Authors: Bruce Feiler
After God delivers the Ten Commandments, thunder and lightning again surround the mountain. A horn blares and the mountain smokes. But God is not finished. He continues for the next three chapters to deliver a series of regulations on everything from what to do with a slave who doesn’t want to go free (pierce his ear with an awl and keep him), whether to use the death penalty for kidnappers (yes), and what to do to a man who pushes a pregnant woman and causes a miscarriage (fine him). Moses repeats these laws, commonly known as the Book of the Covenant, because it amounts to a contract between God and the people, an expansion of the verbal agreement first reached between God and Abraham. To press the importance of these laws, Moses has the population agree to follow them by sprinkling bull’s blood on the people. As he says, “This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord now makes with you concerning these commands.”
God’s revelation of himself on Mount Sinai and his subsequent delivery of a written contract with the people marks the narrative climax of the Five Books of Moses. Up to now, the Israelites have been largely passive—receiving the protection of God, being freed from slavery—but promising little in return. Now they become active participants in the covenant, agreeing publicly to follow the dictates of God. Mount Sinai marks their birth as a spiritual nation, one committed not merely to conquering and holding power at all costs, but to doing so within a strict moral framework. As a result, they would forever alter the course of both political and religious behavior. From now on, nations would no longer say merely, “My god is stronger than your god.” They
must add, “My conduct is more righteous than your conduct.” In this way, at least, the story of Mount Sinai is a monumental achievement. As commentator Gunther Plaut has written, “The story—in all its brevity—achieves its major goal: to convey to some degree the awesomeness of that moment when the Lord of the universe showed His Glory to Israel and when he made his covenant with them, changing their history and the history of all men as well.” Revelation, covenant, and law, Plaut says, are the three pillars upon which the structure of Israel’s history is reared. “Without them, Israel would have been a nation like other nations; with them, it became a focal point of human destiny.”
After a half-hour hike we arrived at the northern ridge of Ras Safsaafa, which overlooks an enormous swath of open terrain called the Plain of ar-Raaha. Seen from above, the plain is wedged in the middle of a hub of craggy mountains and looks like a rare patch of smooth skin on the belly of a toad. At midday the sun bounced off the pale sand as if it were the face of a mirror, creating a blinding glow. Jebel Musa drops straight to the desert floor here, with almost no foothills, thereby giving people on the ground a clear view of Safsaafa’s peak. Based on that view, early visitors concluded that the plain must be the spot where the Israelites gathered to watch God reveal himself on Mount Sinai in the form of smoke and lightning. Those visitors named the clearing the Plain of Assemblage. As Arthur Sutton, an English pilgrim, wrote: “So close does the plain of ar-Raaha come to Mt. Safsaafa that one can at once understand why Moses ‘set bounds for the people around the mountain’ to prevent them from touching it.”
Not content with visual identification, some scholars, whom Avner called pseudo-scholars, went so far as to measure the plain in an attempt to determine if it could hold all the Israelites the Bible says would have been there. Using a population figure of two million, the twelve-mile-by-four-mile site could have accommodated each man, woman, and child with 669 square feet, about the size of a New York City studio apartment.
More seriously, the question of which mountain played host to the
revelation has been a matter of debate for thousands of years. The Bible is notably silent on the matter, giving no physical description of the mountain whatsoever, saying only that it’s in the “desert of Sinai.” Josephus, writing in the first century
C.E.
, said that it was “the highest of all the mountains thereabout.” A rabbinic midrash, written several hundred years later, offers a different take, saying that the mountains of the world quarreled with each other to play host to God. Each extolled its own height and distinction, except Sinai, which humbly said, “I am low.” Finally God announced: “My presence will rest on Sinai, the smallest and most insignificant of all.” In its modesty, the rabbis noted, Sinai resembled the humility of Moses who had not wanted to accept the mantle of leadership.
Other commentators were more specific and equally romantic. No fewer than twenty-two mountains have been put forward as the “real Mount Sinai,” including candidates in southern, central, and northern Sinai, the Negev, Jordan, even Saudi Arabia. Advocates of the various theories cite everything from soil samples to rock formations, wall carvings to climatic conditions. It must be Jebel Sin Bisher, in the northern Sinai, because it’s low enough for the octogenarian Moses to have climbed. It must be Serabit el-Khadim, in the central Sinai, because its rich artwork indicates a ritual importance. It must be Jebel Serbal, in the southern Sinai, because it’s holy to the bedouin. It must be Mount Seir, in Saudi Arabia, because the apostle Paul indicated in a letter that Sinai was “a mountain in Arabia.”
Even as late as the 1980s, two Americans—Larry Williams, a multimillionaire and two-time Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Montana, and Bob Cornuke, a former police SWAT team member—forged passports, hid for weeks in the Saudi Arabian desert, and eventually came upon Jebel al Law, which they believed was the “true” Mount Sinai and would contain troves of undiscovered gold. The gold wasn’t there, of course, but they did claim to find the stone boundary Moses erected to keep the Israelites away from the mountain (their interpretation of the “bounds set round the mountain” described in Exodus 19), the twelve pillars Moses erected in commemoration of the tribes, and even an “unnaturally scorched spot” where God must have
descended to give Moses the stone tablets. Today, despite their contentions, the mountain houses a $30 million radar station, financed by the CIA.
Though most archaeologists have long since given up pinpointing the mountain, at least one scholar has not. Before leaving for our trip I went to visit Emanuel Anati in Jerusalem. A colorful if controversial figure, Anati, born in Florence, is a self-described humanist and man of culture (he’s written eighty books), who trained as an archaeologist in Israel before spending decades doing pioneering work on rock carvings in Europe. Early in his career he discovered similar carvings on a mountain in the southern Negev, close to the border with Sinai. In the 1980s he returned to the mountain and unearthed 230 additional archaeological discoveries, including many with eerie connections to the story of the Ten Commandments, among them twelve pillars at the base of the mountain like the ones Moses is said to have erected, and a cave on the summit like the one he is said to have used for shelter. These findings led Anati to conclude that the mountain, Har Karkom, was a holy place as early as the second millennium
B.C.
E. Because the mountain is also directly on the path from Midian to Egypt (the central route), Anati believes Har Karkom is the mountain referred to as Mount Sinai. He even got Pope John Paul II to endorse his research, which instantly made Har Karkom, though it’s located hours from any road, one of the most coveted adventure sites in Israel.
“So as far as you’re concerned,” I said to Anati during our conversation, “this will be the last theory. The two-thousand-year search for Mount Sinai has ended?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “And I don’t care. But this is not a theory. I know. And I’m not the only one who knows. Whoever knows what I know, knows.”
As charming as it was to meet an old-fashioned romantic purposefully bucking the trends of academia, I ultimately found Anati’s theory more enchanting than persuasive. If anything, I came to believe that the search for Mount Sinai misses an important point inherent in the story. The Bible has perfect recall when it wants to. It remembers people, places, things, even dialogue. If it wanted to tell us the exact location of
Mount Sinai, it could easily have done so, as it does for countless other places. Instead the story is vague, and it seems fair to assume that that vagueness is purposeful.
There are many possible reasons for such a lack of specificity. First, Mount Sinai is not in the Promised Land, and the Bible may not have wanted to glorify any location outside its own boundaries. As Avner noted, biblical writers sanctified few places outside Jerusalem. Second, these writers feared fetishism in general and did not want to encourage pilgrimages. In fact, Jews have traditionally been much less interested in identifying holy places than Christians, who didn’t really begin their effort until Byzantine times. By then, few Jews lived in the Middle East and Judaism had become a religion based more on prayer and ritual than pilgrimage. Third, as one rabbinic midrash suggests, other nations might have been more inclined to dismiss the Five Books had they been given in Israel. “Therefore the book was given in the desert,” the rabbis concluded, “publicly and openly, in a place belonging to no one.”
For me, the lack of identifying details points to another, perhaps more consequential, factor: The less Mount Sinai is associated with a physical place, the more it’s perceived as a spiritual place. Since the Promised Land is never achieved in the Pentateuch (Deuteronomy ends with the Israelites still in the desert, about to start the conquest), Mount Sinai emerges as the spiritual locus of the story, the pivot on which the Five Books hinge. Indeed the appearance of God on the mountain and the people’s ultimate acceptance of the Ten Commandments mark the high point of the story—maybe even the high point of monotheism—when the people and God come together in a moment of unprecedented union.
Sinai,
thus, is not just a place, it’s a metaphor for the covenant between Israel and Yahweh. The people are forever bound to that mountain, attached to that rock. And just as the mountain became the symbol of the covenant, the Bible, in turn, became the symbol of the mountain. If the pyramids are the “Bible in stone,” as Egyptologists Piazzi Smith and David Davidson said, the Bible is Mount Sinai in words, the living embodiment of the physical link between humans and God.
. . .
We made our way back from the overlook through a fascinating corridor of amber-colored stone, which the wind had carved into a series of undulating forms, a fun house of brown sugar. The formations were like clouds:Stare at them long enough and they became objects. One looked like a cow, another a hopping rabbit, another the hood ornament from a Jaguar. We saw a curled cobra the size of a teepee, and a chipmunk the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon. If I didn’t know better, with all the animals in stone, I would have thought this was the mountain where Noah’s ark landed.
The corridor eventually spilled into a small enclosure near the middle of the mountain. A stone chapel dedicated to Saint John the Baptist sits in the middle of a scene so green it could be in Ireland, with hawthorn, fig, and apricot trees scattered in a small grove. Water, collected by a dam that prevents rainfall from cascading on the monastery below, was so plentiful here that early monks who lived on the mountain were actually able to grow wheat. In the sixth century, as many as three hundred monks resided here at one time, Avner said, and there are countless chapels dedicated to everyone from Saint Gregory, to Saint Anne, to Saint Panteleimon, and nooks and crannies named after Moses, Elijah, Jethro, even the “Virgin Mary’s Holy Girdle.” According to legend, the mother of Jesus visited a fourth-century ascetic at the site and gave him her belt as a memento of her visit. All in all, the extraordinary array of facilities on the second-highest mountain in one of the most remote places in the world gives the place the feeling of a plush community of devotion, a suburb of the soul.
A few minutes’ walk from the enclosure, Avner led us to a sheer cliff overlooking the eastern side of the mountain. The wind had picked up a bit, and the sun was glaring off the red face of the stone. Though it was early afternoon, the air was chilly and bracing. I could only imagine how raw the place must feel in winter. Avner hadn’t mentioned where we were going, but when we arrived, he pivoted me around to face a tiny cave, the mouth of which was no higher than my waist. “This is a
Byzantine cave,” he said. “A hermit lived here.” The space between the top and bottom of the opening was no more than a foot and a half. I had to bend over, squat down like a frog, lean forward even more, and go rear-end-first into the cave, just to fit. Inside I crossed my legs in front of me and managed to sit down. My left knee touched the left wall; my right knee touched the right wall. I could reach forward and touch the front lip; I could reach back and touch the back wall. My head rubbed against the top.
“How long would he have stayed here?” I asked.
“Six days a week.”
I closed my eyes. The wind was so loud it seemed like cars whizzing by, and the sensation reminded me of my first day in the desert when the sounds were so loud they had an isolating effect. The wind as white noise. Here, the stimulation came from the front, from this extraordinary window on the world. Thinking back on how I entered the cave, I was reminded of an old Japanese saying that one never leaves a room headfirst, but backward out of deference to the room one leaves behind. Here one enters the room backward out of deference to the landscape. Looking out, I couldn’t help wondering what that landscape must have represented to the monks who sat here. Was it a mirror of their soul? A mirror of God? Or are those the same thing? I could see how sitting here hour after hour, week after week, the view through the eye-shaped opening would begin to consume one’s imagination. Here you’re not on top of the world; you’re inside it. You become, in essence, part of the land.
And how better to remind yourself of the lowly qualities of your body, which will ultimately return to the ground, than to return to the ground yourself. What better way to liberate your spirit than to cut off your body from the world. Not until I slid inside that envelope of earth did I realize how much these individuals were reacquainting themselves with Moses, who met here with God; with Elijah, who fled here from Israel; with Jesus, who sequestered himself in a similar location in the desert and was later placed by apostles in a cave outside Jerusalem. A space like this, coupled with strict self-denial, might be as close as a living person can come to the concept of resurrection. If nothing else, it
shows the lengths that some people will go to to find a way to enter the Bible. By inserting themselves in the rock, the monks, in effect, were inscribing themselves in stone, aligning themselves, as much as humanly possible, with the word of God.