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6 Is Mt. Sinai the Mountain of YEHOVAH?

Burckhardt’s journey back was by way of Wadi Feiran and its oasis -- the largest in the Si-
nai. Where the wadi leaves the mountains and reaches the coastal strip, Burckhardt climbed up an
impressive mountain rising over 6,800 feet called Mt. Serbal -- one of the tallest in the peninsula.
There he found remains of shrines and pilgrims’ inscriptions. Additional research established the
fact that the main monastic center in Sinai -- through most of the centuries -- was at Wadi Feiran
near Serbal, NOT at St. Katherine.

When Burckhardt published his findings (Travels in Syria and the Holy Land), his conclu-
sions shook the scholarly and biblical worlds. The true Mt. Sinai, he declared, was NOT Mt. Musa,
but Mt. Serbal!

The Robinson and Smith Expedition

The next major expedition to Sinai was made by the American Edward Robinson, together
with Eli Smith. Like Burckhardt, they left Suez City on camelback, armed with his book and the
maps of the Frenchman Count Leon de Laborde who toured the peninsula in 1826 and 1828. It took
Robinson and Smith 13 days in early spring to reach the monastery of St. Katherine. Once there,
Robinson thoroughly examined the monks’ legends and discovered that at Feiran there was indeed
a superior monastic community (sometimes led by full bishops) to which Katherine and several
other monastic communities in the southern Sinai were subordinate. Tradition, therefore, placed
GREATER EMPHASIS on Feiran. In the tales and documents he also uncovered the fact that
mounts Musa and Katherine were of NO CHRISTIAN CONSEQUENCE in the early Christian
centuries, and that Katherine’s supremacy only developed in the 17th century when the other unfor-
tified monastic communities fell prey to invaders and marauders. Checking local Arab traditions,
Robinson found that the biblical names “Sinai” and “Horeb” were TOTALLY UNKNOWN to the
local Bedouins! It was the Katherine monks who began to apply these names to certain mountains
in the area.

Was Burckhardt right after all? In his book Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai
and Arabia Petraea, Robinson found a problem with the route by which Burckhardt had the
Israelites reach Serbal, and therefore declined from endorsing the new idea. However, he shared the
doubts regarding Jebel Musa and pointed to another nearby mountain as a better choice.

Lepsius’ Findings

The possibility that the long-held tradition identifying Mt. Sinai with Mt. Musa was incor-
rect was a challenge that the great Egyptologist and founder of scientific archaeology, Karl Richard
Lepsius, simply could not resist. He crossed the Gulf of Suez by boat, landing at el-Tor (”The Bull”)
-- the harbor town where Christian pilgrims to St. Katherine’s monastery and Jebel Musa used to
land even before the Muslims made it a major stopover on the sea route from Egypt to Mecca.
Nearby rose the majestic Mt. Umm Shumar, which Lepsius frequently considered “a candidate”
along with Musa and Serbal. But after extensive research and studying the area first-hand, he fo-
cused on the big issue of the day: Musa or Serbal?

He published his findings in two volumes entitles Discoveries in Egypt, Ethiopia and the
Peninsula of Sinai 1842-1845 and Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia and Sinai -- the latter including

The Berean Voice September-October 2002