Mount Sinai
Question
Dear Rabbi As the originator of Jewish history, where is the current location of mount Sinai where the great Moses received 10 Commandments? Many thanks With regards Sam Sunder
Answer
Shalom!
Thank you for your question.
No one is absolutely certain which mountain was the Mount Sinai of the Bible, the place where the Revelation of the Torah took place. There are over a dozen candidates, in fact.
Josephus writes that Mount Sinai is to be found "between Egypt and Arabia."
Two of the more notable identifications of Mount Sinai include:
Jebel Musa. This is the most likely candidate and it is the site most visited as the presumed site of Mount Sinai. It is also known as “Saint Catherine’s.” It attracts many tourists who hike to the top. There is evidence of massive encampment in the area dating back to Biblical times. It is also one of the few areas of the Sinai desert that had pasture for the animals – a detail mentioned in the Torah itself.
Jabal al-Lawz is a mountain in Saudi Arabia which is also a possible candidate. To this day there is water emerging from rocks which is reminiscent of Moses speaking/hitting a rock for water when the Jewish people were thirsty.
On a related note, we are told that on rocks in the area of Mount Sinai one will find the image a bush. As Rabbi Yaakov Emden writes, “The stones of Mount Sinai have on them an image of the sneh (the burning bush); therefore this mountain is called Sinai because of the sneh in which G-d revealed Himself to Moses. One of the distinguished members of Barcelona brought to me some of these stones and I saw on them the sneh in perfect detail. This is a Heavenly phenomenon, for when I broke the stone in pieces I found the image of the sneh on every side and inner part of the stone, and I marveled at this.”
Similarly, the kabbalistic work Arvei Nachal notes, “It is known that the image of this sneh appears on all the stones of Mount Sinai, and it is a wondrous sign that this is so, since when any such stone is broken into fragments, each will have an image of the sneh. Indeed, these stones from Mount Sinai are an omen for the revelation of the Torah.”