v. Horeb
Exo 19:1 same day they came to the desert of S
Lev 7:38 The LORD commanded Moses on Mount S
Num 1:1 Jehovah spoke to Moses in the desert of S
Deu 33:2 said, The LORD came from S, and from Seir they
Jdg 5:5; Psa 68:8 that S, before Jehovah God
Sinai (Heb. Sînay, perhaps “thorny”; the name could be related to Sin, the Moon goddess of the Babylonians; gr. Siná). 1. Desert, which extends before Mount Sinai, in which the Israelites encamped when they received the law and built the tabernacle (Exo 19:1, 2; Num 1:1, 19:3: 4, 14; etc.) . It is most likely the plain called er-Râhah, about 3 km long and 1.6 km wide, north of Ras ets-Tsaf-tsafeh. 2. Mount from which God gave the Decalogue; also called Horeb,* whose meaning is uncertain (Deu 1:2, 6, 19; 4:10; 5:2; 9:8; cf Exo 19:11, 18, 20, 23; 24:16; 31:18 ; 34:2, 4, 29, 32; Lev 7:38; etc.). The children of Israel arrived at Mount Sinai after touring Mara, Elim and Rephidim in the 3rd month after their departure from Egypt (Exo 15:23, 27; 16:1; 17:1; 19:1, 2). It was a distance of 11 days’ journey from Kadesh-barnea (Deu 1:2). In general, the Christian tradition has located this mountain in the interior of the Sinai Peninsula, where 2 mountains have been identified as Sinai. A tradition dating back to Eusebius (4th century AD) establishes that the Jebel Serbal would be the peak from which the law was given. It is an impressive prominence, 2,070 m high, south of Wâdî Feirân (generally identified with Refidim). But there is no plain in its vicinity capable of containing a more or less considerable crowd. The 2nd tradition, dating from the days of Justinian (6th century AD), identifies Sinai with the Jebel Mfs~, the southeastern peak of a granite mountain with 2 promontories. The northwestern peak, Ras ets-Tsaftsafeh, is 1,993 m high, and the southeastern one, Jebel Mfs~, 2,244 m. Map V, D-5. 471. Ras ets-Tsaftsafeh, the probable mountain where the law was given. In front of Ras ets-Tsaftsafeh there is a wide plain called er-Râhah, from which the mount can be clearly seen and on which a large camp can be comfortably set up. Not so in the other slopes, 1104 because there is no space for the settlement of such a multitude as was the Israelite. It should also be noted that the top of Jebel Mûs~ is only visible from a rather small area. Modern visitors who climb to the top of both peaks, and compare their geographical details with the description given in the Pentateuch, are usually inclined to identify Ras ets-Tsaftsafeh with Mount Sinai, and can scarcely understand why. why the Jebel Mfs~ has had this honor for so many centuries. In the valley (Wâd§ ed-Deir) that extends in front of the Jebel Mfs~, is the famous Monastery of Saint Catherine, founded by Emperor Justinian in 527 AD in honor of a Christian martyr of the same name, who died under torture on the wheel and beheaded in Alexandria in 307 AD This site was selected for the monastery, near Mount Sinai, because tradition held that angels would have carried her body to the top of Jebel Katherin, a towering 2,614m mountain. high, about 3.5 km from the Jebel Mfs. The monastery (fig 472), inhabited by Greek monks, has one of the best libraries in the East. There, in 1844, Tischendorf discovered the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest manuscripts of the Bible, from the 4th century AD (fig 85). 472. The Santa Catalina Monastery as seen from the slopes of Mount Sinai. Some scholars, who believe that the dating of the law as described in the Pentateuch (Exo 19:18) was accompanied by volcanic activity, do not accept the identification of Mount Sinai with any of the mountains found in the perimeter of Mount Sinai. the Sinai Peninsula, because there are no volcanoes there. Rather, they point to a region of Midian, to the east of the Gulf of Aqaba, where volcanoes can be found that have been active in historical times. But there is no need to relate a volcanic eruption to the divine manifestations that occurred in the communication of the Decalogue. God, who manages all the resources of nature, did not need a volcano to manifest himself through smoke and fire from the top of the mountain. Other scholars, whose arguments for their views are also unconvincing, try to place Mount Sinai near Kadesh, or on Mount Seir south of the Dead Sea. This Dictionary holds that Ras ets-TsaÆ’tsaÆ’eh has the greatest chance of being the true Mount Sinai, more than any other in Southwest Asia.
Source: Evangelical Bible Dictionary
mountain in which, according to Ex 19, Moses received the tables of the Law and the Covenant of Yahweh and the people of Israel. Elsewhere in Scripture it is called Mount Horeb, that is, Mount of God, Ex 3, 1. It is not clear which exactly is Mount S. In the massif of the S., which covers almost the entire peninsula of the same name, northwest of Egypt, there are three mountains. The one known as Jabal Katrinah has two very pronounced peaks, the northern one, today known as Horeb, and the southern one, which the Arabs call Jabal Musa, that is, Mount Moses, considered by tradition to be the place of the promulgation of the Law. On this mountain there is an Orthodox Christian monastery founded in the 6th century by Emperor Justinian I; In this monastery, in 1844, a manuscript from the 6th century, the so-called Sinaitic Code, was found.
In the Scriptures, the desert of the S. is also called the plain in which the people of Israel camped after leaving Egypt, around the mountain of the same name, Ex 19, 1; there the first census of the Israelites was carried out, Nm 1, 1..
Digital Bible Dictionary, Grupo C Service & Design Ltda., Colombia, 2003
Source: Digital Bible Dictionary
1. A peninsula lying south of the Paran desert between the Gulf of Hace, to the east, and the Gulf of Suez, to the west.
2. A wilderness (Exo 19:1) where Israel came in the third month after they left Egypt.
3. A mountain (Exo 19:20), Horeb. It was there that God met and spoke with Moses and gave him the law (Exo 19:3). The only subsequent visit to the mountain recorded in the Scriptures is that of Elijah when he fled from Jezebel (1Ki 19:8).
Source: Hispanic World Bible Dictionary
It is not yet clear whether the toponym “Sinai” originally designated the entire mountain of the peninsula between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqabá or if it only indicated a summit of that range.
The current name of “Sinai” and “Sinai Peninsula” cannot shed any light on this, because it derives from a popular linguistic use, with a very generic support in biblical names.
The Bible refers to the mount of the decalogue as a “mount of God.” If the choice of that mount was perhaps motivated by the possibly older designation of †˜el sadday, we cannot say for sure; the “god of the mountain” or “the god worshiped on the mountain” could, moreover, be a divine designation that the Jewish emigrants had already brought to Egypt, for which later — no longer by the work of Moses, but in the course of their sojourn in Egypt — they could have referred to Sinai as the mount of God and the mount of pilgrimage.
The mountain is sometimes called Sinai and sometimes Horeb. Double designation that has led to many errors, but has also caused numerous hypotheses. Here we can only refer to some fundamental points of the controversy.
“Mount of God” indicates that the imposing mountain range of the peninsula was seen by the nomadic and semi-nomadic inhabitants of the region as the dwelling place of a god. Perhaps they worshiped the lunar god Sin there, from whom the toponym Sinai would have spontaneously derived. Horeb, on the contrary, seems to be a characteristic designation of the mount; horeb in the Canaanite language is †œthe dry one,† †œthe hard one,† †œthe lonely one† ; perhaps also †œmountain of cliffs.† Such toponyms, of which one is a divine name and the other an indicator of characteristics, may very well have coexisted in linguistic use.
In 1899, Lagrange hypothesized that Horeb would have been the common name of the mountain range, while Sinai would have designated a particular mount. As the name of Sinai contains the name of the lunar god Sin, and the veneration of a god makes sense linked to a specific and precise mountain and not to an entire mountain range, the hypothesis has a good chance of being true.
On the other hand, we cannot ignore the indication of the Wellhausen school, according to which Horeb is the mount of legislation, especially in the Elohist and in the Deuteronomist (so, for example, in the narrations about Elijah the mountain is called Horeb (cf. 1Ki 19:9-18). From which it could be concluded that the name of Sinai (Mount of Sin) was scandalous, and for this reason it was replaced by the characteristic toponym of Horeb. On the other hand, the Priestly Writing, in the middle of the first millennium, used the name Sinai again, perhaps to impose the literary fiction that the entire Law, down to the last clause, came from Mosaic times. Without this naturally sanctioning the cult of Sin. To clarify this, the writers of the Priestly Writing could have introduced as a conjecture the designation of the burning bush with sene (blackberry).
But, what was the mount of the Sinaitic mountain range in which the Law was given? Where did the desert march people camp? The mount of legislation might have been ras es-Safsafe (1994 m), before which the V-shaped plain of er-Raha stretches to the northwest and the water-carrying wadi ed-Deir flows northeast ( all these toponyms are Arabic). Tradition has also located the events there, even pending whether Moses withdrew to what is now designated by his name dyebel Musa (2,244 m). Nor do other peaks of the Sinai mountain range across the peninsula of the same name contradict the biblical text.
Finally, we must not silence the fact that the Sinai of the Bible is not necessarily the Sinai of our current geography. Since the pilgrimages of the Israelites, as found in the Bible, are a later construction; such paths ultimately say nothing about the position of Sinai, which very well could have been in another mountain range, and only in the compilation of traditional accounts was it pointed out, when indicating the direction of the pilgrimages, that Sinai as mount of the decalogue, the famous mount of God, must have been located in the south of the peninsula between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqabá.
For the history of salvation, the location of the Mount of the Decalogue is of no importance. What is truly important is that with Sinai the mountain of legislation is marked…