Long before Moses persuaded the Israelites to follow him across the Red Sea, is it not therefore probable that he had thoroughly familiarized himself with the fearsome wildernesses of the Sinai peninsula? The location of the burning bush incident leaves no room for doubt that he spent at least part of his forty-year exile in these remote and mountainous deserts. Indeed, it is even possible that he passed most or all of this period there – a view for which there is a degree of academic support. According to one learned Egyptologist, Moses could have spent as long as a quarter of a century in Sinai, living in a settlement on a mountain known as Serabit-el-Khadem barely fifty miles from Mount Sinai itself.128
In June 1989 I visited and climbed Serabit-el-Khadem, which stands in the austere and barren highlands of southern-central Sinai. On the flat top of the mountain, completely innocent of tourists, were the ruins of the settlement in which Moses was thought to have lived – ruins dominated by the obelisks, altars and graceful columns of what must once have been an extensive Egyptian temple. As a High Priest of the ancient Egyptian religion, I reasoned, Moses would have felt comfortable here – and if he had indeed fled the wrath of Pharaoh after killing an overseer as the Bible claimed, then he would have been relatively safe in this remote and obscure spot.
I decided to find out more about Serabit-el-Khadem and researched it in some depth after my initial visit. In the course of this work, two significant facts came to light.
First, I learned that the temple site which I had seen had been thoroughly investigated in 1904–5 by the great British archaeologist Sir William Flinders Petrie – and that he had unearthed fragments of several stone tablets there.129 These tablets were inscribed with writing in a strange pictographic alphabet that, much later, was proved to have belonged to a Semitic-Canaanite language related to ancient Hebrew.130
Second, I discovered that the settlement at Serabit-el-Khadem had been an important centre for the mining and manufacture of copper and turquoise from roughly 1990 BC until 1190 BC.131 These dates meant that there was no anachronism in the assumption that Moses might have sojourned here in the thirteenth century BC, just prior to the Exodus. And the evidence that an alphabet related to Hebrew had been in use on the site at about the same time looked like further corroboration of this view. What really interested me, however, was the point emphasized above, namely that Serabit had functioned as a sort of industrial and metallurgical complex and that the whole area had been extensively mined. It seemed to me that if Moses had indeed lived here for a lengthy period then he could hardly have failed to acquire knowledge of the minerals and metal ores of southern Sinai.
After my visit to Serabit-el-Khadem in June 1989 I drove my hired Jeep the fifty miles across the desert to Mount Sinai. In a sense the word ‘desert’ is a misnomer for this region, for although there are sandy expanses, the bulk of the countryside consists of steep and withered mountain ranges, red in colour, upon which almost nothing grows. The only patches of greenery are created by occasional oases in the valleys, and one such oasis, rich in date palms, stands at the foot of Mount Sinai. Here, in the fourth century AD, a small Christian chapel was erected on the supposed site of the burning bush. That chapel was greatly extended in subsequent years. By the fifth century it had become a substantial monastery under the patronage of the Coptic Church of Alexandria. In the sixth century the Roman Emperor Justinian massively fortified the monastery’s walls so that it could better withstand the attacks of marauding bedouin tribes. Finally, in the eleventh century, the whole complex was dedicated to Saint Catherine.132 It continues to be known as ‘Saint Catherine’s’ today, and many of the structures built in the fifth and sixth centuries still stand.
Before embarking on the arduous 7,450-foot climb to the top of Mount Sinai I spent some time inside the ancient monastery. The main church contained several remarkable icons, mosaics and paintings, some of them almost 1,500 years old. In the gardens was a walled enclosure built around a large raspberry bush that was believed by the monks to be the original burning bush.133 This it certainly was not – and, indeed, I was well aware that even Mount Sinai’s claim to be the ‘Mount Sinai’ referred to in the Bible had by no means been conclusively proved. The fact was, however, that monastic traditions dating back at least to the fourth century AD had associated this particular peak with the ‘mountain of God,’ and had almost certainly done so on the basis of reliable sources of information now lost.134 Moreover I knew that local tribal traditions concurred: the bedouin name for Mount Sinai was simply Jebel Musa – ‘the mountain of Moses’.135 Scholarly opinion also associated the biblical Mount Sinai with the peak bearing that name today – and the few dissenting voices did not favour a different region but rather other nearby peaks in the same range (for example Jebel Serbal).136
I must confess that after climbing Mount Sinai in June 19891 was left in no doubt that this had indeed been the mountain to which Moses had brought the Israelites ‘in the third month’ after leaving Egypt. Pausing at the summit, I stood on a ledge which overlooked tumbled miles of worn and jagged uplands descending to sere plains in the far distance. There was a haze and a powder-blue stillness in the air – not silence, exactly, but stillness. Then a sudden wind whipped up, cool and dry at that altitude, and I watched an eagle soar heavenwards on a thermal, gliding briefly level with me before it disappeared from sight. I remained there alone for a while, in that pitiless and uncompromising place, and I remember thinking that Moses could hardly have chosen a more dramatic or a more appropriate location in which to receive the Ten Commandments from the hand of God.
But is that really what the Hebrew magus came to Mount Sinai to do? It seems to me that there is an alternative scenario. Could it not be that his true purpose all along had been to build the Ark of the Covenant and to place inside it some great energy source, the raw substance of which he had known that he would be able to find on this particular mountain top?
This is a highly speculative thesis – but it is speculation that we are indulging in here and there is room for a little imaginative licence. If Moses had known of the existence of some potent substance on the peak of Mount Sinai, then what might that substance have been?
One suggestion – put forward in a different context in Chapter 3 – is that the tablets of stone on which God supposedly wrote the Ten Commandments were in fact two pieces of a meteorite. Resonant with echoes of Wolfram’s Grail Stone (described as having been brought down from heaven by a troop of angels137), this intriguing possibility is taken seriously by several top-flight biblical scholars, who point to the worship of meteoric fragments in a number of ancient Semitic cultures138 and add that:
concealing tables of law within a closed container [seems] somewhat odd … Words of law engraved upon stone were surely meant to be publicly displayed … [it may therefore be] supposed that the Ark held not two tables of the law but a fetish stone, a meteorite from Mount Sinai.139
If this conjecture is correct then the field lies open to guess what element exactly the ‘meteorite from Mount Sinai’ might have consisted of. It is at any rate not beyond the bounds of reason to suppose that it might have been radioactive, or that it might have possessed some chemical characteristic that would have made it useful to Moses if his purpose had really been to manufacture a potent and durable source of energy for installation in the Ark.
The notion that he might have been manufacturing something on Mount Sinai is certainly not ruled out by the Scriptures. On the contrary, many passages in the relevant chapters of the book of Exodus are sufficiently peculiar and puzzling to allow just such an interpretation to be put on them.
The so-called ‘theophany’ – the manifestation of a deity to a mortal man – began immediately after the Israelites had ‘camped before the mount’. Then ‘Moses went up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain.’140
At this early stage the Bible makes no mention of smoke or fire or any of the other special effects that were soon to be brought into play. I
nstead the prophet simply climbed the mountain and held a private conversation with Yahweh, a conversation that was not witnessed by anyone else. Significantly, one of the first instructions that he supposedly received from the deity was this:
Thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about, saying, Take heed to yourselves that ye go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it: Whoever touches the mountain will be put to death … He must be stoned or shot down by arrow … he must not remain alive.141
It goes almost without saying that Moses would have had a strong reason to impose just such a rigorous and ‘divinely ordained’ exclusion zone if he had indeed been planning to manufacture or process some substance on Mount Sinai: the prospect of being stoned or shot would certainly have deterred the curious from venturing up to see what he was really doing there and thus would have enabled him to preserve the illusion that he was meeting with God.
At any rate, it was only after he had spent three days on the mountain that the drama really began. Then:
In the morning … there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled … And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because Yahweh had descended on it in the form of fire. Like smoke from a furnace the smoke went up.142
Initially it seems that Moses spent only part of his time isolated on the peak, and that he was frequently in the camp. Soon, however, God told him this:
Come up to me on the mountain and stay there while I give you the stone tablets – the law and the commandments – which I have written.143
This, then, was the prelude to what was to be the key event on Sinai – Moses’s acquisition of the two tablets of stone that he would later place inside the Ark of the Covenant. The prophet’s ascent was accompanied by further special effects:
Moses went up into the mount, and a cloud covered the mount. And the glory of Yahweh settled upon mount Sinai; for six days the cloud covered it, and on the seventh day Yahweh called to Moses from inside the cloud. To the eyes of the sons of Israel the glory of Yahweh seemed like a devouring fire on the mountain top. Moses went right into the cloud. He went up the mountain and stayed there for forty days and forty nights.144
Would an omnipotent God have required forty days and forty nights to deliver two stone tablets to His prophet? Such a lengthy period seems hardly necessary. If, however, Moses had not been receiving ‘the tablets of the Testimony’ at all, but instead had been manufacturing or refining some compact stone-like energy source to place inside the Ark, then he could well have needed that much time to finish the work.
From this perspective, the ‘devouring fire’ on the mountain top that the Israelites had interpreted as ‘the glory of Yahweh’ would really have been the infernal glow given off by whatever devices or chemical processes the prophet was using to achieve his objective. And although this hypothesis sounds far-fetched, it is surely not more so than the strange information concerning the tablets of stone that is contained in the Old Testament, in the Mishnah, in the Midrash, in the Talmud, and in the most archaic Jewish legends.
Tablets of stone?
The clearest descriptions of the tablets are contained in the Talmudic-Midrashic sources which yield the following information: (1) they were ‘made of a sapphire-like stone’; (2) they were ‘not more than six hands in length and as much in width’ but were nevertheless enormously heavy; (3) though hard they were also flexible; (4) they were transparent.145
It was upon these peculiar objects that the Ten Commandments were supposedly written – by no lesser figure than Yahweh Himself, as the Bible is at pains to point out:
When He had finished speaking with Moses on the mountain of Sinai, He gave him the two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone, inscribed by the finger of God … And Moses turned and went down from the mount with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands, tablets inscribed on both sides, inscribed on the front and on the back. These tablets were the work of God, and the writing on them was God’s writing.146
Theologically, therefore, there can be no doubting the sanctity or the significance of the prophet’s burden: written upon by the very finger of God, the two tablets were quite literally fragments of the divine. From the biblical viewpoint nothing more precious had ever been entrusted to mortal man. One would have thought that Moses would have looked after them. He did not do so, however. Instead, in a fit of pique, he broke these pure and perfect gifts.
Why did he do this incomprehensible thing? According to the explanation given in Exodus it was because the perfidious Israelites had lost hope that he would ever return after his forty days on the mountain and had fashioned a golden calf, which they were worshipping. Arriving in the camp Moses then caught them in flagrante delicto offering sacrifices and dancing and prostrating themselves before the idol. At the sight of this grotesque apostasy the prophet’s ‘anger waxed hot and he threw down the tablets that he was holding and broke them at the foot of the mountain.’147 He then disposed of the golden calf, had about three thousand of the worst idolators executed, and restored order.148
So much, then, for the official account of how and why the original tablets of stone came to be broken. These items, however, were clearly of vital importance and had to be replaced. Accordingly God instructed Moses to return to the mountain top to receive two new tablets. The prophet complied and ‘stayed there with Yahweh forty days and forty nights … and he inscribed on the tablets the words of the Covenant, the Ten Commandments.’149 Moses then climbed down the mountain again bearing the tablets, exactly as he had done before. A close study of the relevant biblical passages, however, does reveal a single substantive and significant difference between his two descents: on the second occasion ‘the skin of his face shone’;150 on the first there had been no mention of this odd phenomenon.
What could have caused the prophet’s face to shine? The biblical scribes naturally assumed that it had been his proximity to God, and explained: ‘the skin on his face was radiant after speaking with Yahweh.’151 Yet on several previous occasions, dating back as far as the burning bush, Moses had stood close to Yahweh and had not suffered any such consequences. Indeed, a typical example had occurred just before he had embarked on his second forty-day expedition to Sinai. While still in the Israelite camp he had participated in a lengthy and intimate encounter with the deity, an encounter that had been held in a specially sanctified structure called the ‘Tent of Meeting’.152 There ‘the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend,’153 but there was no hint or suggestion that the prophet’s skin had glowed as a result.
So what could have produced this effect? Is it not reasonable to suggest that it might have been the tablets of stone themselves? Oblique corroboration for precisely this suggestion exists in the Talmudic and Midrashic sources which insist that the tablets had been infused with ‘Divine radiance’. When God handed them to Moses: ‘He seized them by the top third, whereas Moses took hold of the bottom third, but one third remained open, and it was in this way that the Divine radiance was shed upon Moses’ face.’154
Since this did not happen with the first set of tablets – the ones that Moses broke – it is legitimate to ask a question: why were things so different the second time around? Could the answer possibly be that Moses had discovered that the first set of tablets were technically imperfect as an energy source precisely because they didn’t burn his face? This would explain why he broke them. He did, however, sustain burns from the second set. Perhaps this proved to him that whatever process he had used to manufacture them had worked – and made him confident that they would function properly when they were placed inside the Ark.
The idea that the glow or shine on Moses’s skin might in fact have been caused by some sort of burn is of course purely speculative. There is no support for it in the Bible. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable deduction – as reasonable as any other – from
the small amount of evidence that is available there. The description of the prophet’s descent from the mountain with the second set of tablets is limited to just seven verses in Chapter 34 of Exodus.155 These verses, however, make it absolutely clear that his appearance was so gruesome when he arrived in the camp that all the Israelites were ‘afraid to come nigh him’.156 To spare their feelings ‘he put a veil over his face’157 – and ever afterwards, except when he was alone in his tent, he wore this veil.158
Does this not sound much less like the behaviour of a man who had been touched by the radiance of God than of a man burned – and burned badly – by some potent energy source?
A testament to lost truths
It would be possible to speculate endlessly about the true character of the Ark of the Covenant – and of its contents. I have gone as far as I wish to down this particular road. Readers who would like to go further, however, might find it interesting to consider first the materials from which the Ark was made. Huge quantities of gold seem to have been used – and gold, as well as being beautiful and noble, is also chemically non-reactive and exceptionally dense. In particular the ‘mercy seat’ – which served as the lid of the relic – was believed by one learned rabbi (who lived in the twelfth century AD) to have been a full hand-breadth thick.159 Since a hand-breadth was traditionally measured from the tip of the thumb to the extended tip of the little finger, this means that the Ark was closed with a hulking slab of solid gold nine inches deep.160 Why was it necessary to use so much of the precious metal? And was it an accident that Rabbi Shelomo Yitshaki who procured this information – as well as a great deal of other intelligence concerning the sacred relic – was born and spent most of his life in the city of Troyes in the heart of France’s Champagne region?161 That same city was the home of Chrétien de Troyes whose work on the Holy Grail, written seventy-five years after the rabbi’s death, established the genre in which Wolfram von Eschenbach was soon to follow. And it was in Troyes as well that the rule of the Knights Templar was drawn up by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. In this way the mysteries and the connections multiply.
The Sign and the Seal Page 39