Mount Sinai

Mount Sinai, also known as "Gebel Musa" or "Jabal Musa" by the Bedouins, is the name of a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula. It is 2,285 metres high and is located in a mountain range in the southern part of the peninsula. It is near a protruding lower bluff known as the Ras Sasafeh (Sufsafeh), and rises almost perpendicularly from the plain.

To some scholars it is the same as the Biblical Mount Sinai, though this is not agreed upon. The name Sinai comes probably from the Moon God Sin, similar to the Desert of Sin.

Judaism teaches that as soon as the Jewish people received the Bible at Mt. Sinai, they would be hated by the rest of the world for having been the ones to receive divine word (a state of affairs presented as a pun: Sinai as Seen-ah, which means hatred). The area was reached by the Hebrews in the third month after the Exodus. Here they remained encamped for about a year. The last twenty-two chapters of Exodus, together with the whole of Leviticus and Numbers ch. 1-11, contain a record of all the transactions which occurred while they were at Mount Sinai.

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