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Three Candidate Mountains, and Why None of Them Is Settled

The Search for Mount Sinai

The mountain where the law was given has never been located. The traditional peak rests on a fourth-century pilgrim's account rather than on anything excavated, and the two best-known rivals each have a problem their own advocates concede.

Object
Not an object but an unsolved identification: which mountain Exodus means. The three most-argued candidates are Jebel Musa in the southern Sinai peninsula, Har Karkom in the Negev, and Jebel al-Lawz with the neighbouring Jabal Maqla in north-west Saudi Arabia
Found at
Candidates lie across the southern Sinai peninsula, the Negev and north-west Arabia; sites in northern Sinai and near Kadesh Barnea have also been proposed
Found in
No candidate has been established. The traditional identification is already in place by AD 381-384, when the pilgrim Egeria found a church, a priest and monks on the mountain she was shown; E. Anati published Har Karkom from 1984; the modern Jebel al-Lawz claims date from visits in 1986 and 1988
Found by
Unknown for the traditional site — no source names who first identified it, and the attribution to Helena is a tenth-century story, not a fourth-century record. Har Karkom is E. Anati's identification; the Midianite/Arabian case in its scholarly form goes back to J. Koenig in 1971
Dates from
The events of Exodus 19 are placed by different evangelical reckonings in the fifteenth or the thirteenth century BC. No candidate has produced material of either date bearing on them; Har Karkom's cultic material peaks in the third millennium BC Disputed dating
Now held at
Every candidate is a mountain and stands where it stands. St Catherine's Monastery, at the foot of Jebel Musa, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and remains in continuous monastic use

What the Text Asks For, and What Tradition Supplied

Scripture gives the mountain two names and very little geography. It is Horeb when Moses is keeping Jethro's flock and turns aside to the bush, and Horeb again when Elijah walks forty days to reach it; it is Sinai when Israel camps before it in the third month after leaving Egypt. Deuteronomy 1:2 supplies the one measurement anybody has to work with — eleven days' journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir to Kadesh Barnea — and even that fixes a distance rather than a direction. No Israelite writer ever says which peak it was, and no later biblical writer goes back to look.

The earliest hard evidence for the traditional identification is a pilgrim's diary. Between about 381 and 384 a western woman known as Egeria travelled to the southern Sinai peninsula and climbed the mountain she was shown, and her account is the reason the site can be dated at all. She writes that the ascent had to be made on foot, and of the top: "In that place there is now a church, not great in size, for the place itself, that is the summit of the mountain, is not very great; nevertheless, the church itself is great in grace." A priest came out of his cell to meet her. She then descended into the valley to see the place of the burning bush, which was shown to her as a separate site.

Two things follow from that, and the second is the one usually left out. Egeria establishes that by the late fourth century the identification was already made, already had a church on it and already had monks living around it — this is not a medieval invention. But Egeria is describing a tradition she received, not evidence for it, and she says nothing about how the mountain came to be identified. The story that Constantine's mother Helena founded the chapel around AD 330 does not come from her or from any other fourth-century writer: the standard account traces it to Eutychius of Alexandria, writing in the tenth century, some six hundred years later — and whatever its ultimate source, it is not a fourth-century witness. The traditional site's real credential is a very old and continuous tradition, which is worth something. It is not an archaeological credential, and the two should not be swapped.

The Three Candidates, and the Case for Each

Jebel Musa, in the granite mountains of the southern peninsula, is the traditional peak and still the default. Justinian's monastery at its foot — St Catherine's, conventionally dated to about 548-565 and among the oldest continuously inhabited monasteries anywhere — is described by Procopius, who is careful to say the emperor "built this church, not on the mountain's summit, but much lower down. For it is impossible for a man to pass the night on the summit, since constant crashes of thunder and other terrifying manifestations of divine power are heard at night," and that a fortress and garrison went up at the base to keep raiders out of Palestine. What the peninsula has not produced, across decades of Israeli and Egyptian survey work, is occupation material of the second millennium BC in the places the wilderness narratives would want it. That absence is real, though it argues less than it looks: nomadic encampments leave very little behind, a point pressed by scholars on more than one side of this question.

Har Karkom, a flat-topped ridge in the Negev roughly halfway between Kadesh Barnea and Petra, has the opposite problem. E. Anati, who has surveyed and published it since the early 1980s, has documented an extraordinary concentration of cultic material there — his project reports over forty thousand rock engravings, hundreds of sites within its concession, standing pillars, altars, tumuli and platforms he reads against the biblical bamoth. His summary is that the mountain "was a paramount cult centre and a sacred mountain beginning in the Palaeolithic Age, reaching its peak of religious activity in the third millennium BC." That is the difficulty stated in his own words, and he does not dodge it. His answer is to move the event rather than the mountain: if the exodus narratives rest on a historical background, he argues, "the chronological context may refer only to the BAC period, and more precisely to phase BAC IV (2350-2000 BC)." A reader should weigh the site knowing that accepting it means accepting a date around a thousand years earlier than either of the dates evangelical scholars usually defend.

Jebel al-Lawz and the neighbouring Jabal Maqla, in north-west Saudi Arabia, are the candidates most people have met, and the popular version and the scholarly version need separating. The popular version dates from visits by R. Wyatt and D. Fasold in 1986 and by L. Williams and B. Cornuke in 1988, and reached a wide audience through L. Williams's The Mountain of Moses in 1990. Behind it sits a much older and more serious argument for a Midianite mountain, which has nothing to do with those expeditions: J. Koenig's 1971 monograph on the al-Jaw plain proposed a volcanic peak in Midian, on the reasoning that Exodus 19's fire and smoke read like a volcano and the Sinai peninsula has none. C. J. Humphreys, a Cambridge materials scientist writing from an evangelical position, argues the same broad case in The Miracles of Exodus, and it is worth being exact that his candidate is Hala'l Badr, not Jebel al-Lawz — he is regularly and wrongly filed with the expedition literature.

Nothing Here Is Settled, and Evangelicals Are Not Agreed Either

The Arabian case leans hard on Galatians 4:25, where Paul writes that "this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia," and the weight it can bear is much less than it is usually asked to carry. G. Franz, writing for Associates for Biblical Research, makes the case against at length: ancient writers used "Arabia" for territory that included the Sinai peninsula, so Paul's phrase does not move the mountain east. Franz also went at the physical claims and found them to be the wrong period. The "Cave of Moses" he judged "clearly a first-century AD Nabatean tomb"; the pottery around the claimed altar and twelve pillars he reports as "purely, and only, Nabatean"; and of the famous bovine petroglyphs he reports what a Saudi archaeologist who wrote his doctorate on the region's rock art told him, that they "dated to the Neolithic period, considerably earlier than the Exodus and wilderness wanderings." That is a specific, checkable set of objections rather than a dismissal, and it is the strongest thing published against the Saudi sites.

Two claims that circulate on the other side of this argument are not repeated here because they could not be sourced. One is that the Saudi antiquities authorities surveyed Jebel al-Lawz and rejected the identification; the only trace of it leads to an unpublished report with no citation. The other is the body of claims made by a foundation that promotes the site, whose own website could not be reached to read them. Neither absence proves anything either way — but an article that reports a claim it has not read is doing the thing this section exists to warn about.

Where the app stands, and where it declines to. The traditional site has the best pedigree and the least evidence; Har Karkom has the most evidence and the wrong date by its own excavator's reckoning; the Jebel al-Lawz sites have an exegetical argument that does not hold and material remains that belong to the Nabataeans, while the wider Midianite proposal is better described as untested than as refuted. No candidate has decisive evidence, and this is not a case where one side is merely being stubborn. It is worth adding that evangelical scholars are not lined up behind one answer here, and a reader who has been told otherwise has been misinformed: J. K. Hoffmeier argues for the southern peninsula, and — on the account of R. S. Hess, reviewing the book — prefers Gebel Safsafah or Gebel Serbal to the traditional Jebel Musa itself; C. J. Humphreys argues for Midian; G. Franz argues for the traditional peninsula and against Arabia in print. Three evangelical scholars, three answers, all published. F. M. Cross, quoted by H. Shanks, put the wider state of exodus geography about as well as it can be put: "A mountain of paper has been expended in attempting to locate the stations of the Exodus in Numbers 33. There are almost as many opinions as there are scholars." The mountain is not lost in any sense that matters to a reader of Exodus. What happened there is what the text is about, and the text never thought the coordinates were the point.

Scripture references

Sources

Further reading

Reflect

Israel could see the mountain and still could not go up it. What do you want explained that you may only ever be asked to trust?

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