Every year, around December 21, the shortest day of the year, we witness one of the most successful marketing stunts in the landscapes of Israel. A stunt that manages to draw hundreds of pilgrims to behold the phenomenon of the “Burning Bush” at Har Karkom, one of the most remote and isolated mountains in the Negev.
In a country that is sixty percent desert, to take a desert mountain that is fairly unremarkable to the general public and turn it into a pilgrimage site — that is sheer genius. All this by turning the place into “Mount Sinai” and declaring that an esoteric natural phenomenon of reflected sunlight is none other than the “Burning Bush.”
The fact that there is no connection whatsoever between the marketing stunt and scientific truth or plain logic takes nothing away from the beauty of the trolling, nor from the fact that this brilliant marketing ought to be taught in a course on selling ice to Eskimos.
How it all unfolded:
Mount Sinai, the place where God descended to speak His word, has presumably been sought by many worthy scholars. In the book “Sinai Journeys,” first published in 1968, Menashe Har-El lists twelve different opinions as to the mountain’s location, and since then many more proposals have been added. In fact, there is hardly a significant peak in the Sinai Peninsula that has not been proposed by some researcher as Mount Sinai, and some have even pushed the identification as far as the deserts of Arabia or the western Sahara…
But only one proposal, Har Karkom, lies within the borders of the State of Israel today. Interestingly enough, this proposal was first put forward in 1983, about a year after we left the deserts of Sinai and handed them over to Egypt.
Since I am not going to go into the details of the proposal, I suggest reading about it thoroughly online and in the materials published by Anati. I will only say in brief: the proposal rests on the thousands of rock drawings on the mountain and around it, on the remains of a relatively dense settlement at its foot, and on several water sources that supposedly match the biblical sources.
The proposal was rejected by an overwhelming majority of the scientific community and of researchers, and was characterized more as a belief — a wishful hope that we might have a “Mount Sinai” within Israel’s borders — than as something that could somehow be connected to the findings and to the biblical description.
And as a lay hiker with a Tanakh and common sense, I can add that in my eyes the chance that Har Karkom is Mount Sinai equals the chance that the rock pools of Nahal Barak are the Red Sea. There is simply no connection. The genuinely beautiful drawings exist in many other places in Sinai and the southern Negev; their dating is problematic; the Karkom well, identified as “Rephidim,” where a flowing stream is described, is nothing but a stagnant well that barely suffices for a few goats; the mountain’s geographic location does not fit; and the problems go on and on…
But the genius of the marketing stunt did not end there. Almost every last stone on the mountain was suddenly tied to grand biblical stories: a cave, of which there are hundreds throughout Sinai, was suddenly crowned as one of the few caves found at a mountaintop, and therefore surely “the cleft of the rock” in which Moses hid; a cluster of small tamarisk trees was crowned as the source of the ancient “manna”; and various engravings were linked to the Tablets of the Covenant and to a host of verses. But the wildest of them all is, without a doubt, the Burning Bush.
On the side of the mountain, a small cave was found with a hole at its top, which at midday in the depth of winter creates a certain halo of light. Inspired by Emmanuel Anati, who claimed that Har Karkom is Mount Sinai, someone came along and claimed that the cave’s halo at winter midday is none other than the vision of the “Burning Bush” that Moses saw from afar.
What can I tell you?
It is a wonderful experience to come to the mountain and see hundreds of people standing before this little cave, stirred by the biblical story.
What does this thrilling phenomenon look like?
There is no need to travel all the way to Har Karkom for that. Open the blinds of a window in your home, let the sun’s rays flicker on a dark wall — and there you have the Burning Bush phenomenon. Exactly the same as at Har Karkom. One to one.
What do I think of this trolling?
I absolutely love it.
Because as with any good troll, the truth doesn’t matter — the buzz it creates does. And so, thanks to this thing, thousands of hikers visit a mountain that, were it not for Anati’s story, no one would ever reach. So good luck to them. Along the way, the question of Mount Sinai’s identification comes up, along with discussion of the verses — so we have gained all around. As long as we remember that this is a kind of trolling. A trolling whose truly dear inventor believes in it with all his heart.
Still, we are left with a certain riddle.
There is, after all, a mountain in the Negev whose thousands of rock drawings attest that it was important and sacred for many long years. Even if it is not Mount Sinai, can we nevertheless give it a more fitting identification?
In my opinion, yes.
There is a sacred mountain that appears in the Bible in the wilderness of Paran: Mount Paran.
The prophet Habakkuk describes it: “God comes from Teman, and the Holy One from Mount Paran, Selah,” and it is also mentioned in the Bible at the opening of the song of Vezot Haberakhah, as a holy mountain alongside Mount Sinai:
“The Lord came from Sinai, and rose from Seir unto them; He shone forth from Mount Paran.”
The wilderness of Paran is identified, with quite reasonable probability, with the central, chalky part of the Sinai desert — including, among other areas, the basin of today’s Nahal Paran. Har Karkom in fact lies in the northern part of the wilderness of Paran, and its sanctity in the eyes of the nomads over hundreds of years may indicate that this is the ancient Mount Paran.
Perhaps,
Just perhaps
