THE MOUNTAIN OF YAHWEH

IN ISRAEL

Elsewhere I have reported the discovery of an ancient Hebrew document that gives an eyewitness report on the encounter between David the shepherd-boy and Goliath the giant of Gath (1 Samuel 17 in the Bible).  It was found in a fortress overlooking the Valley of Elah. There are five lines of writing on a piece of a broken pot (an ostracon), and they record that the giant Goliath cursed David the servant of God, but he has been judged, and executed.

I have now realized that the name of God is hiding up in the top right hand corner, in the form YH (there are no vowels in the Hebrew text, only letters for consonants). YH is a short form of YHWH (Yahweh), and it is the same as Yah in Hallelu-Yah (“Praise Yahweh”), and Yahu in modern Israeli names, such as Netanyahu and Eliyahu. This name Eliyahu means “Yahweh is my God” (it is mangled in English as Elijah), and it originally belonged to a famous prophet in ancient Israel (1 Kings 17–18).

In the story of Eliyahu (1 Kings 19), after this man of God had defeated the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, Queen Jezebel sought to kill him; and so he fled into the wilderness, “to Horeb, the mountain of God”, which would be the Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai where Moses met Yahweh (Exodus 3). In this cave Eliyahu had an epiphany, with earthquake, wind and fire, and the voice of Yahweh speaking to him in the ensuing stillness (1 Kings 19:9-13).

Through the ages, Christians have gone to a mountain in the south of the Sinai Peninsula, in the belief that this is the holy Horeb. The famous Greek monastery of Saint Catherine stands below it. I myself have climbed that mountain, but I can not recall seeing a cave on top of it, though a chapel has been built there for “Elias”.

However, there is a mountain in the desert inside the borders of Israel, which does have a cave on top. Its Hebrew name is Har Karkom (“Mount Saffron”); it has obviously been a sacred site since the Stone Age, as is shown by thousands of petroglyphs on its rocks. Emmanuel Anati of Milan has devoted six decades of his life to studying this area, and he is convinced that this is the Biblical Mount Sinai, also known as Mount Horeb. He announced his theory in the press all round the world in 1986.

Besides the cave, there are other possible indications that it is the mountain where Moses took the children of Israel to meet Yahweh and make their covenant (Exodus 19–24): a cleared space (for the Tabernacle?); twelve standing stones (Exodus 24:4, twelve pillars representing the tribes); a drawing of the two tablets (Exodus 24:12-18). But what clinches it for me is the sequence of stones along the trail leading to the mountain, which have a human stick figure and a stick inscribed on them. This is usually understood as a person worshiping a pillar (a forbidden practice!). No, it is writing, and in fact the original alphabet (or the proto-alphabet) from the Bronze Age: the stick represents a human arm (Hebrew yad, hence Y); the person is rejoicing, and the word for jubilating and praising is hallel (as in Hallelu-Yah) hence H.  

Here is an example (HK03b) situated on the trail.

 And another from the same place (HK03c):-



 This one (HK03d) apparently has the same word  YH, with the person's arms raised, showing the E part of the figure (which will be all that survives in the Greek and Roman alphabets, as the letter E):-



Here is yet another from the same sequence of marker-stones (HK03a), which would also  say YH (the arm has a hand but the H is not tidy, having one arm up and the other down):-