On the identification of Mount Sinai

[lethargic_man]

In the summer of 1995 I climbed Jebel Musa, the mountain Muslims and Christians, though not Jews, identify as Mount Sinai, in order to see the sunrise from the top. People started climbing at one o'clock in the morning in order to get to the top in time for sunrise. (My group was more sensible than to climb a rocky mountain in the middle of nowhere in pitch darkness; we hiked up the previous afternoon and slept in the open air half an hour from the summit.)

As the sun rose, I looked around, and saw everyone facing to the the east. So, being me, I turned around and faced west to see what they were all missing—and what I saw then impressed me greatly, and suggested a reason to me why Christians and Muslims identify this mountain, the second tallest in the Sinai peninsula, with Mt Sinai.

What I saw was an almost perfectly triangular shadow cast upon the mountain to the west:

What made this special was the fact that the mountain's profile from most angles is not conical in the slightest. Here's a view looking northwards, pretty much straight down the right-hand shoulder of the triangle, towards Jebel Safsafa (identified with Mt Horeb):

It's just pure chance that from the angle of the rising sun, the ridges down each side of the mountain and those on the facing mountain combine to give such a geometrically perfect shadow. There's a similar, but even more impressive, shadow cast by a holy mountain in Sir Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise; that was what gave me the idea this might be the reason this mountain was identified as the one where the Ten Commandments were given.

The strange thing is that everyone talks about seeing the sun rise from the top of Jebel Musa, but I've never heard anyone else talk about the mountain's shadow before. Maybe no one else is perverse enough to look around to see what everyone else is missing.

(Oh, and the reason the Jews don't identify this mountain as Mt Sinai? Well, there's a midrash in which all the mountains clamoured to be the one on which the Law was given, boasting of their height and so forth; but the mountain G-d chose was a small, insignificant one that had not put itself forward. This both teaches the value of humility, and (cf. Deut. 34:6) helped prevent the mountain being turned into a shrine.)

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Amazing picture.

[darren grant (from livejournal.com)]

I like it.. Delta for David, after all..

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

The letter ד was actually shaped like an equilateral triangle in the palaeo-Hebrew script used at the time... but David has nothing to do with Mt Sinai; that was centuries before his time and hundreds of miles from his kingdom.