Jebel Musa

Jebel Musa is the most widely accepted location for the biblical Mount Sinai. It is located in the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula.

Jebel Musa (Arabic for “Mount Moses”) has been the traditionally accepted site of Sinai since at least the fourth century ad. Eusebius and Justinian—who established a Greek Orthodox monastery at Jebel Musa in ad 527—both accepted this site as the biblical Sinai. Lacking any contradictory archaeological evidence, much of modern scholarship accepts this tradition. The terrain surrounding Jebel Musa does include the broad plains necessary for the tribes to have encamped around the mountain (Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 270). Further, Y. Aharoni has followed a route from Jebel Musa to Kadesh and demonstrated that it accords well with the 11-day journey indicated in Deut 1:2 (Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament, 638). If Jebel Musa is Sinai, it appears to indicate an unusual and unnecessary detour in the route of the exodus; however, the oddness of the route itself may be validating, as it is unlikely to have been invented and befits the erratic route one might undertake to avoid being followed (Durham, Exodus, 185).