by Bruce Feiler
“How long would he have stayed here?” I asked.
“Six days a week.”
I closed my eyes. The wind was so loud it seemed like cars whizzing by, and the sensation reminded me of my first day in the desert when the sounds were so loud they had an isolating effect. The wind as white noise. Here, the stimulation came from the front, from this extraordinary window on the world. Thinking back on how I entered the cave, I was reminded of an old Japanese saying that one never leaves a room headfirst, but backward out of deference to the room one leaves behind. Here one enters the room backward out of deference to the landscape. Looking out, I couldn’t help wondering what that landscape must have represented to the monks who sat here. Was it a mirror of their soul? A mirror of God? Or are those the same thing? I could see how sitting here hour after hour, week after week, the view through the eye-shaped opening would begin to consume one’s imagination. Here you’re not on top of the world; you’re inside it. You become, in essence, part of the land.
And how better to remind yourself of the lowly qualities of your body, which will ultimately return to the ground, than to return to the ground yourself. What better way to liberate your spirit than to cut off your body from the world. Not until I slid inside that envelope of earth did I realize how much these individuals were reacquainting themselves with Moses, who met here with God; with Elijah, who fled here from Israel; with Jesus, who sequestered himself in a similar location in the desert and was later placed by apostles in a cave outside Jerusalem. A space like this, coupled with strict self-denial, might be as close as a living person can come to the concept of resurrection. If nothing else, it shows the lengths that some people will go to to find a way to enter the Bible. By inserting themselves in the rock, the monks, in effect, were inscribing themselves in stone, aligning themselves, as much as humanly possible, with the word of God.
Back outside the cave we walked back to the chapel of Saint John, where our pack camel had arrived with lunch. We leaned up against the stone wall and ate our daily regimen—bread, cheese, tuna, honey. A lizard scooted by on the ground, stopping to stare at the spread. With the sage, the flowering almond trees, and the total silence, we could have been in any park in the world—except for the stone cliffs all around us, and for the fact that we were six thousand feet high.
We pulled out our Bibles and returned to the story. After the Israelites agree to follow the laws God lays out in the Book of the Covenant, Moses, Aaron, and seventy elders climb back up the mountain, where they are allowed to glimpse God, or at least his feet:“Under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity,” the text says. The procession of ascendings and descendings gets confusing here, but Moses is called up the mountain again, this time with Joshua, and God covers the mountain with smoke and fire. Moses enters the canopy of smoke, where he stays for forty days and nights, receiving elaborate instructions on how to construct the Ark of the Covenant, a box made of acacia wood, covered with pure gold, and protected by two cherubim with outstretched wings. The ark will ultimately contain a copy of the law, and, like the divine boats used in Egyptian temples, is fitted with rings and poles that allow it to be carried. The ark is to be placed inside the Tabernacle, or Dwelling, which serves as God’s residence on earth. The Tabernacle is a blue, purple, and crimson tent, made of linen and goat yarn, roughly forty-five feet long and thirty-six feet wide, about half the size of a tennis court. It has a special inner chamber, the Holy of Holies, separated by a curtain, and containing the Ark. In front of this is a holy area, with a table, lamp stand, and altar.
At the end of these instructions, God gives Moses two stone tablets, “inscribed by the finger of God,” containing the Ten Commandments. He begins to descend. In the meantime, the Israelites have become impatient and plead with Aaron, “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.” Aaron instructs them to take off their gold earrings, which he molds into a “young bull,” usually called a “calf ” in English translations. The bull was quite popular in Egyptian religions and the Israelites, in familiar territory again, rejoice. “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” the Israelites say. Aaron builds an altar and the people celebrate with eating, drinking, and dancing—an orgy on the desert floor.
God is outraged and enjoins Moses to hurry down the mountain. “I see that this is a stiff-necked people,” God says of their unwillingness to bow down in deference to him. He threatens to lash out, terminate the covenant he made with Abraham, and begin again with Moses. “Now, let me be, that my anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them, and make of you a great nation.” But Moses, who once said to God on this same mountain that he was a stutterer and not a man of words, uses words to temper God. “Let not your anger, O Lord, blaze forth against your peopleLet not the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he delivered them, only to kill them off in the mountains and annihilate them from the face of the earth.’ ” God relents and renounces his punishment, and Moses continues down the mountain.
But when he reaches the bottom and sees what God has already seen, Moses also becomes enraged and hurls the tablets from his hands, shattering them at the foot of the mountain. He then burns the calf and grinds the remains into powder, sprinkling the powder into water, which he makes the Israelites drink. Moses then offers a loyalty test. “Whoever is with the Lord, come here!” he says. The Levites come forward, and Moses bids them travel through the throng, slaying “brother, neighbor, and kin.” Three thousand people die that day, and the following day Moses returns to the mountain and makes a personal appeal for God to forgive the Israelites for their sin of constructing the golden icon.
God is sympathetic, and he and Moses enter into an elaborate negotiation on the journey to come: Will God go with the Israelites? Will Moses have assistance? Much of this conversation takes place near the camp, inside the Tabernacle, “where the Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one man speaks to another.” This communication, though, is not enough for Moses, who asks to see God directly, suggesting their earlier conversation was somehow indirect. God promises to pass before Moses, but says, “You cannot see my face, for man may not see me and live.” God points him to a cleft on the rock and shields Moses with his hand. “Then I will take my hand away and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” After the viewing, clearly the most intimate yet between God and the prophets, God asks Moses to write the Ten Commandments on a new set of tablets.
When Moses takes those tablets back down the mountain, he is not aware that the skin of his face is radiant, sending forth beams of light. Since the word for radiant, karan, is similar to the word for horn, keren, the word was mistranslated by the Latin Vulgate to say that Moses’ face was “horned,” which led to the erroneous image in Michelangelo’s statue of Moses with two goatlike horns. Either way, the Israelites shrink from the radiance of Moses, and the passage at Mount Sinai ends with Moses putting a veil over his face, shielding himself from his people. The veil is a fitting metaphor for this string of chapters, for it seems to capture the change in status that occurs at Mount Sinai: When Moses speaks directly with God, he removes his veil; when he speaks with the people, he puts it back on. Moses has become an intermediary—no longer worldly, not quite divine. In that way, he’s like the mountain itself, a bridge between the people and God, an earthly body infused with light.
For many biblical enthusiasts, Jebel Musa perfectly captures that mix of emotions. Avner, in particular, feels this way. As we were finishing, he told a story about a photographer he brought to this spot many years earlier. “She refused to get excited,” he said. “She insisted on playing it cool.” The day was sunny, with little wind. “We had some chocolate and some wine with us,” he said. “I told her about a monk who came here and was so moved he stood and shouted part of the liturgy”—Avner stood himself to demonstrate
—“‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ ” And the whole mountain echoed, as it did at that moment, “ ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ But the monk said, ‘Only those who have ears to hear it, hear it.’ ”
“And did she hear it?” I asked.
“Do you?” he said.
The last words were just drifting away.
By the time we finished lunch, it was time to climb to the summit. We walked a few minutes along Ras Safsaafa and passed through the Basin of Elijah, a small depression containing a five-hundred-year-old cypress tree, which is said to be the place where the prophet Elijah, according to 1 Kings, flees from the wrath of Queen Jezebel and is rewarded by having his own vision of God. From there we turned to the west and the path to the top.
The summit of Jebel Musa is a geological oddity, a large, angled mound of dark volcanic rock perched like an upside-down ice cream cone on top of the other ridges. The summit itself occurs on a fault line and is the neck of an extinct volcano that washed away. In the nineteenth century, historian Arthur Stanley called it a “bosom” of a mountain; clergyman Edward Robinson described it as a black and desolate hump, “rising perpendicularly in frowning majesty.” For centuries, the main route to the peak has been the 750-step footpath, which weaves around the nooks and fissures like the spiral on the outside of a conch shell. When Avner and his colleagues were excavating the mountain in the 1970s, they uncovered a previously unknown path up the far steeper western side that was built by Byzantine monks. This would have been the path that Egeria, the Byzantine nun, used to climb the mountain in the fourth century, and Avner suggested we use it ourselves.
As we paused to tie our shoes and take a final sip of water, I asked Avner how many times he’d been up the mountain. “Many, and not one time less than that,” he said.
“So what advice do you have for someone going up for the first time?”
“Do you have something warm?”
The bottom part of the path was well hewn, with the steps carved out of the rock. But the higher the path rose the more it began to disintegrate, until finally the steps were all but invisible. After twenty minutes, I was crawling on all fours, like a squirrel on a tree. I would grab onto a boulder with my left hand, put my right leg on another boulder, wait to see if it would hold, then propel myself up with a mixture of torque and hope, or maybe that’s faith. Climbing this gorge, with its overturned stones and spilling of shale, was like climbing an avalanche of overgrown popcorn, with an occasional kernel getting stuck in your knee, producing a wince of pain. When I mentioned this analogy to Avner, he said that when he was a child Israelis referred to popcorn as “American manna.”
“I can’t believe Moses made this walk in sandals,” I said.
After a while I was sweating through my windbreaker and almost completely out of breath. I pulled myself up one last boulder and came to rest on a flat area that seemed to mark an end to the cataract. About fifty yards higher was the summit, topped by a few buildings that were just visible from this angle. The blush of sun was gentle at this hour, and the air contained a hint of the cold to follow. After waiting a bit for my pulse to calm down, I was joined by Avner and we climbed the remaining steps of the mountain, taking advantage of the now solid rock to scamper far more quickly to the top, a rush of excitement pushing us the final few feet. The surface of the mountain here wasn’t like popcorn but was a chocolate-colored dollop of igneous rock that up close had lots of hidden divots and folds but from afar would look perfectly smooth and delectable.
The summit itself was surprisingly crowded, with a chapel, a mosque, and a bedouin rest tent all in a space less than one hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, an ecclesiastical strip mall on top of the world. The church, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, was built in the 1930s on a spot that has been almost continually occupied since the fourth century, when Egeria described a church in the same location that was not great in size but “great in grace.” Egeria said the facility was built on the place where Moses received the Law from God; later monks escalated that, saying the rock beneath the church floor contained the imprint from Moses’ knees where he bowed down to God; monks today go even further, saying their church sits on the very rock from which God chiseled the tablets. I half expected to see a sign that said MOSES SLEPT HERE. As it was, Avner pointed out a large rock just to the west of the church that monks claim has the cleft where Moses hid his face from God. Edward Palmer, an American scholar who visited in 1872, described seeing in this cleft “something like the impression of a man’s hand and head left there by Moses.”
The buildings, though, are overshadowed by the view, a 360-degree panorama of blood-colored mountains, which in the long shadows of late afternoon seemed even more menacing than earlier. With the jagged mountains confined to a large ring of southern Sinai, they seemed like the head of a giant lion roaring up in the middle of the desert, each of the peaks another tooth tearing at the sky. “Nothing can exceed the savage grandeur of the view from the summit of Mt. Sinai,” wrote English naturalist Edward Hull. “The whole aspect of the surroundings impresses one with the conviction that he is here gazing on the face of Nature in one of her most brutal forms.” As French artist Leon de Laborde put it, even more breathlessly: “If I had to represent the end of the world, I would model it from Mt. Sinai.”
This combination of raw beauty and pure emotion has made Jebel Musa a requisite layover for naturalists and pilgrims alike. Avner and I were admiring the view from the western side of the church when I began to hear singing from the other side. I peeked around the corner, where a dozen or so travelers in bright yellow caps were singing “Amazing Grace.” They were the only other visitors on the summit. When they finished, one of the members said a few words, and the group held hands and began chanting the Lord’s Prayer. After they were done, I spoke to one of the men, an engineer in his forties from Vienna. The group was on a pilgrimage, he said, from Jerusalem, to the Galilee, to Bethlehem, to Mount Sinai.
“Was the experience meaningful?” I asked.
“I’m Catholic, though not a very good one,” the man explained. “I believe in God. I believe all the stories. But I don’t like public religious things. I prefer to have religion inside, alone. Inside you have silence and mysticism.”
“And do you have such feelings here?”
“Here you have the whole story,” he said. “You have the view. You have the mountain. It doesn’t matter if it’s the real mountain. What you have is a memory—a real memory—of what happened here three thousand years ago.”
I walked the few steps to the bedouin tent, where Avner was chatting with an old friend, who sat with an unfiltered view of the Sinai, selling drinks and snacks to visiting pilgrims. A cardboard sign behind him read WE HAVE BLANKETS, WE HAVE TEA, WE HAVE HOT CHOCOLATE AND WOARM PLACE TO SLEEPP. He also had a small water dish next to his hands where birds stopped for a drink. “Sunset and sunrise are the most beautiful time,” he said. “But at lunchtime there’s nobody here, and that’s also a great time.”
I asked if he had a particular spot where he liked to go.
“There’s a cistern a few steps down,” he said. “I built a small chapel there. I go there for three or four hours during lunchtime, alone and quiet.”
“And what do you see when you look out from there?”
“I see a lot of calmness,” he said. “When the site is very clear, when you have six-by-six sight”—six-by-six is the bedouin equivalent of twenty-twenty, Avner explained—“what you see is not important. It’s what you feel that’s important.”
“And what do you feel?”
“Peace.”
I let Avner and his friend continue their conversation and stepped out to the ridge. A late afternoon haze had settled over the mountains. The sun was still yellow despite the dust. As I looked out over the plain—the mountains, the sand, the Gulf of Aqaba, which was now becoming visible on the horizon—I was struck by the similarity of what the engineer from Vienna and the bedouin from the desert had said. Both enjoyed
the mountain for its silence, for the feeling of being alone. And yet both were drawn here by others—in the case of the engineer, by the many people who made a similar trek over the centuries, making it such an accessible holy place; in the case of the shopkeeper, by the thousands who continued to come, looking for a moment of peace. And it’s that tension—between being with others and being alone, between reaching salvation within a sometimes unruly community and seeking enlightenment on your own—that lies at the heart of the story of Mount Sinai.
At the beginning of Exodus, Moses goes into the desert to escape his community (and his own murderous behavior), but God, speaking to him from the burning bush, at the base of Mount Sinai, sends him back to lead his community. Once he arrives back at the mountain, with the people in tow, the pattern continues. Moses goes off alone, encounters God, then returns to convey God’s message, and bring the people along. Once, twice, three times this happens, before the people, thinking Moses has abandoned them, abandon him. And at that moment comes the test. Will Moses follow God’s wishes and abandon the people? Will he go off alone and father another great nation, as God offers? The answer, glorious, is no. Moses knows, even more than God seems to know at that moment, that a leader, no matter how great, is nothing without his people. That an individual cannot reach salvation without a community. That the only way for the story to work is for Moses to lead—to inspire—both the people and God. And in that way, the triumph of Mount Sinai is that Moses, in the end, becomes the mountain himself, the link between humanity and the divine.
