Page 14 - BV17

14 Is Mt. Sinai the Mountain of YEHOVAH?

tory, and it was natural enough for someone who had played such an important part as Constantine
to believe, or require others to believe, that he, too, had seen a vision, which supported his [sup-
posed] adherence to Christianity" (Constantine the Great: The Man and His Times. Charles
Scribner's Sons, N.Y. 1994. P. 138).

"The ancient world," continues Grant, "and especially the world of Constantine's epoch,
was as credulous of significant nocturnal dreams as it was of other kinds of visions. 'It is to dreams,'
wrote Tertullian, 'that the majority of humankind owe their knowledge of God.' Artemidorus of
Ephesus devoted a study to the subject, the Oneirocriticon. Divine powers were believed to visit
people very often in their dreams and give them messages, and this was thought to apply particu-
larly to great and powerful men. Thus an angel was said to have appeared in a dream to Licinius, and
Constantine himself was said to have seen and talked with God in dreams, as part of his LIFELONG
RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SUPERNATURAL" (Ibid., p. 140).

And there was no exception to this when Constantine selected Jebel Musa in the Sinai pen-
insula as the "true" site of the Mountain of God. As we shall see, there was no biblical or historical
teaching that prompted Constantine to pick the area in the wilderness of the Sinai. The Jews them-
selves had NO FIRM TRADITION regarding the location of Mt. Sinai.

Notice what the Jewish Encyclopedia says:

There is no Jewish tradition of the geographical location of Mt. Sinai; it seems that its
exact location was obscure already in the time of the monarchy....The Christian hermits
and monks, mostly from Egypt, who settled in Southern Sinai from the second century
C.E. on, made repeated efforts to identify the locality of the Exodus with actual places to
which the believers could make their way as pilgrims. The identification of Mt. Sinai
either with Jebel Sirbal near the oasis of Firan (Paran; Nilus, Cosmos Indicopleustes), or
with Jebel Musa, CAN BE TRACED BACK AS FAR AS THE FOURTH CENTURY
C.E. [TO CONSTANTINE'S TIME]. (Vol. 14, p. 1599).

The selection of the Sinai peninsula for the site of Mt. Sinai probably occurred at the same
time Constantine decided to build a church at the supposed place of Christ's resurrection in Jerusa-
lem. The identification of "holy sites" in the Middle East was the result of an ATONING ACTION
by Constantine for the deaths of his wife Fausta and his son Crispus -- executed at his own com-
mand. In a fit of depression Constantine sent his MOTHER HELENA to the Middle East to dis-
cover the spots he had "foreseen" in his visions.

Helena confirmed her son’s belief by constructing the first church at the site of the assumed
Mt. Sinai -- calling it the Chapel of the Burning Bush. A monastic community developed around the
chapel and, to protect both the monks and the chapel from the attacks of roving Bedouin marauders,
the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I built a fortress-like basilica around the chapel in 542 A.D. The
basilica was called the Church of Transfiguration in memory of the transfiguration of Yeshua the
Messiah in the presence of Moses and Elijah on sacred Mt. Tabor. It is now known as St. Kather-
ine’s monastery. All this construction and religious activity served to more firmly establish the leg-
endary association of Jebel Musa as the biblical Mt. Sinai.

The Berean Voice September-October 2002