"'Yahweh came from Sinai' (Deuteronomy 33:2; Psalms 68:18). It is in Sinai that Moses first encounters Yahweh; it is back to Sinai that Moses leads Yahweh’s people from Egypt; and it is from Sinai that, two years later, on Yahweh’s order again, Moses sets off with them to conquer a piece of the Fertile Crescent.
"But where is Sinai, with its Mount Horeb [the mountain where God gave Moses the 10 commandments]? Exodus unequivocally places it in the land of Midian ...
"And where is Midian? Greek authors unanimously place it in northwestern Arabia, on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Aqaba [see map]. Even Paul the Apostle, who spent three years in Arabia, knew that 'Sinai is a mountain in Arabia' (Galatians 4:25). It was not before the 4th century that the biblical Sinai was misplaced in the Egyptian peninsula, probably for geopolitical reasons (Egypt was within the control of the Roman Empire, unlike Arabia, under Persian influence). But placing the biblical Sinai west of the Gulf of Aqaba didn’t make any sense, since that region had always belonged to Egypt (archeology has confirmed it). Why would the Israelites have settled there when chased by the Egyptian army?" Source: "The Arabian Cradle of Zion," by French historian Laurent Guyenot, The Unz Review. Image from World Atlas.
Comment: Whether you agree with Laurent Guyenot in general, he's right about one thing, at least. The idea that the biblical Mount Sinai / Mount Horeb is located on the Sinai peninsula doesn't make any sense at all. If the Jews were fleeing Egypt, why would they settle on Egyptian territory? Assuming this is actual history we're talking about here -- a very big assumption -- they would have left Egypt altogether and crossing the Gulf of Aqaba into Arabia would have been a good way to put some distance between them and the pharaoh. If that's what actually happened -- if the real Mount Sinai is in Arabia and not on the Sinai peninsula -- it would overturn centuries of accepted religious doctrine:
"The biblical Mount Sinai is one of the most important sacred places in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions. The summit [in Egypt] has a mosque that is still used by Muslims, and a Greek Orthodox chapel, constructed in 1934 on the ruins of a 16th-century church, that is not open to the public. The chapel encloses the rock which is considered to be the source for the biblical Tablets of Stone. At the summit also is 'Moses' cave', where Moses was said to have waited to receive the Ten Commandments." (Wikipedia)
The supposed Mount Sinai in Egypt. Is this just a pile of rocks in the middle of the desert?
I'm not sure how many Christians, Jews and Muslims still accept the idea that Mount Sinai is in Egypt. Some Christians, at least, have come around to the belief that the mountain is in Saudi Arabia and the idea seems to be gaining in popularity. The UNZ Review article quoted above points out the effect this is having on Middle Eastern politics:
"The growing popularization of the Arabian Sinai cannot be unrelated to the NEOM project announced in October 2017 by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman: a high-tech, ultra-connected, transnational mega city and economic zone, covering 10,230 square-miles (about the size of Massachusetts), which happens to correspond roughly to ancient Midian."
There's a lot that could be said about the Saudis, the NEOM project and the war in Yemen, among other things, but never mind all that. The UNZ Review article is as much about the current politics of the region as it is about the actual location of the mountain where YHWH gave Moses the ten commandments, but I'm just interested in the ancient history here. I'm not going to comment one way or another about the political stuff, but I will say that there is something deeply sinister about the NEOM project.
Getting back to where Mount Sinai is actually located, it would be interesting to know if the conventional wisdom has been wrong all these years, but I'm not sure how anybody could prove that this or that pile of granite in the desert is the biblical mountain. You would need an ancient map or some kind of non-biblical documentary evidence to do that and nothing of the sort has been discovered as far as I know. But even if the question could be settled conclusively, what difference would it make?
Scholarly interest aside, the importance of all this depends on whether you believe that the Old Testament stories are true. Call me a skeptic, but I don't believe that YHWH appeared on a mountaintop in the form of a burning bush and gave Moses a list of commandments. I don't believe that YHWH exists in the first place and Moses himself is probably a mythological character:
"The modern scholarly consensus is that the figure of Moses is a mythical figure, and while, as William G. Dever writes, 'a Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in the southern Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century B.C.', archaeology cannot confirm his existence. Certainly no Egyptian sources mention Moses or the events of Exodus–Deuteronomy, nor has any archaeological evidence been discovered in Egypt or the Sinai wilderness to support the story in which he is the central figure." (Wikipedia)
The Exodus itself, the founding myth of the Israelites, probably never happened as well:
"The consensus of modern scholars is that the Bible does not give an accurate account of the origins of Israel, which formed as an entity in the southern Transjordan region by the 13th century BCE from the indigenous Canaanite culture. There is no evidence that the Israelites were ever enslaved in ancient Egypt or even lived there and scholars broadly agree that the Exodus has no historical basis. There is a widespread agreement that the composition of the Torah or Pentateuch, the biblical books which contain the Exodus narrative, took place in the Middle Persian Period (5th century BCE), although the traditions behind it are older and can be found in the writings of the 8th-century BCE prophets." (Wikipedia)
In light of all this, the question of where Mount Sinai was located seems pretty much irrelevant.
"For centuries scholars have been hunting for the lost works of ancient Greek and Latin literature. In the Renaissance, books were found in monastic libraries. In the late 19th Century papyrus scrolls were found in the sands of Egypt. But only in Herculaneum in southern Italy has an entire library from the ancient Mediterranean been discovered in situ." Source: BBC News (2013) Herculaneum was destroyed along with Pompeii during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.
"In Herculaneum, Piso [Roman consul 58 BC and Julius Caesar's father-in-law] built a seaside villa on a palatial scale - the width of its beach frontage alone exceeds 220m (721ft). When it was excavated in the middle of the 18th Century, it was found to hold more than 80 bronze and marble statues of the highest quality, including one of Pan having sex with a goat."
Comment: Piso's library was an incredible find. It sounds like Caesar's father-in-law was really into Epicureanism, an advanced philosophy which combined an atomistic materialism with a rational hedonistic ethics that emphasized moderation and the cultivation of friendships. The discovery of the Herculaneum papyri provides yet another example of the Greek influence on the Romans.
"It is no exaggeration to say that we owe most of our knowledge of ancient Egypt to the work of her scribes. The ancient Egyptians covered their temples and tombs with hieroglyphs, but they also employed scribes to record everything from the stocks held in the stores for workers, the proceedings in court, magic spells, wills and other legal contracts, medical procedures, tax records and genealogies. Scribes were central to the functioning of centralized administration, the army and the priesthood and in truth very little happened in ancient Egypt which did not involve a scribe in some manner." Source: Ancient Egypt Online.
"Much of what is known about ancient Egypt is due to the activities of its scribes and the officials. Monumental buildings were erected under their supervision, administrative and economic activities were documented by them, and stories from Egypt's lower classes and foreign lands survive due to scribes putting them in writing." Source: Wikipedia.
"Scribes were considered part of the royal court, were not conscripted into the army, did not have to pay taxes, and were exempt from the heavy manual labor required of the lower classes (corvée labor). The scribal profession worked with painters and artisans who decorated reliefs and other building works with scenes, personages, or hieroglyphic text. "
This charming contraption is regularly featured in sensationalistic stories and videos about ancient death machines. According to Wikipedia, "the brazen bull, bronze bull, or Sicilian bull, was a torture and execution device designed in ancient Greece. According to Diodorus Siculus, recounting the story in Bibliotheca historica, Perillos of Athens invented and proposed it to Phalaris, the tyrant of Akragas, Sicily, as a new means of executing criminals." The brazen bull may have had its origins in Carthaginian human sacrifices and ancient bull worship, assuming that it actually existed, of course.
I haven't been able to find much information about the alleged inventor, Perillos of Athens, other than that he was a brass worker who was supposed to have invented and suggested the use of the Bull to the tyrant Phalaris. If true, Perillos must have had a sick mind and he apparently came to a well-deserved end when Phalaris (disgusted by Perillos's sadism) used him as a guinea pig to test his new invention. Perillos was cooked inside the bull for a while, then taken out alive and thrown off a cliff. That's the story, anyway.
The question is: How much of this story is actually true? The history is extremely murky, but as far as I can tell, no archaeologist has ever uncovered hard evidence that the brass bull as described here ever existed. According to NNDB (a kind of Who's Who database that I'd never heard of before), "the story of the bull cannot be dismissed as pure invention. Pindar, who lived less than a century afterwards, expressly associates this instrument of torture with the name of the tyrant [Phalaris]. There was certainly a brazen bull at Agrigentum, which was carried off by the Carthaginians to Carthage, from where it was again taken by Scipio [Africanus?] and restored to Agrigentum."
Pindar was probably just passing on a story he found in the sources. Likewise for Diodorus Siculus, whose reliability as a historian is still a matter of debate. A very scholarly discussion of Diodorus Siculus's historical method in relation to the story of the bull of Phalaris can be found here [PDF]. As for the brass bull at Agrigentum mentioned above, I haven't been able to find any evidence that it was the same bull as the famous Brazen Bull or that the Agrigentum bull was anything more than a statue. The bull was sacred to several ancient cultures.
There's no limit to human cruelty, but I'm guessing that the story of the Brazen Bull is an early example of propaganda designed, in this case, to smear the reputation of Phalaris, a hated tyrant who was eventually overthrown for his viciousness (and supposedly burned inside his own torture device). According to Livius, "Phalaris became the prototype of an evil dictator" and the story of the invention of the brass bull "...was clearly invented to suggest what tyranny was all about, but there may be an element of historical truth."
The execution of the Protestant scholar, William Tyndale, who was condemned for heresy, then strangled to death and burned at the stake in 1536 AD, tells me everything I need to know about the nature of the early Catholic church. It was a sadistic, totalitarian organization that maintained its grip on its flock through terror and mystification.
Tyndale, a leader in the Protestant Reformation, was condemned partly because he was the first to translate the Bible into English from the Greek and Hebrew texts. The King James Bible drew heavily on Tyndale's [partial?] translation. "One estimate suggests that the New Testament in the King James Version is 83% Tyndale's and the Old Testament 76%," according to Wikipedia.
Translating the Bible into English was something the Catholic church couldn't permit. If ordinary people could read the Bible for themselves Rome would lose its monopoly on the faith, not to mention a lot of its secular power, so the church had to make sure it controlled the message.
Translations of the Bible had to be carefully restricted and regulated. Latin versions were OK because only the churchmen and elites could read Latin, but the last thing the church wanted was an English version that the plebs might actually be able to understand and interpret for themselves. The first English translations of the New Testament had to be printed overseas and were apparently smuggled into England in bales of cotton. At the time, these were probably the most dangerous books in the world to possess. Note: Even possessing a Bible is still dangerous in some places.
During Tyndale's lifetime, Rome didn't want people being able to think for themselves. As far as the church was concerned, the best way to fleece the sheep was to keep them in a state of illiteracy, ignorance and passive obedience. It was a particularly insidious form of social control reinforced with bloody punishments for "heresy." Imagine living under a regime where you have to obey laws written in a language you can't understand. That's what the situation was like, but in the case of the medieval church, if you broke the law you not only faced burning at the stake but eternal damnation.
The church's policy was a form of mushroom management. It's no wonder that the peasants eventually revolted. The war for the English Bible was similar in some ways to Prohibition in America where high-quality booze -- the "real stuff" -- had to be smuggled into the country from Canada and the Caribbean. The church didn't have any more chance of containing the thirst for knowledge during the Reformation than the US government had of containing the thirst for liquor during Prohibition, and the democratization of knowledge exploded with the invention of the printing press:
"In the early days of the Reformation, the revolutionary potential of bulk printing took princes and papacy alike by surprise. In the period from 1518 to 1524, the publication of books in Germany alone skyrocketed sevenfold; between 1518 and 1520, Luther's tracts were distributed in 300,000 printed copies." (Wikipedia)
William Tyndale was a key figure in the war for the English Bible. The eventual publication of the King James Bible, based partly on Tyndale's work and authorized by the Church of England, itself a reaction against Catholic corruption, was a victory for free thought.
"In 2015, Jeffrey Alan Miller, an English professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, stunned the academic world with his announcement, in the Times Literary Supplement, that he had discovered 'the earliest known draft of any part of the King James Bible, unmistakably in the hand of one of the King James translators.' This year [2019] Miller was awarded an NEH research fellowship to bring out a critical edition of the draft, and, as we went to press, it was announced that he had won a MacArthur 'genius' grant." Source: National Endowment for the Humanities (2015).
The King James Bible is an English translation carried out "by 6 panels of translators (47 men in all, most of whom were leading biblical scholars in England) who had the work divided up between them: the Old Testament was entrusted to three panels, the New Testament to two, and the Apocrypha to one." (Wikipedia) The work was started in 1604 AD and completed/published in 1611. The drafts or notebooks that Jeffrey Miller discovered were written by one of these translators, a Puritan theologian named Steven Ward (1572–1643).
Note: The KJ version wasn't the first English translation of the Bible. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he followers of John Wycliffe undertook the first complete English translations of the Christian scriptures in the 14th century. These translations were banned in 1409 due to their association with the Lollards," a pre-Protestant reform movement within the Roman Catholic church which was eventually condemned as a heresy.
These early English translations of the Bible were illegal. According to Wikipedia,"the spread of Wycliffe's Bible in the late 14th century led to the death penalty for anyone found in unlicensed possession of Scripture in English, although translations were available in all other major European languages." The books themselves were burned by the orders of the Pope and at least one of Wycliffe's followers, Jan Hus, was burned at the stake for criticizing the extremely corrupt church and promoting the radical idea that people should be able to read the Bible in their own language.
"The dramatic story of the King James Bible and the English Bibles that came before it is part of a much larger, even epic, narrative that spans not just centuries, but millennia: the history of the Christian Bible as a book. This gallery offers a look at a wide sampling of early Bibles and psalters (collections of the psalms)." Source: Manifold Greatness.
Comment: I'm not that interested in the Bible itself, but it doesn't really matter. I love everything about old books from their bindings and worn covers to the feel of their pages and the look of their text and engravings. They're works of art, designed to last, and the care that went into their production, not to mention their age, gives their content an almost mystical aura of ancient wisdom.
I've always wanted to collect old books--really old books--but I don't have the slightest idea how to get into something like that and, in any case, I couldn't afford it. If I did know what I was doing and had the money, I know what I'd like to collect, though. Old Bibles may be priceless, but they're a little too tame for me. I'm more interested in dangerous knowledge and forbidden books like the Necronomicon or the Nine Gates Of The Kingdom Of Shadows. Too bad they don't actually exist.
Notes: "The Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St. John's fragment [...] is a fragment from a papyrus codex, measuring only 3.5 by 2.5 inches (8.9 by 6 cm) at its widest; and conserved with the Rylands Papyri at the John Rylands University Library Manchester, UK. The front (recto) contains parts of seven lines from the Gospel of John 18:31–33, in Greek, and the back (verso) contains parts of seven lines from verses 37–38.[...] Since 2007, the papyrus has been on permanent display in the library's Deansgate building." Source: Wikipedia
The Wikipedia article on P52 dates the fragment to "somewhere between 117 CE and 138 CE..," but then goes on to add that "...the difficulty of fixing the date of a fragment based solely on paleographic evidence allows a much wider range, potentially extending from before 100 CE past 150 CE..."
The video, on the other hand, says that the fragment has been dated to 100-125 AD and speculates that it could have been written in the "mid-1st century," which leads me to believe that the video was created by a Christian eager to establish an early date. As for the video's assertion that P52 reports the "authentic words of Jesus," this is pure speculation which can't be supported by the age of the fragment, whatever it turns out to be. In fact, I can't think of anything that would prove that the content of the fragment is authentic.
If the estimated age of the fragment is accurate, however, P52 proves that the Hellenized version of the gospel found in John was in circulation during the 2nd century AD.
Note: Catherine of Alexandria probably never existed:
"Donald Attwater (English Catholic author, 1892-1977) dismisses what he calls the 'legend' of Saint Catherine, arguing for a lack of any 'positive evidence that she ever existed outside the mind of some Greek writer who first composed what he intended to be simply an edifying romance.' Harold Davis writes that 'assiduous research has failed to identify Catherine with any historical personage' and has theorized that Catherine was an invention inspired to provide a counterpart to the story of the slightly later pagan philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350–370 – 415 CE)." (Wikipedia)
According to the UNESCO World Heritage List, "The [Greek Orthodox] monastery of St Catherine stands at the foot of Mount Horeb where, the Old Testament records, Moses received the Tablets of the Law. The mountain is known and revered by Muslims as Jebel Musa. The entire area is sacred to three world religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism." The monastery is controlled by "the autonomous Church of Sinai."
Even though St. Catherine's was named after a fictitious saint, this is still a remarkable and very old institution:
"Built between 548 and 565, the monastery is one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world. The site contains the world's oldest continually operating library [next video], possessing many unique books including the Syriac Sinaiticus and, until 1859, the Codex Sinaiticus."
The incredible library filmed on a potato.
Note: The manuscript shown in the video above is the Ashtiname of Muhammed, "also known as the Covenant or Testament (Testamentum) of Muhammad (the Islamic Prophet) ... a document which is a charter or writ ratified by the Islamic Prophet Muhammad granting protection and other privileges to the followers of Jesus the Nazarene, given to the Christian monks of Saint Catherine's Monastery. It is sealed with an imprint representing Muhammad's hand."
The manuscript may be inauthentic. According to Wikipedia, "Since the 19th century, several aspects of the Ashtiname, notably the list of witnesses, have been questioned by scholars. There are similarities to other documents granted to other religious communities in the Near East. One example is Muhammad's alleged letter to the Christians of Najran, which first came to light in 878 in a monastery in Iraq and whose text is preserved in the Chronicle of Seert." It doesn't really matter, though, because even if the Ashtiname is a forgery -- something I don't think anyone is claiming -- it's still a priceless artifact from the period.
Recently renovated, the library at St. Catherine's was re-opened in 2017.
The manuscripts and books in the monastery's library go way back:
"When Egeria visited the Sinai in 383-384, she wrote approvingly of the way the monks read to her the scriptural accounts concerning the various events that had taken place there. Thus we can speak of manuscripts at Sinai in the fourth century. It is written of Saint John Climacus that, while living as a hermit, he spent much time in prayer and in the copying of books. This is evidence of manuscript production at Sinai in the sixth century. The library at the Holy Monastery of Sinai is thus the inheritor of texts and of traditions that date to the earliest years of a monastic presence in the Sinai. In earlier times, manuscripts were kept in three different places: in the north wall of the monastery, in the vicinity of the church, and in a central location where the texts were accessible." Source: The Sinai Monastery website.
Research has also revealed that some of the manuscripts in the library contain "hidden manuscripts" which were erased in order to reuse the parchment they were written on.
"The Sinai manuscripts comprise the oldest and most important Christian monastic library collection. Of its 3,300 manuscripts, two-thirds are in Greek. The rest are principally in Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, and Slavonic, through there are other manuscripts in Polish, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Armenian, Latin, and Persian. The New Finds correspond to these languages, and are stored adjacent to the library. The library also contains an important archive, containing letters, account books, charters, and other documents." Source: The Sinai Monastery website.
"...The most famous manuscript is the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus, of which the monastery retains twelve pages and some twenty-four fragments."
Comment: I'm not a Christian, but St. Catherine's and its library are priceless historical treasures which must be protected at all costs. The monastery has already been the target of at least one attempted terrorist attack back in 2015 and the Islamic State vermin are still waging a sporadic insurgency in the Sinai. I hate to say it, but if the situation deteriorates the Church of Sinai (which controls the monastery) should consider moving the library to a safer location, preferably somewhere out of the country.
"Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendor, the squalor and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires, he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, aging flirts and downtrodden teachers." -- Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, Penguin Classics, Third Edition.
"[Juvenal was] known primarily for the angry tone of his early Satires, although in later poems he developed an ironical and detached superiority as his satiric strategy," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised). "...virtually nothing is known of his life...the absence of dedication to a patron in Juvenal's Satires may suggest that he was a member of the elite. The few datable references confirm Syme's assessment that the five books were written during the second and third decades of the 2nd cent. AD (or later), at about the same time as Tacitus was writing his Annals."
Comment: Juvenal is my favorite Roman poet. Earthy, cynical, outraged, comically obscene, his poetry seems strangely modern and I can sympathize with his disgust at the corruption, stupidity and perversity of the world he lived in. In that regard, human nature being what it is, very little has changed over the last 2000 years.
Juvenal coined the phrase "bread and circuses" to describe the political system of Rome in his day, a system which still exists in modern America, a country where at least half the population is receiving some form of government benefits and tens of millions of plebs work themselves into a lather over mass sports spectacles like the Super Bowl every year. And if you think we're all that different from the mobs who attended the gladiatorial fights and animal hunts at the Colosseum, it should be noted that gladiator-like mixed martial arts arena fighting has seen a huge surge in popularity recently. Juvenal attended the games in Rome and he could be particularly acerbic about the degeneracy, excess and status-seeking of some of the spectators:
"To go to the games, Ogulnia hires dresses, attendants, a carriage, cushions, a baby-sitter, companions, and a little blonde slave-girl to carry her messages. Yet what's left of the family plate, down to the last salver, she'll hand out as a present to some smooth athlete. Many such women lack substance [wealth] - yet poverty gives them no sense of restraint, they don't observe the limits." -- Satire VI. Note: I copied these passages in prose form in order to save space.
If Juvenal could see the crowds at a modern Super Bowl, he'd probably have a heart attack. An impoverished aristocrat -- at least when he was writing the early satires -- he was highly indignant about the way he was shoved aside to make way for wealthy low-lives at the games:
"The hardest thing that there is to bear about wretched poverty is the fact that it makes men ridiculous. 'You! Get out of those front-row seats,' we're told. 'You ought to be ashamed - your incomes are far too meager! The law's the law. Make way for some pander's son and heir, spawned in an unknown brothel; yield your place to the offspring of that natty auctioneer with the trainer's son and the ring-fighter's brat applauding beside him!'" -- Satire III.
Like so many other Romans, Juvenal's poverty reduced him to depending on a wealthy patron for the necessities of life. The second-class treatment he received at the hands of this patron didn't do much to improve his mood, especially when he considered the profligacy of his "betters:"
"...when has there been so abundant a crop of vices? When has the purse of greed yawned wider? When was gambling more frantic? Today men face the table's hazards with not their purse but their strong-box open beside them...Isn't it crazy to lose ten thousand on a turn of the dice, yet grudge a shirt to your shivering slave? In the old days who'd have built all those country houses, or dined off seven courses, alone? Now citizens must scramble for a little basket of scraps on their patron's doorstep." -- Satire I.
Juvenal's Rome was a behavioral sink, a decadent and dangerous city where whores, criminals and morons rose to the top and lorded it over the ordinary citizens who probably counted themselves lucky if they could make it through the day without being robbed or stabbed to death. Most of the population lived in hazardous tenements run by greedy landlords who were only interested in swindling the tenants crammed together in fire-trap buildings that could collapse or burn to the ground at any minute:
"...here we inhabit a city largely shored up with gimcrack stays and props: that's how our landlords postpone slippage, and -- after masking great cracks in the ancient fabric -- assure the tenants they can sleep sound, when the house is tottering. Myself, I prefer life without fires, without nocturnal panics. By the time the smoke's reached the third floor -- and you're still asleep -- the heroic downstairs neighbor is roaring for water, shifting his stuff to safety. If the alarm's at ground-level, the last to fry is the wretch [on the upper floor] among the nesting pigeons with nothing but tiles between himself and the weather." - Satire III.
Juvenal was the misanthrope of his day, ranting about everything from the mobs on the street and the degenerates in high office to the promiscuity of Roman women and the grotesque spectacles of the theater and games. Later in his life, he apparently came into some money and mellowed a little -- but not much. He was essentially a conservative, but unlike Tacitus, who focused on the moral decline of the Rome aristocracy, Juvenal describes in lurid detail the day-t0-day life of the average citizen. I don't have the space to give more than a few quotes from the Satires, but they're full of juicy details and your view of ancient Rome will never be quite the same again after you read them. Highly recommended.
The great Auberon Waugh. In this interview, he seems kind of dismissive of Juvenal's scorn for Roman society, which is pretty odd coming from somebody like him. To see what I mean, you should check out The Diaries Of Auberon Waugh, a collection of his Private Eye writings (1976-1985), aptly described on Amazon as the "venomous, abusive, irrational, fantastical, hugely bigoted diary of a ranting maniac." Highly recommended.
Is The Real Mount Sinai In Saudi Arabia?
"'Yahweh came from Sinai' (Deuteronomy 33:2; Psalms 68:18). It is in Sinai that Moses first encounters Yahweh; it is back to Sinai that Moses leads Yahweh’s people from Egypt; and it is from Sinai that, two years later, on Yahweh’s order again, Moses sets off with them to conquer a piece of the Fertile Crescent.
"But where is Sinai, with its Mount Horeb [the mountain where God gave Moses the 10 commandments]? Exodus unequivocally places it in the land of Midian ...
"And where is Midian? Greek authors unanimously place it in northwestern Arabia, on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Aqaba [see map]. Even Paul the Apostle, who spent three years in Arabia, knew that 'Sinai is a mountain in Arabia' (Galatians 4:25). It was not before the 4th century that the biblical Sinai was misplaced in the
Egyptian peninsula, probably for geopolitical reasons (Egypt was within the control of the Roman Empire, unlike Arabia, under Persian influence). But placing the biblical Sinai west of the Gulf of Aqaba didn’t make any sense, since that region had always belonged to Egypt (archeology has confirmed it). Why would the Israelites have settled there when chased by the Egyptian army?" Source: "The Arabian Cradle of Zion," by French historian Laurent Guyenot, The Unz Review. Image from World Atlas.
Comment: Whether you agree with Laurent Guyenot in general, he's right about one thing, at least. The idea that the biblical Mount Sinai / Mount Horeb is located on the Sinai peninsula doesn't make any sense at all. If the Jews were fleeing Egypt, why would they settle on Egyptian territory? Assuming this is actual history we're talking about here -- a very big assumption -- they would have left Egypt altogether and crossing the Gulf of Aqaba into Arabia would have been a good way to put some distance between them and the pharaoh. If that's what actually happened -- if the real Mount Sinai is in Arabia and not on the Sinai peninsula -- it would overturn centuries of accepted religious doctrine:
"The biblical Mount Sinai is one of the most important sacred places in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions. The summit [in Egypt] has a mosque that is still used by Muslims, and a Greek Orthodox chapel, constructed in 1934 on the ruins of a 16th-century church, that is not open to the public. The chapel encloses the rock which is considered to be the source for the biblical Tablets of Stone. At the summit also is 'Moses' cave', where Moses was said to have waited to receive the Ten Commandments." (Wikipedia)
The supposed Mount Sinai in Egypt. Is this just a pile of rocks in the middle of the desert?
I'm not sure how many Christians, Jews and Muslims still accept the idea that Mount Sinai is in Egypt. Some Christians, at least, have come around to the belief that the mountain is in Saudi Arabia and the idea seems to be gaining in popularity. The UNZ Review article quoted above points out the effect this is having on Middle Eastern politics:
"The growing popularization of the Arabian Sinai cannot be unrelated to the NEOM project announced in October 2017 by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman: a high-tech, ultra-connected, transnational mega city and economic zone, covering 10,230 square-miles (about the size of Massachusetts), which happens to correspond roughly to ancient Midian."
There's a lot that could be said about the Saudis, the NEOM project and the war in Yemen, among other things, but never mind all that. The UNZ Review article is as much about the current politics of the region as it is about the actual location of the mountain where YHWH gave Moses the ten commandments, but I'm just interested in the ancient history here. I'm not going to comment one way or another about the political stuff, but I will say that there is something deeply sinister about the NEOM project.
Getting back to where Mount Sinai is actually located, it would be interesting to know if the conventional wisdom has been wrong all these years, but I'm not sure how anybody could prove that this or that pile of granite in the desert is the biblical mountain. You would need an ancient map or some kind of non-biblical documentary evidence to do that and nothing of the sort has been discovered as far as I know. But even if the question could be settled conclusively, what difference would it make?
Scholarly interest aside, the importance of all this depends on whether you believe that the Old Testament stories are true. Call me a skeptic, but I don't believe that YHWH appeared on a mountaintop in the form of a burning bush and gave Moses a list of commandments. I don't believe that YHWH exists in the first place and Moses himself is probably a mythological character:
"The modern scholarly consensus is that the figure of Moses is a mythical figure, and while, as William G. Dever writes, 'a Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in the southern Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century B.C.', archaeology cannot confirm his existence. Certainly no Egyptian sources mention Moses or the events of Exodus–Deuteronomy, nor has any archaeological evidence been discovered in Egypt or the Sinai wilderness to support the story in which he is the central figure." (Wikipedia)
The Exodus itself, the founding myth of the Israelites, probably never happened as well:
"The consensus of modern scholars is that the Bible does not give an accurate account of the origins of Israel, which formed as an entity in the southern Transjordan region by the 13th century BCE from the indigenous Canaanite culture. There is no evidence that the Israelites were ever enslaved in ancient Egypt or even lived there and scholars broadly agree that the Exodus has no historical basis. There is a widespread agreement that the composition of the Torah or Pentateuch, the biblical books which contain the Exodus narrative, took place in the Middle Persian Period (5th century BCE), although the traditions behind it are older and can be found in the writings of the 8th-century BCE prophets." (Wikipedia)
In light of all this, the question of where Mount Sinai was located seems pretty much irrelevant.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient Africa, Ancient Israel, Ancient Literature, Ancient Middle East, Arabia, Commentary, Culture, Current Affairs, Egypt, Hidden History, Religion, Videos | Permalink