by Bruce Feiler
By a little past eleven we had arrived at an intermediate peak and disembarked from the camels to begin our hike. Avner brought over a small piece of stone imprinted with what looked like a fossilized branch of fir needles. “These aren’t fossils,” he noted, “but minerals—manganese crystals—that accumulated here in this shape.” Like the tafuni, the weather-worn holes in the rock we saw a few days earlier, these impressions were made when a hard, mineral solution seeped into the cracks and later expanded into tendrils that looked like fragile twigs. “Byzantine visitors decided they were the remains of the burning bush,” he said.
“So the burning left this scar on the rock?”
“Remember,” he said, grinning, “you are standing on holy ground.”
And frightful ground, too. Though the mountain may seem poetic from the path, from on top it can be wickedly cruel. Almost anyone who climbs the mountain at night to see sunrise reports that the experience was the coldest of their lives. An average of ten people die of exposure every year. During Avner’s tenure a special forces officer from the Israeli army came one night and announced he was going to climb the mountain. “Don’t go now,” the bedouin told him. “You won’t have enough time.” Being from the special forces, he went anyway. “I went home,” Avner said. “Put the kids to bed, and one of the bedouin came running. ‘Somebody’s stuck on the mountain!’ ” The man had gone up the front of the mountain, reached a dead end, turned around to come down, and become trapped. “Then it became quite cold,” Avner said, “and he tried to shout, and nobody heard him.” He needed to signal, but had no equipment, so he took his checkbook, ripped out check after check, and set them on fire. “I climbed up the regular trail but couldn’t reach him. I had to fly in a helicopter to bring him down. His legs were already quite frozen, and we had to soak him in hot water.”
Despite the mountain’s ferociousness, it can be hospitable. Jebel Musa is actually made up of a number of small peaks that cover an area of about two square miles, topped by a conelike summit. The lower peaks contain a series of protected plateaus, hidden caves, and isolated nooks that serve to keep out the elements, making the mountain quite friendly to habitation by those seeking to get closer to God. On Ras Safsaafa, the most extensive of the peaks, the granite ridges are filled with man-made remains—dikes, wells, cisterns. There is even an orchard of pear and almond trees. In the early Christian era, monks perfected means of storing water and actually lived for months at a time on the mountain. In one hollow, Avner pointed out a whitewashed structure that monks claim is the Sinai’s oldest monastery, built by a nun and her husband (!) during the Roman persecutions of the third century C.E.
This juxtaposition of the barren mountain and pockets of fertility only heightens the sense of otherworldliness that envelops Jebel Musa. It also mirrors one of the tensions in the biblical story of the Ten Commandments: A mountain that seems so terrorizing to the Israelites proves to be so welcoming to Moses; a mountain untouchable to humans succors an eighty-year-old prophet for weeks at a time.
The story of Moses and God on Mount Sinai is one of the most celebrated in the Bible, but also one of the most confusing, with a series of ups and downs that are almost impossible to keep track of. In the third month after the Exodus, the Israelites arrive at the wilderness of Sinai and set up camp at the base of the mountain where Moses first encountered God in the burning bush. The Lord calls Moses from the mountain and asks him to tell the people that God bore them “on eagles’ wings” from Egypt and that if they obey him, they will become “my treasured possession.” The people agree, saying, “All that the Lord has spoken, we will do!” The Lord then orders the people to stay pure for two days, and wash their clothes, for on the third day he will come down in a cloud on Mount Sinai, in sight of the whole community. The people are not to touch the mountain, and whoever does shall be put to death. On the third day, as morning dawns, thunder and lightning fill the area and a dense cloud envelops the mountain. A shofar sounds. Moses leads the people to the foot of the mountain, which trembles violently. The Lord calls Moses to the top of the mountain, then sends him back down to get Aaron. The two then ascend again, and God reveals his laws.
The Ten Commandments, which the Greeks called the decalogue, or ten words, and the Hebrew text calls the “decade of words,” turn out not to be limited to commandments, and not to be confined to ten. The laws, which theologian J. Ryder Smith called “the universal alphabet of religion for all mankind,” actually comprise thirteen verses in Exodus 20, which has led to enormous debate over precisely what constitutes the code. The first verse, for example, is not a commandment at all, but a preamble, in the manner of other Near Eastern laws from that time: “I the Lord am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.” Jewish tradition lists this as the first commandment. Most Protestant denominations believe the first commandment also includes the subsequent verse “You shall have no other gods beside Me.” Jewish, Catholic, and Lutheran traditions make that verse part of the second commandment, along with the next few verses, which command against making “sculptured images” of God. For everyone, the subsequent six laws command, in order: (3) You shall not swear falsely by the name of the Lord; (4) Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy; (5) Honor your father and mother; (6) You shall not murder; (7) You shall not commit adultery; and (8) You shall not steal. The last two laws are also apportioned differently in different religions, but command: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, and you shall not covet your neighbor’s house, wife, slave, ox, or ass.
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 sto
ne, 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.