Mount Sinai Found!

Simcha Jacobovici TV ^ | June 11, 2013 | Simcha Jacobovici

[SunkenCiv]

For those who have never been to Mitzpe Ramon, you’re missing out. It’s on the edge of the Ramon makhtesh -- Israel’s Grand Canyon. In fact, although it is called a “crater” in English, it is actually a “makhtesh” i.e., a “box canyon”, formed not by a meteor or a river, but by geological processes of a receding ocean. It is the world’s largest “makhtesh”!

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In any event, no one listened, but everyone had a lot of fun. My friend Hershel Shanks who moderated my session chided me for being too confident. He wanted me to have an appropriate mount of humility when I said that his theory – following the late Frank Moore Cross – that Mount Sinai was in Saudi Arabia was impossible. Hershel, by definition, Mount Sinai has to be in the Sinai, or it’s not Mount Sinai. Having said all this, Joshua Schmidt has to be commended for creating this forum. The only way to get to the truth is by a civilized debate.

Here is a link to my paper where I contend -- no one has made a single argument as to why I am wrong -- that Hashem el-Tarif, a mountain about 45 minutes out of Eilat into the Sinai desert is, without question, (sorry, Hershel, I know I should be more humble) Mount Sinai!

[SunkenCiv]

It’s a lump of rock in a landscape that is a lump of rock, just like every other lump of rock in that same landscape. They are unremarkable. Mount Seir was identified by Charles Beke as Mount Sinai in the second half of the 19th century, but the location of Mount Seir also varies. Beke identified it as Jebel-e’-Nur in Arabia, but he was looking for a volcano (he was of the school of thought that Sinai was a volcano, hence the pillar of smoke by day, fire by night) and Jebel-e’-Nur wasn’t one.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Jebel-e%27-Nur

[GeronL]

interesting

lots of guesswork involved

[SunkenCiv]

Another proposed Sinai, just over the border from Israel, but in this shot it doesn't look like a mountain at all -- 30°20'N,34°20'E

[SunkenCiv]

The very lack of information is interesting, because, for example, the Valley of Siddim is specifically glossed in the OT as being now the Dead Sea; the landscape had changed, but the Israelites knew their geography. The OT account of the wandering between Mt Horeb and Mt Sinai implies that they are one and the same place, but the nomadic lifestyle the Israelites led took them back and forth with flocks. One destination was on one side of the mountain, the other end of the cycle was on the other side of the mountain. Each face had a different name. IMHO, the real mountain has a double peak, and pronounced, basically impassible ridgelines coming out of it, cradling two separate valleys that were worthwhile places to sojourn, but necessitating a long trip along a very specific route, “c”-shaped.

[GeronL]

long journey around a mountain, so they gave it 2 names.. heh