A medieval party of 800 Armenians at the top of Mount Sinai suddenly found themselves surrounded by fire. Their pilgrim staffs shone like candles but, wisely chanting ‘Kyrie Eleison’, they were relieved that after an hour or so the fire abated and not an eyelash of theirs was harmed.
The top of Mount Sinai is no place to be stuck in an electrical storm, even less exposed to the fire of God’s presence. A steep mass of weathered granite 7,616 ft high overlooking the Red Sea, it could be climbed on foot (but not on mule-back) with the help of 3,700 steps built into the rock. The slog was worth it because this was the Mountain of the Law where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments — hence its Arabic name Jabal-Musa (Mount Moses), which George Manginis uses for the summit.
Despite the name of the book, he refers to the whole mountainous mass as Horeb, reserving Sinai for the peninsula. A second focus of holiness, perhaps just as holy, lies at the foot of the mountain, where Moses saw the Burning Bush, and God told him his name: ‘I Am Who Am’. There stands the Monastery of St Catherine behind its 40 ft walls in an enclosure of 80 by 90 yards.
It is astonishing that the monastery has survived since the first centuries of Christianity, when it acted as a focus for desert hermits or anchorites. I had got it all wrong about St Catherine’s. I thought it was a guest, as it were, in a sea of aliens. But the monks were able to thrive in the midst of Muslim territory because the monastery was the greatest power in south Sinai. The Bedouin depended on the monastery, not vice versa.
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