Summit of Jebel Musa

2,285 m above sea level

To Sinai via the Red Sea, Tor, and Wady Hebran. Near view of Mount Sinai. — Photochrom, Library of Congress · no known restrictions on publication

In the Bible

The LORD descended on Mount Sinai in fire and called Moses to the summit; he stayed forty days and forty nights and came down with the two tablets.

Exod 19:18–20Mount Sinai was completely enveloped in smoke, because the LORD had descended on it in fire. And the smoke rose like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked violently. And as the sound of the ram’s horn grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and God answered him in the thunder. The LORD descended to the top of Mount Sinai and called Moses to the summit. So Moses went up,

Exod 24:18Moses entered the cloud as he went up on the mountain, and he remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights.

Exod 34:28–29So Moses was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments. And when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands, he was unaware that his face had become radiant from speaking with the LORD.

Tradition

For Christian pilgrims Jebel Musa has been the mountain of the law since at least the 4th century. Other mountains are proposed: Serbal, Ras Safsafa, and peaks in the Negev and north-western Arabia.

Here today

A small chapel of the Holy Trinity, completed in 1935, and a little mosque on the summit; pilgrims climb by night to see the sunrise.

Through the eyes of old pilgrims

At the fourth hour we arrived at that peak of Sinai, the holy Mount of God, where the law was given … In that place there is now a church—not a large one, because the place itself, the summit of the mountain, is not large; but the church has in itself a large measure of grace.Egeria, c. 381–384

This place in the Bible

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Land outlines: Natural Earth (public domain).