their livestock had settled.
At the base of the mountain, we entered St. Catherine’s Monastery, established about halfway through the 6th century CE. Perhaps we would find evidence there.
Encompassed within its walls, it boasted the still-living burning bush and a tiny well said to be the Well of Moses, an unlikely size to supply herds of goats, thirsty camels, and a significant number of people for the daily water they would have needed. The monastery is about 1,500 years old but, regardless, had the taint of a sensationalist fabrication; holy relic bait to lure donations.
“This cannot be the real Mount Sinai,” I said to my son. “Maybe the real place is in Saudi Arabia.”
Is Mount Sinai in Saudi Arabia?
IN THE early 1980s, a Christian adventurist, Ron Wyatt, claimed to have found the real Mount Sinai in Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk Province near the country’s southwest border that abuts the Gulf of Aqaba. Because Wyatt was not an archaeologist and was known to claim melodramatic finds of biblical sites, his assertion was intriguing but not given a lot of credence by credentialed professionals.
The site was also fenced off by Saudi officials. It was not a place open for exploration. Regardless, a few years later, two more Christian explorers, Robert Cornuke and Larry Williams, snuck into the area, filmed what they saw, and released it to the public. Their documentary, The Search for the Real Mount Sinai, is available today on YouTube.
Thirty-six years later, in April of this year, I had the opportunity to visit the area with a group of five. Driving far afield from paved roads in a Toyota Land Cruiser, we followed dusty, bumpy tracks to the still undeveloped locations for Mount Sinai and its related landmarks of biblical events.
Would the area, like the site near St. Catherine’s Monastery, be interesting but not compelling?
Hardly. Unlike the Sinai Peninsula, everything we saw in Saudi Arabia fit the biblical narrative and did so with an abundance of archaeological and geographical evidence.
On the first day of exploration, we set out to find the Rock of Horeb, the rock split by Moses’ rod overlooking the plains of Rephidim. According to the biblical text, when the masses became angry with Moses for lack of water, God told him to make his way to “the rock at Horeb.”
Driving into jagged hills on the apparent plains of Rephidim, millions of rocks were everywhere. How is it that one rock among countless others would be a known landmark – then and now?
As we drove, rounding one hill after another, suddenly it appeared. Emerging from the peak of a stony platform, a solitary, huge, 12-meter torso-shaped rock towered over the plain below. Split down the middle, it was impossible to miss.
Climbing the natural platform on which it stood, we saw that its size was breathtaking. Standing at the base of the split, looking down at the landscape below, it was easy to see how hundreds of thousands, maybe more, were able to assemble and witness what, as instructed, Moses did.
Dry as a rock today as it was 3,500 years ago, there was a curious symmetry with the Red Sea crossing.
Only a few weeks earlier, Moses’ staff had split the Gulf of Aqaba. One key assumption for the proposition that Saudi Arabia is the place in which Mount Sinai towers is that Jewish refugees from Goshen had been led to a mountain-locked seashore delta, today called Nueiba, in the Sinai Peninsula. A solitary pillar still stands there, called the Pillar of Solomon, indicating that in millennia past, this was the commonly known place of crossing.
When the sea was split, it created a 17-km. path of dry land on which an entire population, including livestock, made their way to safety on the other side. If, in fact, this is where the crossing happened, its depiction in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 film The Ten Commandments is surprisingly accurate.
And the symmetry? From water, God made a solid, arid path. Days later, from an arid rock, He created a geyser of water. Both the water and the rock had been split in two.
ALLEGEDLY, THIS is also where Jewish refugees battled the Amalekites. They were victorious only as long as Moses held up his arms, perhaps the same posture as when he parted the sea. In this event, however, his arms grew weary. When they sagged, the warriors of Israel began to lose.
Recognizing the problem, Aaron and Hur gave him a rock to sit on, and then held up his arms. Accordingly, the Amalekites were defeated.
But is there evidence?
Huge stone altars adorn the nearby plain. And at a nearby place where non-combatants could easily witness the battle, there are dozens of petroglyphs: gazelles, lions, hunters, and… footprints.
The footprint as a Jewish symbol was reinforced by God just before the children of Israel entered the Promised Land.
“Every place on which the sole of your foot steps shall be yours,” God says in Deuteronomy 11:24.
Accordingly, the earliest gathering sites in the Promised Land were called gilgals. All of them are shaped like a footprint, visibly definable to this day.
Finding footprint petroglyphs on countless rocks is a provocative indicator, if not proof, that a lot of Jews were gathered here, on the plains of Rephidim – in Saudi Arabia.
The next place where “the sons of Israel” were led was to “the wilderness of Sinai,” where they encamped “in front of the mountain,” obviously another well-known landmark among an ocean of stony pinnacles.
The tallest of them all, today a blackened triangular peak, was called Mount Sinai. According to the Torah, when Moses was summoned there to meet with God and receive His law, he disappeared into a thick cloud resonating with continual thunder and lightning. When, after five or six weeks, he did not reappear, a movement began to merge, or syncretize, with the God who brought His people out of Egypt with the Egyptian goddess of love, Hathor.
Depicted as what can only be described as a very sexy cow, Hathor was worshiped by the Egyptians; also, it seems, by the Jewish slaves who lived there for 400 years.
The proposed Saudi site for the altar of the golden calf is a dramatic natural circle of rocks upon which, it seems, the glittering idol was set.
Proof? The rocks supporting the base are covered with petroglyphs and now faint paintings of cows. Portrayals include men dancing on the backs of cows, provocatively lifting their tails, and celebrating as if at a party. On a nearby mural, all the men are visibly aroused. Clearly, the art is not intended to depict farmers and their cattle.
If this is the right location, it is a dramatic witness to the lingering presence of Egypt inside the hearts of those only recently delivered from it.
TODAY, THE Saudi site for Mount Sinai remains a compelling geographical testament to its authenticity. Moving toward the mountain’s base, there are the remains of what appears to have been a bullpen, through which cattle were herded to a place of slaughter, butchering, and sacrifice. Scattered around the site are the cut-down marble bases of a structure that once was there, apparently sanctifying it.
Mount Sinai itself, including a cave of Elijah on its ascent, is the pièce de résistance, anchoring all the other sites in a terrestrial landscape, and perfectly fitting the biblical narrative.
In this area, still called Midian by Saudi archaeologists, there is a compelling case to be made: This is Mount Sinai.■
Comments are closed.