Where is Mount Sinai?

The clues in the Bible

The mountain has two names. Exodus and Numbers mostly say Sinai; Deuteronomy prefers Horeb. Moses first finds it while he is a shepherd in exile.

Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness, and came to God’s mountain, to Horeb.

Israel reaches it in the third month after leaving Egypt (Exodus 19:1), by a chain of camps, Marah, Elim, Rephidim, that nobody can place with certainty. Deuteronomy adds a distance:

It is eleven days’ journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir to Kadesh Barnea.

Kadesh Barnea is usually identified with the oasis of Ein el-Qudeirat, near the border of Sinai and the Negev, and every candidate is measured against those eleven days. Centuries later the prophet Elijah walks “forty days and forty nights to Horeb, God’s Mountain” (1 Kings 19:8). After him the Bible records no visit at all, and Israel’s holy mountain becomes Zion, in Jerusalem.

Jebel Musa, the mountain of tradition

Jebel Musa, Arabic for “Mountain of Moses,” rises 2,285 meters (7,497 feet) in the granite heart of the southern Sinai Peninsula. Monks were living around it by the 4th century, and the pilgrim Egeria, who came around 381–384, was shown the places where Israel had camped. Between 548 and 565 the emperor Justinian built a fortified monastery at its foot, around a bush revered as the burning bush. Saint Catherine’s Monastery is still inhabited, among the oldest working monasteries in the world. Its library kept the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th-century Greek Bible that Constantin von Tischendorf took away in 1859; most of it is now in the British Library. Pilgrims still climb the 3,750 Steps of Penitence in the dark to watch the sunrise from the top. Its neighbor, Mount Catherine, is higher, 2,629 meters, the highest point in Egypt.

Other candidates in Sinai and the Negev

• Jebel Serbal, about 30 kilometers to the west, where hermits settled early and a monastery stood at its foot in the 4th century.
• Jebel Helal, in northern Sinai, much closer to Kadesh Barnea.
• Har Karkom, in Israel’s Negev, where the archaeologist Emmanuel Anati found shrines, standing stones and more than 40,000 rock engravings. Most of them date to about 2350–2000 BC, roughly a thousand years before most dates proposed for the Exodus.

The case for Arabia

Moses meets God at the mountain while he lives in Midian, and Midian lay east of the Gulf of Aqaba, in today’s Saudi Arabia. Jethro later visits the camp “at the Mountain of God” (Exodus 18:5), and Paul writes of “Mount Sinai in Arabia” (Galatians 4:25), though in his day Arabia could include Sinai and the Negev. Some read the scene itself as a volcano:

All of Mount Sinai smoked, because Yahweh descended on it in fire; and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.

The Sinai Peninsula has no young volcanoes, so in 1873 Charles Beke looked east of the gulf, where northwestern Arabia has fields of lava, and in the early 20th century the explorer Alois Musil proposed the volcano Hala-’l Badr. Since the 1980s Ron Wyatt, Bob Cornuke and others have promoted Jabal al-Lawz, 2,580 meters high near the Jordanian border, or its neighbor Jabal Maqla. Scholars such as James Hoffmeier reject their evidence. For the laws given on the mountain, wherever it stands, see the Ten Commandments.