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[First posted in 2015. This chapter in Jon D. Levenson’s SINAI and ZION, is on the same page, so to speak, with Sinai 6000. This discussion validates Sinaites’ raison d’etre as the non-religious ‘movement’ for gentiles who are seeking or are in transition, who do not wish to affiliate with any of the three major world religions that trace their roots to Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
There is a 4th choice: return to Sinai and the self-revealing God who spoke to Moses first, and to the mixed multitude after the exodus from Egypt. Keep away from religion and get to know the God Who revealed His Name as YHWH and learn what is His Will in His Torah. Serve Him within the limitations of your knowledge at every stage of your spiritual journey, just don’t stop learning from the wisdom of His Sinai Revelation. This One True God knows the heart and understands the mind of each true seeker and connects us with one another.
This is the spirit of Sinai 6000 in a nutshell: whether you are alone in your faith journey or travelling with other seekers who are just as hungry as you are for more truth, do not worry about losing your way; we’ve been on this road to Sinai since 2010 and we keep looking back if others have gotten on the same road who might need a helping hand, a push and a shove. We are here for you! Together our dimly lit lamps provide brighter illumination as our numbers increase, even when some of our life-lamps finally go out, because our last testimony, our legacy is about the final lap of our journey of a lifetime. No membership is needed, simply walk YHWH’s Way with the rest of us. Just as He was with His chosen people in the wilderness wandering of the mixed multitude, YHWH is with all who choose Him as personal God and are retracing their paths back to Sinai to finally understand what it means to “choose life.”
First posted April 19, 2015; related posts:
Reformatting and highlights added. —Admin1.]
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Those who wish to speculate about the meaning of Sinai in the period of Israel’s first association with it will take special interest in those passages which mention the mountain and can be dated on independent, formal grounds to a very early period.
Psalm 68 is a choice example, as linguistic, orthographic, and other criteria suggest to some scholars that it is one of the oldest pieces of Israelite poetry. Vv 8-9 and 16-19 are quite relevant to any discussion of the conception of Sinai that diverges from, and thus most likely predates, the conception in our Pentateuchal narrative sources. These verses, obscure as they are, clearly record a march of YHWH from Sinai, a military campaign in which the God of Israel and his retinue, divine, human, or something of each, set out across the desert.
The point not to be overlooked is that YHWH’s home, the locus of this presence, is not a site inside the land of Israel, but rather Mount Sinai, which is separated from Israel’s home by forbidding wasteland. The mention of Sinai (vv 9, 18) clearly implies a connection between YHWH and that mountain much closer than what we would expect from the Pentateuchal narratives in which Mount Sinai seems to be no more than the place in which the revelation of law took place.
Instead, in Psalm 68, YHWH is “the One of Sinai” (v 9), an epithet that provokes jealousy on the part of Mount Bashan, in the lands of the Trans-Jordanian branch of the tribe Manasseh.
In spite of his ritual march to the land of Israel, YHWH’s favored abode is still Mount Sinai. “The One of Sinai” is the numen, the deity, of that mountain, the God of whom Sinai is characteristic.
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The same expression occurs in an identical context in the famous Song of Deborah (Judg 5:4-5). It is possible that “Sinai” in Ps 68:9, 18 and Judg 5:5 is a gentilic adjective related to the “Wilderness of Sin,” a desert probably in the Sinai peninsula (e.g., Exod 16:1). If so, the expression refers to a broader area than the mountain itself in its designation of the divine abode.
On the other hand, there is an unmistakable play on Sinai in the account in Exod 3:1-6 of the burning bush (sene), which Moses encountered at Horeb. The marvel that attracts Moses’ attention here is a bush that burns and burns, but is never burnt up—the prototypical renewable source of energy. The document from which this narrative is drawn refers to the mountain of God not as Sinai, but as Horeb (v 1). , the closeness in sound of sene (“bush”) and Sinay(“Sinai”) cannot be coincidental. Perhaps the play on words here derives from the notion that the emblem of the Sinai deity was a tree of some sort; hence the popular association of Sinay and sene.
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In fact, a blessing on the tribe of Joseph identifies YHWH with “the one who dwells in the bush” (Deut 33:16). If “bush” is not a scribal error for “Sinai,” the tree here is not merely a device to attract attention, as one might think from Exodus 3, but is, rather, an outward manifestation of divine presence. YHWH is the numen of the bush. The conjunction in Exodus 3 of bush or tree (we do not know the precise meaning of sene) and fire is not surprising in light of later YHWHistic tradition. “YHWH your God,” thunders a Deuteronomistic homilist, “is a devouring fire, a jealous God” (Deut 4:24).
In the encounter of Moses and the burning bush, two of YHWH’s emblems—tree and fire—clash, and neither overpowers the other. The two will appear again in tandem in the menora, the Tabernacle candelabrum which is actually a stylized tree, complete with “branches,” “almond-shaped cups,” “calyces,” and “petals” (Exod 25:31-39). This arborescent lampstand appears not only in the Tabernacle which served as Israel’s central sanctuary in the period of wandering in the wilderness, but also in the Temple that was to be built by Solomon in the early monarchical era (1 Kgs 7:49). The Temple at Jerusalem was lit by the fires of the burning tree.
What accounts for our inability to locate the site of the great mountain of Mosaic revelation with any certainty? The failure is not simply one of the modern science of topography. Rather, there is a mysterious extraterrestrial quality to the mountain in the most developed and least allusive biblical references to it. Sinai/Horeb seem(s) to exist in no man’s land.
Moses’ first trip “to the mountain of God” occurs after he has fled Egypt. The mountain of God is not under Pharaoh’s control. It seems to be closer to Midian, a confederation of tribes living near what is today known as the Gulf of Eilat (or Gulf of Aqaba), the body of water that separates the Sinai from Arabia. Still, according to Exod 3:1, Horeb does not seem to lie within Midianite territory, since Moses must drive his Midianite father-in-law’s flocks into the wilderness to arrive at the sacred spot.
Further proof of this follows from Num 10:29-33, in which Jethro (also known as Hobab and Reuel) announces that he will return to his native land and not accompany Israel in her march from the Sinai into Canaan, the promised land. Mount Sinai may be near, but it is not within Jethro’s territory. Instead, “the mountain of God,” under whatever name and with whatever difference that names may indicate, is out of the domain of Egypt and out of the domain of the Midianites, an area associated, by contrast, with the impenetrable regions of the arid wilderness, where the authority of the state cannot reach.
YHWH’s self-disclosure takes place in remote parts rather than within the established and settled cult of the city. Even his mode of manifestation reflects the uncontrollable and unpredictable character of the wilderness rather than the decorum one associates with a long-established, urban religion, rooted in familiar traditions.
As Moses and Aaron put it to Pharaoh:
The God of the Hebrews has chanced upon us.
Please let us go a journey of three days into the wilderness
to offer sacrifice to YHWH our God,
lest he strike us with plague or sword. (Exod 5:3)
In other words, the deity is like his worshippers: mobile, rootless and unpredictable. “I shall be where I shall be” (3:14)—nothing more definite can be said.
This is a God who is free, unconfined by the boundaries that man erects. To man, especially to a political man in a civilization as urban and complex as that of Egypt, this request of the Hebrews must have seemed unspeakably primitive. And so Pharaoh, ruler of a great power, responds contemptuously to Moses and Aaron’s plea that the people be allowed to journey into the desert to appease their God, lest he afflict them:
Who is this “YHWH” that I should obey him and let Israel go?
I do not recognize YHWH and I will not let Israel go! (Exod 5:2)
Artlessly, an opposition has been set up between service to YHWH and service to Pharaoh. Two masters, two lords, are in contention for the service of Israel in these first chapters of Exodus. As the narrative develops, it becomes clear that—
- one master represents human pride, the security of an ancient and settled regime which has lasted for millennia and will, so its ruler believes, outlast the demand of these Asiatic barbarians for the liberty to serve their God in his desolate home.
- The other master is that unpredictable deity himself, unknown in the urban world of Egypt, a deity whose home and whose power lie outside Egyptian sovereignty, increasingly threatening it and continually reminding Pharaoh of the limits of his power, which he and his subjects regard as infinite and, in fact, divine.
The contrast is also between the desert and the urban state. As Zev Weisman puts it,
“the desert serves as a cradle for this primitive universalism of social elements which are outside the control of government, in that it is a space free of any political authority whatsoever and of any organized governmental-cultic establishment.”
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Note that I am not saying that the desert was the goal or ideal of life in ancient Israel. It was not. The desert was mostly conceived as a forbidding, even demonic area. Nor am I saying that YHWH’s essential nature was perceived throughout biblical history as that of a desert deity. It was not.
What I do claim is that the desert, which some poetry (which is probably early) regards as the locale of YHWH’s mountain home, functions in early prose as a symbol of freedom, which stands in opposition to the massive and burden-some regime of Egypt, where state and cult are presented as colluding in the perpetuation of slavery and degradation.
The mountain of God is a beacon to the slaves of Egypt, a symbol of a new kind of master and a radically different relationship of people to state.
Sinai is not the final goal of the Exodus, but lying between Egypt and Canaan, it does represent YHWH’s unchallengeable mastery over both.
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