We assume Har Sinai is somewhere deep in Sinai, but Ari and Ari pursue a lead in the Saudi Desert 

Photos by Ari Z. Zivotofsky and Ari Greenspan

Think about Bnei Yisrael on their march to receiving the Torah, and you automatically assume Har Sinai is somewhere deep in the Sinai Peninsula between Israel and Egypt. But following the pesukim, the humble mountain may well be at the tip of Saudi Arabia, just over the Jordanian border. With this new information and a Saudi visa, we just had to see it for ourselves

Standing on a mountaintop looking out over a vast desert in the intense Saudi Arabian sun, we wondered if we were in the right place. We’d been researching the idea that Har Sinai was not located in the Sinai Peninsula, as is generally thought, but was actually in northwestern Saudi Arabia, a theory espoused by an assortment of scholars, including evangelical Christians and a Tanach researcher who happens to be a longtime Ponevezh avreich.

We had always perceived Saudi Arabia as a closed, forbidding place under strict Muslim rule, where liquor is banned, women can’t show themselves, and Jews cannot visit. Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam and of its founder Mohammed, and is the caretaker of Islam’s two holiest cities: Mecca, where every Muslem has a religious obligation to visit once in his life, and Medina. Several years ago while en route to visit the isolated dictatorship of Eritrea, our Lufthansa flight made a stop in the Saudi capital city of Riyadh to let passengers off, and we were shocked to see that before crossing into Saudi airspace, all the liquor on the plane was locked up and the female flight attendants had to cover themselves. Yet here we were on a very hot summer day in 2022, trying to evaluate the route Bnei Yisrael might have taken to enter the Promised Land.

Although the Shechinah no longer overtly rests on Har Sinai as it did while the universe stood still during the Divine Revelation, and identifying or visiting the site would not involve any brachah or mitzvah, there’s still something tantalizing about visiting the place where our forefathers stood to receive the Torah after they left Egypt 3,500 years ago, a humble mountain suspended somewhere between heaven and earth.

While there is not much subsequent mention of Har Sinai in the Torah, it was not totally forgotten. In one of the most dramatic stories in Tanach, King Achav’s wicked wife Izevel threatens to kill Eliyahu, who then flees to Be’er Sheva and continues into the desert where he prays for G-d to end his life. Instead, G-d sends him on a long journey of 40 days and 40 nights to, of all places, Har Chorev, i.e. Mount Sinai. He enters a cave, and it is here that, in a Moses-like scenario in the crook of the rock, Hashem reveals the secret of where He can be found — in the “still small voice” (I Melachim 19).

When we learned that at least one of the 13 or more suggested locations of Har Sinai is in Saudi Arabia, and that recent events had decreased our security concerns, we decided to explore the theory. We also realized that we would not be the only Jews led to Har Sinai by an Arab. In a series of tales told by Rabbah bar bar Chanah (Bava Basra 74a), he describes being led to Har Sinai by an Arab merchant. He reports seeing it surrounded by scorpions and hearing a bas kol lamenting Hashem’s having sworn to exile the Jews. We were hoping that our Arab guide would not lead us to a scorpion-filled site and did not anticipate hearing Heavenly voices, but who knows?