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Is Mt. Sinai the Mountain of YEHOVAH? 5

Children of Israel to this forbidding area, to impress upon them His might and His laws NOT from
the tallest mountain around! Had YEHOVAH missed the right mountain?

The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767 DOUBTED that the traditional Mt. Sinai was
correctly identified. Von Haven, a member of the expedition, quickly realized the impossibility
of the site:

I have observed earlier that we could not possibly be at Mount Sinai. The monastery [of
St. Katherine] was situated in a NARROW VALLEY, which was not even large enough
for a medium-sized army to be able to camp in, LET ALONE THE 600,000 MEN THAT
MOSES HAD WITH HIM, who, together with their wives and children, must have come
to over 3,000,000 (Thorkild Hansen: Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of
1761-1767. P. 181).

Burckhardt’s Theory

In the year 1809, the Swiss scholar Johann Ludwig Burckhardt arrived in the Near East on
behalf of the British Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa. A stu-
dent of Arabic and of Muslim customs, Burckhardt donned Arab clothes and changed his name to
Ibrahim Ibn Abd Allah -- Abraham the Son of Allah’s Servant. In this capacity he was able to travel
to parts forbidden to infidels, discovering the ancient Egyptian temples at Abu Simbel and the
Nabatean rock city of Petra in the Transjordan.

On April 15, 1816 -- with the goal of retracing the route of the Exodus and establishing the
true identity of Mt. Sinai -- he set out on camelback from the town of Suez at the head of the Gulf of
Suez. Following the supposed route taken by Moses and the Israelites, he traveled south along the
western coast of the peninsula where the mountains begin some ten to twenty miles away from the
coast, creating a desolate coastal plain. Here and there this plain is cut by wadis and several hot
springs -- including one favored by the Egyptian pharaohs.

As he traveled south, Burckhardt noted the geography, topography and the distances. He
compared conditions and place names with the descriptions and names of the stations of the Exodus
as mentioned in the Bible. Where the limestone plateau ends, Burckhardt turned inland following a
sandy belt which separates the plateau from an area of Nubian sandstone. After following this natu-
ral cross-Sinai avenue for a while, he set his course southward into the granite heartland, reaching
the Katherine monastery from the north.

Burckhardt climbed mounts Musa and Katherine and explored the area extensively. He was
especially fascinated by Mt. Umm Shumar -- a mere 180 feet shorter than Mt. St. Katherine -- which
rises somewhat southward of the Musa-Katherine group. From a distance, the top of Mt. Umm
Shumar dazzled in the sun “with the most brilliant white colour,” due to an unusual inclusion of par-
ticles of mica in the granite rocks, forming “a striking contrast with the blackened surface of the
slate and the red granite” of the mountain’s lower parts and the surrounding area. The convent’s re-
cords mentioned that Umm Shumar used to be a principal location of monastic settlements.

The Berean Voice September-October 2002