The Pharaoh was not himself among the six hundred chariots which had pursued the flying Israelites into ‘the sea.’[[186]] As in the great battle against the Libyans, Meneptah, while taking the field in person, nevertheless took care to avoid actual danger and to delegate his authority to others when there was a prospect of fighting. He lived several years after the Libyan victory, and therefore after the Israelitish Exodus; and though his tomb in the Bibân el-Molûk at Thebes was never finished, he was buried in it at a ripe old age. A dirge,[[187]] probably composed at the time of his death, speaks of the king as dying at an advanced period of life.
With the waters of ‘the sea’ between themselves and Egypt, the Israelites felt that they were at last free men. The fortified wall of Egypt was behind them; they were already in the desert-home of their Asiatic kinsmen, free to move whithersoever they desired. But there was one road which they could not take. If the fear of ‘seeing war’ had kept them back from the northern road to Palestine, it would still more keep them from the road which led into the Egyptian province of Mafkat. Here on the western side of the Sinaitic peninsula were the mines of copper and malachite worked by Egyptian convicts, and strongly garrisoned by Egyptian troops. To venture near them would have been to court again the danger from which the fugitives had just escaped.[[188]]
The road was well known. For centuries it had been trodden by Egyptian troops and miners, by civil officials and the convicts of whom they had charge. There was no difficulty, therefore, in avoiding it, and in plunging instead into the desert which led to their kinsfolk in Edom and that land of Canaan which was their ultimate goal.
Old errors die hard, and the belief that the Sinaitic peninsula was the scene of the wanderings of the Israelites still prevails among students of the Old Testament. It originated in the wish of the early Christian anchorites in the Sinaitic peninsula to find the localities of the Pentateuch in their own neighbourhood, and has been fostered by the geographical confusion between ‘the sea’ crossed by the Israelites and the Yâm Sûph. But the belief is not only irreconcileable with the facts of Egyptian history, it is also irreconcileable with the narrative of the Pentateuch itself. It transports the Amalekites or Bedâwin of the desert south of Judah to the western side of the Sinaitic peninsula, and performs the same feat for the wilderness of Paran.[[189]] It makes Jethro, the high-priest of Midian, cross the Gulf of Aqaba and make his way through barren gorges and hostile tribes in order to visit his son-in-law, and sets at defiance the express testimony of Hebrew literature that Mount Sinai was among the mountains of Seir.[[190]]
The wilderness into which the Israelites emerged is called indifferently that of Shur and Etham. Shur was the Semitic equivalent of the Egyptian Anbu or ‘Wall’ of fortification, while Etham took its name from one of the Khetemu or ‘Fortresses’ which guarded the approach to the valley of the Nile. It was a wilderness which stretched away to the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Hebrew tribes accordingly marched along it. They took, we are told, ‘the way of the wilderness of the Yâm Sûph,’ following the Haj road, which is still traversed by the pilgrims from Egypt to Mecca. But the caravan moved slowly, and for three days they could find no water. Had they turned southward into the Sinaitic peninsula, a few hours would have brought them to the Wells of Moses—now a place of picnic for the visitors to Suez,—while the road to the Egyptian mines was provided with cisterns and wells. But to have done so would have been merely to exchange Egypt for one of its strongly-garrisoned provinces.
How long the wanderers were in crossing the desert we do not know; nor do we know where Marah was, whose ‘bitter’ waters refreshed them after three days of scarcity. But at last they reached the oasis of Elim, which the itinerary in the book of Numbers (xxxiii. 10) couples with the Yâm Sûph. Elim, in fact, is but a variant form of Elath,[[191]] and Elath is the Aila of classical geography, of which Aqaba is the modern successor. When the Israelites left Elim a whole month had elapsed since their departure from Egypt (Exod. xvi. 1).
Between Elim or the Yâm Sûph[[192]] and Mount Sinai lay the Wilderness of Sin. Sinai and Sin alike derived their names from Sin, the moon-god of Babylonia, whose worship had long since been brought by Babylonian conquest to the West. More than two thousand years before the Exodus the Babylonian conqueror, Naram-Sin, ‘the beloved of Sin,’ had carried his arms as far as the Sinaitic peninsula, and the inscriptions of Southern Arabia show that there also the Babylonian deity was adored.[[193]] It would seem probable that a temple dedicated to his service stood on the slopes of Mount Sinai.
Numerous attempts have been made to identify the mountain which the Israelites regarded as the scene of the first pronouncement of their Law. Most of these attempts are based on the belief that it is to be sought in the Sinaitic peninsula. The rival claims of Jebel el-’Ejmeh, Jebel Umm ’Alawî, Jebel Zebîr-Katarîna, Jebel Serbâl, and Jebel Mûsa have all been eagerly discussed. Jebel Mûsa alone can claim the support of tradition, though this does not go back further than the third or fourth century A.D., when the Christian hermits first settled in its neighbourhood. The Sinai of S. Paul and Josephus was still in the Arabia of Roman geography, the kingdom of which Petra was the capital.
In the geography of the Old Testament, however, Mount Sinai was in Edom. This is expressly stated in the Song of Deborah, one of the oldest products of Hebrew literature. Here we read (Judg. v. 4, 5), ‘Lord, when Thou wentest out of Seir, when Thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water. The mountains melted from before the Lord, even that Sinai from before the Lord God of Israel.’ Similar testimony is borne by the blessing of Moses (Deut. xxxiii. 2), ‘The Lord came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; He shined forth from the Mount of Paran,’ an expression which appears in another form in Habakkuk (iii. 3), ‘God came from Teman, and the Holy One from the Mount of Paran.’ Teman denoted Southern Edom, and Paran was the desert which adjoined Edom on the west and Judah on the south, and in whose midst was the sanctuary of Kadesh-barnea.[[194]] In the Blessing of Moses the parallelism of Hebrew poetry requires that Sinai and Seir should be equivalent terms.
We must, then, look to the frontiers of Edom and the desert of Paran for the real Sinai of Hebrew history. But it is useless to seek for a more exact localisation until the mountains of Seir and the old kingdom of Edom have been explored. Then, if ever, the Sinai of the Pentateuch may be discovered. It would seem that it formed part of a range that was known as ‘Horeb,’ the ‘desert’ mountains, and as late as the age of Elijah it was still reverenced as ‘the Mount of God’ (1 Kings xix. 8).[[195]]