Is Mount Sinai in Saudi Arabia?

Jebel al Lawz in Saudi Arabia, which many fundamentalists claim is the biblical Mt. Sinai

I have been wanting to post on this question for quite awhile, especially since I began the Mount Sinai series back in 2007. Two sites have been proposed for Mt. Sinai: one, the traditional site, Jebel Musa in the Sinai Peninsula between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This site has been venerated as the biblical Mount Sinai since at least the 1st century by Jews and Christians alike and is the site of the famous St. Catherine's monastery. In two previous posts, I went over the historical and scriptural evidence that this indeed is the biblical Mount Sinai upon which Moses received the Ten Commandments.

The second proposed location, and one that has garnered lots of attention in the past twenty years, is a site known as Jebel al Lawz, which is situated in modern Saudi Arabia just across the Gulf of Aqaba from the Sinai Peninsula. There are several reasons put forth for this view, of which I will enumerate here. I want to say first that for many years, I myself was convinced that this site in Arabia was indeed the biblical Sinai, but I have now come to seriously doubt it. After going into the reasons why this site is put forth, we will look at some problems with the theory.

First of all, why is Jebel al Lawz promoted as the possible location of Mt. Sinai? There are several reasons:

First, St. Paul says that Mt. Sinai is "in Arabia" (Gal. 4:25), thus leading some to believe he means the Arabian peninsula.

Second, the existence of a land bridge between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas across the Gulf of Aqaba that would serve as an ideal crossing point for the Israelites.

Third, several archaeological finds at the foot of Jebel al Lawz which are purported to be the remains of the Israelite camps: an altar, carvings of cows, and a split rock.

Fourth, the top of Jebel al Lawz appears to be blackened, as if by a great fire.

Let's look at these points, one at a time.

First, the passage of St. Paul in Galatians 4:25 in which he says that Mount Sinai is in Arabia is, on the surface, a strong argument in favor of Jebel al Lawz until we realize that Saudi Arabia did not become an indepentdent nation until 1927 (until then, it had been part of the Turkish Empire for centuries). St. Paul would not have been using 21st century geopolitical terms in his geography, but rather the political terms of the Roman Empire. As it turns out, "Arabia" was a Roman province that encompassed part of Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula and parts of what are now Jordan. Interestingly enough, Roman Arabia did not include the modern Arabian Peninsula. This was all documented in my post on the Scriptural evidence for Jebel Musa. Therefore, I think we can throw out Galatians 4:25 as lending any serious support to Jebel al Lawz.

Second, what about the land bridge that exists between Sinai and Saudi Arabia? Proponents of Jebel al Lawz stress that this land bridge could have been the place where the Israelites crossed into Arabia. Aside from the obvious problem that the Scriptures state that the crossing happened at the Red Sea, not the Gulf of Aqaba (and we will have a future article about the much contested definition of the Hebrew Yam Suph), this theory suffers from other defects.

First, the simple fact that an underwater land bridge happens to exist does not mean that is where the crossing happened. Case in point: a similar land bridge exists north of the Red Sea near the Gulf of Suez, very close to the traditional site. This would be a much better location to place the crossing. Second, this land bridge from Sinai to Arabia is less than a mile across, much to narrow to accomodate the great numbers to people that needed to cross in the amount of time (a single night) that Scripture says it took for them to get across. Third, the makeup of this land bridge is not land at all, but coral. Anyone who has ever been around coral knows that it is extremely dangerous to walk on. It is almost certain that many of the Israelites would have been barefoot, and even a single slip could have been deadly. This would have slowed up the crossing even more and makes a single night crossing almost impossible.

I should also point out that this crossing location is very problematic from the standpoint of the amount of time the Bible says that it took the Israelites to get to the Red Sea. Instead of going just to the Suez on the borders of Goshen, this theory requires them to get to the Gulf of Aqaba on the far side of Sinai (a distance of 350 miles in six days (averaging 58 miles a day, or almost 43 miles per day allowing for six hours of rest per night). While this may be feasible for a man in the prime of his life and aqcuainted with desert travel, it becomes absurd when we apply it to a million people, including the elderly, women and children.

Next, we come to the archaeological finds at Jebel al Lawz. These consist of the following items: a large altar decorated with bovine carvings, which proponents say are the Egyptian deities Hathor and Apis, or perhaps represent the Golden Calf itself. Also found was a large boulder split down the middle, which some say is the stone from which Moses drew water. A cave nearby has been called "The Cave of Moses" since very early times and supposedly was where Moses dwelt.

Most of these finds are easily written off due to a few facts: first, the "altar" at Jebel al Lawz is a pile of massive boulders. The Scripture says that the altar was built by Aaron (Ex. 32:5), indicating it was probably not as monumental in scale as that which exists at Jebel al Lawz. Also, the carvings of cows on the altar are also joined by carvings of plenty of other animals, ibexes, for example. This means that the altar is not necessarily "bovine" in nature. Both it and the carvings have been dated to the Neolithic period, well before the Exodus. Also, if Moses destroyed the Golden Calf because it was an idol, why wouldn't he destroy the carvings as well? And why would he leave the altar up, when if every other case in Scripture the altars of false gods are torn down? Also, this "altar" does not look that much different from hundreds of other rock formations which litter the plains around the site.

What about the so-called "Cave of Moses?" This has been positively identified as a Nabatean tomb dating from a millenium after Moses.

One of piece of evidence touted by proponents of Jebel al Lawz is a large boulder near the site with a split down the center. This is held to be the rock struck by Moses from which water flowed to quench the Israelite's thirst in the desert. Below is a picture of the split rock of Jebel al Lawz:

It must be pointed out that the so-called "split" is not a split at all, but a massive separation (several feet wide in some places) that is due to wind erosion. I have seen such formations on Mackinaw Island in upper Michigan. They are not unique at all.

What about the blackened summit of Jebel al Lawz? It is undeniable that the top of this mountain is blackened. Pseudo-archaeologists Ron Wyatt and Bob Cornuke managed to sneak some of this blackened rock out of Saudi Arabia for testing in the United States. The tests were completed, but the results were not released. They have remained unreleased for 13 years (by the way, this is the same Ron Wyatt who claims to know where the Ark of the Covenant is but won't release the evidence. Oh yeah, he also claims to have discovered Noah's Ark). Many Arabian mountains have such blackened tops, and it is usually due to past volcanic activity. In fact, Arabia and the Horn of Africa are full of volcanic activity. Look at the tectonic map below:

There are literally dozens of sites in Arabia with such blackened tops. In general, it seems that the proponents of this Jebel al Lawz site have one technique in common: to take characteristics that are common to Saudi Arabia (but which most westerners are ignorant of) and put them forward as unique identifiers of this one place with the biblical Mount Sinai.

Two other reasons to be wary of the Jebel al Lawz argument:

First, it was originated by Muslim polemicists during the Crusades. Previously, they had not cared about the location of Mt. Sinai, but with the influx of Christians visiting the Holy Land, they wanted to identify Sinai with their own holy places in the Arabian Peninsula.

Second, the modern theory was forumlated by none other than Ron Wyatt and Bob Cornuke, evangelical fundamentalists who admit that they are neither archaeologists nor geologists and who also claim to have found Noah's Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah and the Ark of the Covenant.

Some people claim that the fact that the Arabian government has this site fenced off is an indicator that it is the true Mt. Sinai. Anybody who has ever been to Greece, Rome or anywhere with lots of historic sites knows that many historic places are fenced off. Many of you probably know the frustration of visiting a famous site only to find that it is closed or gated off, as happened to me when I went to Stonehenge in 1998 (there was a fence prohibiting you from getting closer than 10 feet). My friend went to Greece in 1997 and was ticked when he found that the Parthenon was fenced off that year for renovations. Archaeological sites often get fenced off.

While Jebel al Lawz looks impressive on the outside (and it is a legitimate archaeological site, only it is Neolithic and not Hebraic in origin), we cannot simply abandon the set principles of archaeology and erudition just because we are desperate to identify somewhere with a biblical location. Ultimately, biblical archaeology does not affect our theology; but, often the way we do biblical archaeology tells us something about our theology.

Click here for an excellent article by Gordon Franz treating this much more in depth than I have here.