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A Holy Mountain
| Article
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10309 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1993 |
1,998 Words |
| Author
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Marjorie Hope
Marjorie Hope is the author of Youth against the World and,
with her husband, James Young, The South African Churches in a
Revolutionary Situation and The Faces of Homelessness. |
The Sinai, that gaunt desert neighboring the Arabian peninsula, is a land where all boundaries seem to evanesce. Human travelers who impose their tracks on the sand may suddenly find that the horizon separating the heavens from earth has become a mirage. Without warning, the earth beneath their feet may transform itself into a swirling storm, burying them in particles of disintegrated rock, with only a pitiless bird to sing over their anonymous graves. Over the centuries, the guideposts have been not those planted by men, but the radar of the sun and the stars.
It is an ancient crossroads of warriors and herders, miners and migrants, mystics and merchants moving between Egypt and Palestine and thence on to Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. It is also the meeting place of the three great Semitic faiths--"historical" religions that locate within human history certain events signifying God's revelation, religions that have fought holy wars against each other over the centuries.
Yet the three dwell here in peace. They meet at the "holy mountain," Mount Horeb, more often known to Jews and Christians as Mount Sinai, and to Muslims as Jebel Musa, the Mountain of Moses. To all three faiths, it is sacred as the place where God (Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah) bestowed the Ten Commandments on Moses. For Jews, Moses is the lawgiver of the faith. For Christians, he stands for the matrix that Jesus later elaborated into Christianity. For Muslims, Moses--together with Abraham, Noah, and Jesus--is one of the great prophets, albeit not so important as their final prophet, Muhammad.
SHRINES AND TREASURES
Deep in a valley near Mount Horeb stands the Orthodox monastery of Saint Catherine. Begun in A.D. 542 by Emperor Justinian, it is both a monastery and a formidable fortress, from the top of whose walls the pious inhabitants used to throw boiling oil on attackers. Today it encompasses monks' dwellings, a hospice, several chapels, Saint Stephen's Well, a garden of fruit trees, a renowned library of precious manuscripts and books, a mosque, and a Byzantine church, which incorporates the church of St. Helena, dedicated in A.D. 330 to the Mother of God upon the site of the Burning Bush. "As the bush was burned but not consumed by it, so the Virgin Mary; a human being, conceived the fire of the deity, yet was not burned; she brought forth the Lord, yet remained forever virgin," the monks told me.
Some three centuries after the time of Helena, the monks were directed
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