Mt. Sinai—in Arabia? - The BAS Library

Home > Magazines > Bible Review > April 2000

We set off…to climb each of the mountains,” wrote the fourth-century C.E. Christian pilgrim Egeria of her visit to Mt. Sinai. “They are hard to climb. You do not go round and round them, spiraling up gently, but straight at each one as if you were going up a wall, and then straight down to the foot, till you reach the foot of the central mountain, Sinai itself. Here then, impelled by Christ our God and assisted by the prayers of the holy men who accompanied us, we made the great effort of the climb…I was not conscious […]

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

See “Frank Moore Cross, An Interview, Part I: Israelite Origins,” BR 08:04.

See Leonard Greenspoon, “Mission to Alexandria: Truth and Legend About the Creation of the Septuagint, the First Bible Translation,” BR 05:04.

For a contrasting view of Paul’s use of the term “Arabia,” see Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, “What Was Paul Doing in Arabia?” BR 10:05.

Endnotes

See Allen Kerkeslager, “Jewish Pilgrimage and Jewish Identity in Hellenistic and Early Roman Egypt,” in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, ed. David Frankfurter, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 134 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 156–158, 199–200.

Cited in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 9.29.1–3.

Philo, On the Life of Moses 1.47, 51–52; cf. On the Virtues 34; On the Life of Joseph 15.

Philo, Moses 1.163–220; cf. Exodus 17:8–16, 19:1–2.

Philo, Moses 2.70.

Philo, Allegorical Interpretation 12–13; Agriculture 43; On the Confusion of Tongues 55–57; On the Change of Names 106–120.

See Kerkeslager, “Jewish Pilgrimage,” pp. 169–175.

Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 3.33,39–40, 62.

Josephus, Antiquities 2.257,264–265; 3.76.

10.

Origen, Selecta in Genesim 39; Patrologia Graeca 12.120.

11.

Eusebius, Onomasticon 124, 172.

12.

See Jerome’s Latin translation of Eusebius, Onomasticon 125, 143, 167 and 172–173.

13.

F. Buhl and C.E. Bosworth, “Madyan Shu‘ayb,” in Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. C. Bosworth et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1986), vol. 5, pp. 1155–1156; Alois Musil, The Northern Hegaz: A Topographical Itinerary (New York: American Geographical Society, 1926), pp. 109–118, 278–282.

14.

This might also have been true of the Jewish author of the Apocalypse of Abraham (see 12:1–3).