Wilderness of Sinai #99

The Wilderness of Sinai is the desert region surrounding Mount Sinai, where the people of Israel camped after leaving Egypt. Scripture uses it for the setting of a large portion of the Pentateuch: the second half of Exodus, the whole of Leviticus, and the opening chapters of Numbers all take place while Israel is encamped there. It is not the same as the “wilderness of Sin,” a stop earlier in the journey (Exodus 16:1), whose name is similar in English.

Biblical Significance

Exodus reports that in the third month after leaving Egypt, the Israelites came to the wilderness of Sinai and camped in front of the mountain (Exodus 19:1-2). There God spoke to Moses, and the people consecrated themselves and heard the Ten Commandments (Exodus 19:3 to 20:21). The covenant was ratified with sacrifice and a meal (Exodus 24:1-11). Moses went up the mountain for forty days to receive instructions for the tabernacle, and while he was away the people made the golden calf (Exodus 24:18; 32:1-6). After the covenant was renewed, the tabernacle was constructed and set up on the first day of the first month of the second year (Exodus 40:17).

The book of Leviticus, giving instructions for sacrifice, priesthood, and holiness, ends by saying these were the commands the Lord gave Moses on Mount Sinai for the people of Israel (Leviticus 27:34). Numbers opens in “the wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of the congregation” on the first day of the second month of the second year, with a census of the fighting men and the arrangement of the tribes around the tabernacle (Numbers 1:1-3; 2:1-2). Israel kept the Passover there for the first time since leaving Egypt (Numbers 9:1-5). Finally, in the second year, on the twentieth day of the second month, the cloud lifted from over the tabernacle, and the people set out from the wilderness of Sinai toward the wilderness of Paran (Numbers 10:11-12). By this reckoning, they stayed at Sinai for roughly a year.

The stay at Sinai transformed Israel from a group of freed slaves into a covenant community with a law, a priesthood, and a place of worship.

Today

The location of Mount Sinai itself is uncertain, and so the precise boundaries of the wilderness are as well. The oldest and most widely held tradition places the mountain in the southern Sinai Peninsula, at Jebel Musa, where Saint Catherine’s Monastery, founded in the sixth century, still stands. Other proposals have located the mountain elsewhere in the Sinai or in northwest Arabia, and scholars continue to debate the question. The region is dry, mountainous, and sparsely inhabited, a setting that helps a reader imagine what forty years of wilderness travel meant for a large people dependent on God’s provision.