by
Damien F. Mackey
“Among
the many unsolved problems concerning this holy mountain, one is likely to be
the most challenging: Why this mountain? What did people find on this
mountain which is not found elsewhere? Similar things may have attracted there
the Palaeolithic and BAC [Bronze Age] tribes. Perhaps the material evidence has
not yet been found or, if it has, it is not yet understood. After forty years
from the first discoveries and after fourteen years of survey, we may not yet
have discovered enough details to fully understand this high-place. The
mountain is likely hiding still other messages”.
Professor
E. Anati. Kar Karkom. The Mountain of
God.
Introduction
In an article published in Chronology & Catastrophism
REVIEW 1998:2,
A Tale of
Two Mountains: Ararat and Sinai
I hopefully attempted to provide an answer as to
why the remote mountain, Har Karkom, that professor Emmanuel Anati has
identified - rightly I believe - as the biblical Mount Sinai, was already
revered as a sacred site, a holy mountain, long before the time of Moses. My
conclusion then was that Mount Sinai might have been the same as Mount Ararat
where the Ark of Noah had landed.
I have since rejected this fanciful idea and have
written a more traditionally-based reconstruction:
I may
have been prompted to a certain extent to include Noah in 1998 by the taunt
that Anati and his colleagues had received: “We became used to sarcastic
comments such as ‘Did you find the broken Tablets of the Law?’, or, 'Next you
should look for Noah’s Ark’.” Most definitely I was inspired by the view of
scholars (see below) that the Exodus story of Moses is a miniature Flood story.
Nor have
I yet finished with Noah’s Ark.
This time
round I would like to consider that Har Karkom, whilst certainly not being the
site of landing for the Ark, may possibly have been the place of its
construction.
So I
would like now to return to my original article, “A Tale of Two Mountains”, and
modify it (using blue) accordingly.
----
Moses
wrote the Exodus account in terms of ‘a miniature Flood story’, portraying
himself as the new Noah. This article illustrates the Flood-Exodus parallelisms
and ultimately draws the conclusion that the reason why Mount Sinai was revered
as 'the mountain of God', even prior to the Exodus (cf. 3:1), was
because it was the mountain upon which Noah's Ark had landed.
A:
Comparisons Between Genesis and Exodus
Moses,
who compiled Genesis from the series of family histories (Toledoth) of his
illustrious forefathers [1], was apparently also very conscious - when writing
his own story in the rest of the Pentateuch - of the content, language and
structure of Genesis.
For more on this, see my two-part:
Tracing the Hand
of Moses in Genesis
Simple examples
of this are identified below, followed by a more profound, structural example.
- Just as God saw His creative
works as ‘good’ (Genesis 1:31), so did Moses’ mother see that her son ‘was
a goodly child’ (Exodus 2:2) [2];
- The ‘Ten Words’ or creative
commands of God in Genesis 1: ‘And God said’, have been found to parallel
the ‘Ten Commandments’ of Exodus 20 [2]. Moreover, both series of ten are
referred to in the context of the Six Days and a Seventh (cf.
Genesis 1:5-31; 2:2 & Exodus 20:9-11).
- The new Pharaoh who began
the oppression of the Israelites is portrayed by Moses as something of a
Nimrod figure, as found in Genesis 10 & 11, a megalomaniacal builder
of cities. At Babel, the inhabitants use a phraseology: ‘Come, let us make
bricks .... Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top
in the heavens ...’ (cf. Genesis 10:8-9 & 11:3,4) that Moses
would copy in Exodus: ‘... the new king over Egypt’ said ‘Come, let us
deal shrewdly with [the Israelites], lest they multiply ...’. So the Egyptians
‘made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick’ (Exodus
1:10,14). The stated purpose of the Babylonians was to build a city ‘...
lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’ (11:4). Moses
used a kind of ‘rival operation’ to this in the case of the Israelites,
for ‘... the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the
more they spread abroad’ (1:12).
- Abram was ordered by God to
leave the land of his birth and sojourn in the foreign land of Canaan
(Genesis 12:1). Moses, for his part, fled his native home, of Egypt, and
sojourned in the foreign land of Midian (Exodus 2:15).
- Pharaoh begged Abram to
leave Egypt once God had begun to inflict plagues upon that country,
because of Abram’s wife (Genesis 12:17-19). Likewise, the Pharaoh of the
Exodus begged Moses to leave Egypt because of the Ten Plagues (Exodus
12:31-32).
Innumerable
other simple comparisons may be found but there is also a more far-reaching
similarity between Genesis and the other Pentateuchal books. Kikawada and Quinn
[3] have discerned a five-part structure shared by Genesis and the rest of the
Pentateuch, as well as multiple chiasms, pointing to a striking unity of
thought throughout the entire Pentateuch. This similarity of structure is further
compelling evidence in favour of Mosaic compilation of Genesis and authorship
of the last four books. Most striking of all, however, as we shall see, is the
similarity between the lives of these two great Patriarchs - so much so that we
find Moses portraying himself as a second Noah, his story being ‘a miniature
flood story’ [4].
Versions
of the Flood
Nations
throughout the world share a legend of a universal Flood and of a righteous man
saved with his family in a boat of some kind [5]. Surely this points to a
common ancestry amongst even the most diverse and far-flung peoples?
Given the
prominence in early Egypt of Joseph and Moses, with their Toledoth records, we
should expect to find Flood legends in the sophisticated Egyptian mythology as
well. Strangely, ancient Egypt is thought by some to be one of the few nations
in which memory of a universal Flood has not been preserved. David Fasold [6]
thinks otherwise, pointing out that the begetter of the ‘gods’ of Egypt was Nu,
a name not dissimilar to Noah [7]. Moreover, the original gods of the Egyptian
pantheon were 8 in number; 8 was also the number saved in Noah’s Ark (cf.
Genesis 7:13 & II, Peter 2:5).
According
to Fasold [6]:
A closer
approximation to the Noah of the Genesis account is hard to imagine. In this
regard Noah was the preserver of the seed of mankind .... Noah, or Nu, being
one with the original eight gods of the Egyptian pantheon also accounts for Nu
being the progenitor of the father of their civilization. These eight were
viewed as gods by having passed through the judgment and survived as well as
their longevity, which their offspring did not inherit to the same extent’.
In light
of Sir Wallis Budge’s view that Nu represented the watery mass from which the
gods evolved, Fasold added: “It takes little imagination to view Nu as directly
connected with the watery mass of the Flood, and the 'bark of millions of years’
as the Ark from ancient times, with the ‘company of gods’ as the survivors”.
The ‘goddess’ Nut, mother of all the living, who accompanied her husband Nu on
the voyage, must then stand for Noah's wife. Nut was also held in high esteem
among the gods.
Notes and References
Mackey,
D, Calneggia, F & Money, P, 'A Critical Re-Appraisal of the Book of
Genesis' I & II, C&CW 1987:1 & 2.
See e.g.
PJ Wiseman, Creation Revealed in Six Days, Marshall, Morgan & Scott,
1977.
Kikawada,
I & Quinn, A, Before Abraham Was, Ignatius Press, San Francisco,
1985, p. 115.
Ibid. The authors have found the same basic structure
in the Babylonian Creation/ Flood account, Atrahasis and also in Homer's
Iliad.
Might
not, for instance, the fabulous Rainbow Serpent of Australian aboriginal
folklore take its origins from the brilliant rainbow that appeared after the
Flood (cf. Genesis 9:13)?
Fasold,
D, The Discovery of Noah's Ark, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1990,
pp. 16-17. This, moreover, is not the only Egyptian version of the Flood. For
another example, see A Yahuda, The Language of the Pentateuch in its
Relation to Egyptian, Oxford UP, 1933, 219-211.
Part Two:
Noah and
Moses
B:
Comparisons between Noah and Moses
According
to Kikawada and Quinn,
In the
spirit of good creation, the author of Exodus 2:10 borrows the words of Genesis.
When Moses’ mother sees her newborn son, how good he is, she cannot help
defying Pharaoh’s command by hiding her son. And then when she can no longer
hide him, she seeks some other way to save her son (2:2-3). The famous story of
the baby Moses in the basket of bulrushes corresponds to Noah’s Flood and to
the Great Flood of Atrahasis. The story occupies the same relative position in
Exodus 1-2 as did Noah’s Flood in Genesis and the Great Flood in Atrahasis. All
three stories contain the motif of salvation of a hero from the water ... In
addition to the motif parallels between the Genesis and Exodus flood stories
noted above, there are lexical-syntactical parallels that demonstrate the Moses
story to be a miniature flood story. These parallels are found in the
description of how Noah is to build his têbah: ark and how Moses’ mother
constructs the têbah: basket for her child. Noah was commanded:
‘Make for yourself a têbah of
gopher wood .... and pitch it with pitch inside and outside (Genesis 6:14)’.
Exodus
describes the actions of Moses’ mother thus:
She took
for him a têbah of bulrushes and she pitched it with pitch and with mortar
(Exodus 2:3) [8].
From there I went on to consider the type of
material used by Noah to build the Ark. I reproduce it here, though not
necessarily now entirely agreeing with it:
The Bible
seems to be interpreting itself here. In the second part of this parallel
description we seem to have the key to the nagging questions about the material
‘gopher wood’ Noah used to construct the Ark. The Exodus account reveals it to
be ‘bulrushes’. In The Jerusalem Bible translation, God told Noah: ‘Make
yourself an Ark of resinous wood. Make it with reeds and line it with pitch
inside and out’ (Genesis 6:14). It sounds very Egyptian, doesn’t it? Fasold,
who has a maritime background [9], has concluded from a comparison of these two
biblical texts that:
The ark
of Moses in which he was placed as a babe, was a papyrus reed boat with a
covering of protection, an enclosure ... covered with a symbolic kaphar of
slime and pitch (Exodus 2:3), a perfect description of the Ark of Noah, which
preceded Moses’ ark [10].
Fasold
has written at some length on the design and structure of Noah's Ark [11] and
is adamant that the massive vessel could not have been made of hard wood,
except for parts such as the hogging-truss support poles, the beams and the
floorboards. He says that maritime experience in the early part of this century
has proven that 300 feet is the absolute limit for fibre stress of any wooden
material for a ship. Noah’s Ark, he concludes, was a raft-shaped ‘boat’ of
gum-resinous papyrus reeds, protected by a covering, as in to the Sanskrit
version of the Ark [12].
Similarly
Professor Yahuda, an Egyptologist, has noted that the material used for the ark
in which the infant Moses was placed was made of Egyptian papyrus reed, or km3
(kemah) [13]. Undoubtedly in this Egyptian word km3, equivalent
to the Hebrew word gomeh, we have the mysterious (mistranslated)
gopher-wood - or bulrush material. Yahuda has provided the following
interesting account of the type of ark in which the child Moses was hidden
[14]:
We must
ask: What sort of ‘ark’ was denoted by tebah, and how did the mother
imagine the rescue of her child by using just this particular ark?
It has
long been established that tebah is the Egyptian db3.t = tatbe....
But whereas it is applied to ‘ship’, in the flood-story, Gen. 6,14ff., db3.t
is used here in its real meaning of coffer, chest, holy shrine, coffin. Such a
chest generally had the form of a divine shrine (Naos), and served as housing
for images of gods which were dedicated to the temples ...
.... On
certain festivals as well as on the occasion of great victory fêtes they were
borne in solemn procession, or were carried on the Nile, from one temple-town
to another on a bier which was usually given the form of a bark, such as was
conceived as a vehicle for the sun god Re, Osiris, and other gods.
Just such
a chest is to be understood by the [tebah] in the Moses narrative. The
mother had devised a means of saving her child which was peculiarly conformable
to Egyptian conditions. She placed the infant in a chest which was exactly in
the form used for enshrining images of gods and laid it among the bulrushes at
the spot where Pharaoh’s daughter was accustomed to bathe at a certain hour.
Her hope was that the princess would, at first glance, suppose it to be a chest
containing the image of a god that had fallen into the river and drifted ashore
and that she would have rescued it forthwith.
We know
that the ploy worked and that the incident later became enshrined in Egyptian
mythology pertaining to Horus, Isis and Hathor [15].
C: Other
Genesis and Exodus likenesses
Amongst
numerous other similarities between the Noah and Moses stories, there are the
following striking parallels.
(i) The
Wicked Drowned
According
to the Flood account:
... the
waters prevailed ... and all flesh died that moved upon the earth ..., and
every man (Genesis 7:20, 21).
Likewise,
in Exodus the Egyptians forces were drowned:
the
waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen and all the host of
Pharaoh ... And Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore (Exodus 14:28,
30).
(ii)
Blotting Out
In
Genesis, God decided to ‘blot out’ humankind from the face of the earth because
of its universal wickedness.
But Noah
found favour in the eyes of the Lord (6:7, 8).
In Exodus
(32:10, 32), during the incident of ‘the Golden Calf’, God bade Moses:
‘... let
Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but
of you I will make a great nation’, but Moses interceded for his
fellow-Israelites (that ‘rival operation’ again), saying: ‘... if Thou wilt
forgive their sin - and if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which
Thou hast written’.
(iii) Ark
Specifications
Noah
built the Ark according to the specifications God gave him (Genesis 6:14-16).
Likewise,
Moses built the Ark of the Covenant according to very precise Divine
instructions (Exodus 25:10-22).
(iv)
Seven Days & Forty Days/Nights
Noah and
his family entered the Ark.
And after
seven days the waters of the Flood came upon the earth .... And rain fell upon
the earth forty days and forty nights (Genesis 7:7, 10, 12).
Moses
went up onto Mount Sinai.
The glory
of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days; and on
the seventh day He called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud .... And Moses
was on the mountain forty days and forty nights’ (Exodus 24:15, 16, 18).
(v) Same
Date
Mackinlay,
who synchronises the dates of the Flood and Exodus, tying these in with the New
Testament [16], says: “[Christ] rose from the dead on the day after the Sabbath
after the Passover (John 20:1); the day on which the sheaf of first-fruits,
promise of the future harvest, was waved before God (Leviticus 23:10,11). Hence
we are told by St. Paul that as ‘Christ the first-fruits’ (I Corinthians
15:20,23) rose, so those who believe in Him will also rise afterwards. This day
was the anniversary of Israel's crossing through the Red Sea (Exodus 12-14),
and, as in the case of the Passover, it was also a date memorable in early
history, being the day when the Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat (Genesis 8:4)”.
(vi) Ark
at the Mountain
The Flood
that destroyed humankind carried Noah and his family safely to the mountain,
where the Ark landed (Genesis 8:4). Moses led his people safely through the
Sea, which closed over their enemies. He had the Ark of the Covenant
constructed at the sacred mountain (Ex. 25:10ff.).
(vii)
Altar Built at the Mountain
Noah
built an altar to the Lord (on the mountain?) (Genesis 8:20). Moses built an
altar at the foot of the mountain (according to the design he had seen on the
mountain? [17]) (cf. Exodus 27:1, 8).
(viii)
Covenant at the Mountain
God made
a covenant with Noah at the mountain (Genesis 9:9). God made a covenant with
Moses at the mountain (e.g. Exodus 24:8). The recorded laws that God gave to
Noah were few by comparison with those given to Moses at Sinai.
These
few, nonetheless, are strikingly similar to certain of the latter: God's first
command to Noah was: ‘... be fruitful and multiply upon the earth’ (Genesis
8:17). God tells the Israelites at Sinai: ‘And I will ... make you fruitful and
multiply you’ (Leviticus 26:9). ‘You shall not eat flesh with its life, that
is, its blood’ (Genesis 9:4). Similarly, at Sinai: ‘... you shall eat no blood
whatever’ (Leviticus 7:26).
Regarding
murder: ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed ...’
(Genesis 9:6). This is summed up at Sinai by: ‘You shall not kill’ (Exodus
20:13).
Finally, “Ham,
the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father [Noah]”, and his
off-spring was cursed by Noah (Genesis 9:22, 25). This was remembered at Sinai,
when God told Israel: ‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father ...’
(Leviticus 18:7).
Notes and References
8.
Kikawada, I & Quinn, A, Before Abraham Was, Ignatius Press, San
Francisco, 1985, p. 115. Emphasis added.
9. He
refers to himself as a ‘shipmaster’. Fasold, D, The Discovery of Noah's Ark,
Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1990, p. 263.
10. Ibid.,
p. 271.
11. Ibid.,
pp. 262-3.
12. Ibid.,
pp. 265, 269, 274. Notice also that the Ark of the Covenant, whose construction
Moses oversaw at Sinai, was made of acacia wood (Exodus 37:1), a tree from
which gum is obtained. (A different Hebrew word, though, is used for the Ark of
the Covenant. Not tebah). During Egypt's VI Dynasty, the official Weni refers
to ‘a barge of acacia wood of sixty cubits in length and thirty cubits in width’
that was used to ferry a great altar of alabaster (N. Grimal, A History of
Ancient Egypt, Blackwell, 1992, p. 113).
I have since suggested that this Weni may have been
Moses himself as a high official in Sixth Dynasty Egypt:
13. Yahuda, A., The Language of
the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian, Oxford UP, 1933, p. 264. Yahuda here contrasts the Egyptian flavour
of the story of the child Moses in the river with the entirely Babylonian
flavour of the story of Sargon of Akkad. The latter is one of many copycat
versions of the Exodus story. Another is the Greek legend of Perseus, who as an
infant was locked up with his mother in a wooden ark, which was cast into the
sea. It was eventually picked up by a fisherman, who released the pair inside
and reared Perseus in his own house, until he grew up.
14. Op.
cit., pp. 262ff.
15. As I
noted in ‘Queen of Sheba: Hatshepsut’, Hathor - like Moses’ mother - wet-nursed
the child Horus found in the marshes of the Nile Delta.
16.
Mackinlay, G, The Magi. How They Recognised Christ's Star, 1907, p. 143,
cf. R Anderson, The Coming Prince, note, p. 118.
17. Anati
at least thought this to be the case. Thus he wrote in Har Karkom in the
Light of New Discoveries, Edizioni Del Centro, 1993, p. 35: “Some biblical
scholars believe that Moses may have had a vision of a ‘celestial’ temple while
on the mountain, but the Bible says that there was a temple and this again is a
topographic feature [of Har Karkom]”.
Part Three:
“Next you should
look for Noah’s Ark”.
Anati calls Har Karkom “a Prehistoric
Lourdes”.
D: ‘Why
This Mountain?’
Based on
the above similarities between Noah and Moses, I wish to propose an answer to
the question that has puzzled Professor Anati in regard to Mount Karkom, which
he has convincingly shown to be the true Mount Sinai, or Horeb:
Among the
many unsolved problems concerning this holy mountain, one is likely to be the
most challenging: Why this mountain? What did people find on this
mountain which is not found elsewhere? Similar things may have attracted there
the Palaeolithic and BAC [Bronze Age] tribes. Perhaps the material evidence has
not yet been found or, if it has, it is not yet understood. After forty years
from the first discoveries and after fourteen years of survey, we may not yet
have discovered enough details to fully understand this high-place. The
mountain is likely hiding still other messages [18].
Anati’s
last sentence may turn out to be quite prophetic.
From as
early as the emergence of Homo Sapiens, during the Palaeolithic era
(supposedly 2,000,000 - 20,000 BC), the mountain now known as Har Karkom has
been regarded as a sacred, cultic site. Anati calls it “a Prehistoric Lourdes”
[19].
Anati is a conventional scholar as to dating,
whether it be (i) the Geological Ages; (ii) the Stone Ages or (iii) the
Archaeological Ages.
It was a
region much frequented by Palaeolithic man [20]:
In the
early phases of the Upper Palaeolithic, Homo sapiens left many traces,
among which are several camping sites clustered in an area of less than one
square kilometre. In the middle of this area is found the recently discovered
site HK/86B which was named the ‘Palaeolithic Sanctuary’. From there man has,
as in the past, a vast view of what is today called the Paran desert. At that
time it was an immense bush area and probably was rich with game. For the
Palaeolithic hunters it must have looked like a ‘promised land’.
Because
of this obvious sacredness of the site from ‘Stone Age’ times, Har Karkom might
have been identified as Mount Sinai long before Anati, if only it had been a
more imposing mountain. Just as it is often imagined that great men must hail
from illustrious places, so pious souls might assume that a definitive moment
like the Theophany at Mt. Sinai must have occurred on a tall, imposing
mountain.
The same
human need for an impressive site as the location for an event of great
historico-theological import may well have been what motivated Byzantine
Christians to identify as ‘Mount Sinai’ an imposing mountain in the Sinai
Peninsula, so that today that mountain is known as Jebel Musa (‘Mountain of
Moses’). These explorers apparently went in search of the most imposing
mountain they could find between Egypt and Israel, presuming that the original
Mount Sinai had to be the biggest and most majestic looking in the area.
However Anati has comprehensively shown from the archaeological data that there
was no significant human presence around Jebel Musa for the time of Moses by
any chronological estimation - nothing substantial between the early Stone Age
times and the Byzantine era.
Whilst
the true Mount Sinai, Har Karkom, is quite an imposing mountain amidst its own
environment, it is not of Alpine height. Here is part of Anati’s description of
it [20]:
Though
Har Karkom is only a modest 487 meters above sea level, it dominates the
surrounding Paran desert. The mountain is visible from the Edom mountains in
Jordan, over 70 km away. Likewise it is visible from Jebel Arif el-Naqa, likely
to be the biblical Mount Seir, some 30 km Northwest, beyond the Egyptian
border. When looking at Har Karkom from the Paran desert, the mountain has a
rectangular outline that imposes itself on the horizon. This is an obvious
point of reference for travellers crossing the desert today as in the past.
Perhaps it is significant that this mountain has been an extremely important
source of prime-quality flint in Palaeolithic times. Over 70 Palaeolithic flint
workshops have been recorded so far on the plateau. The archaeological evidence
collected in previous years had led us to consider that Har Karkom became a
holy place at the end of the Stone Age. The use of flint, at this time, as the
material of primary daily use was drawing to a close.
Karkom is
very flat - a vast plateau with two small peaks, perfectly situated relative to
the nations that, according to the Pentateuch, were Sinai’s neighbours at the
time of the Exodus. Jebel Musa, on the other hand, is not appropriately
situated, nor apparently is any other mountain. Moreover, St. Paul referred to
Horeb (Sinai) as being in ‘Arabia’ (Galatians 4:25), which is a suitable
description for the location of Har Karkom during his era but not for Jebel
Musa.
It was at this point in the article that I
introduced my, then, theory that Har Karkom may have been the mountain where
Noah’s Ark had landed:
I would
like to make a bold suggestion regarding Sinai/Horeb (modern Mount Har Karkom):
Horeb is the same as the mountain upon which Noah’s Ark landed, the mountain
known as ‘Ararat’. That is the reason why it became so revered from earliest
times. Indeed it was already known as ‘Horeb, the mountain of God’ before Moses
had returned to Egypt to lead his people to freedom (cf. Exodus 3:1).
It is not
hard to see how the name Horeb could later have been confused with Ararat,
especially in around the 7th cent. BC, when the kingdom of Ararat (or Urartu)
had become a powerful nation in its own right. Horeb, meaning ‘dryness’ in
Hebrew [21] is a most suitable name for the mountain upon which Noah’s Ark
landed, because the most notable feature at Noah’s embarkation was the fact
that the ground was ‘dry’: “... the waters were dried off from the earth ...,
and behold, the face of the ground was dry ... the earth was dry ....Then God
said to Noah, ‘Go forth from the Ark ...’.” (Genesis 8:13, 14, 15). It would
not be surprising, then, if Noah had originally called this mountain “dryness”
(Horeb).
As in the
case of efforts to identify Mt Sinai, the Byzantine Christians went looking for
a majestic mountain - one they considered worthy of the Ark’s landing - and
chose Mt Ararat in Turkey; over 17,000 ft high and snow-capped. Ararat is
actually dangerous and extremely difficult to climb. Apparently a St. Jacob of
the Christian era was one of the first to popularise Mt Ararat in Turkey,
claiming to have been actually carried up to the Ark by an angel, after failing
in his own attempts to ascend the rugged mountain [22].
Whereas
neither Ararat, nor Jebel Musa in the Sinai Peninsula, would have been easy for
people and animals to negotiate (both Noah and Moses were old men), there is
nothing in the Scriptures to indicate that either Patriarch had any trouble
negotiating his mountain. Today there is a lot of interest focussed on Mount
Ararat in Turkey. It has become a favourite destination for ‘Arkeologists’ but
one boat-shaped object in the area, about which fierce controversy has been
raging, appears to be nothing more than a natural feature, a geosyncline.
Anyway, is it realistic to expect that Noah’s Ark, a ship of reeds according to
this study, could survive - exposed to the elements - for more than 4,000
years?
Unlike
Sinai, Ararat is not portrayed in the Scriptures as being a revered region, or
place of pilgrimage, as we would expect had the Ark really landed there. Apart
from the apparent reference in the Flood account, ‘Ararat’ is only otherwise
mentioned in Jeremiah 51:27 and this is about 2,000 years after the Flood.
There ‘Ararat’ refers not to a mountain but a kingdom (which it had become by
that time). The other ancient references to the mountain of the Ark do not even
use the name “Ararat” [23].
The
Babylonian mountain of the Ark, Nisir, has never been firmly identified,
and this name again has no likeness at all to Ararat. Apparently, the sir
part of the ideogram in Ni sir can be read as muš (mush),
which is suspiciously like the Arabic name for ‘Moses’, Muša. Was the
mountain of the Ark simply, as is argued here, the same as ‘Mountain of Moses’?
Possibly it was, but not the mountain of the Ark’s
landing, only perhaps of the Ark’s construction.
Har
Karkom, unlike Ararat, is easily climbed. It is nice and flat on top too,
perfect for a smooth landing for Noah and his crew. The Ark, we are told, “came
to rest upon the mountains of Ararat ... the peaks of the mountains were seen”
(Genesis 8:4, 5). Note the plural “mountains”. A vessel would not be likely to
rest on more than one mountain at a time - but Har Karkom has two small peaks
guarding its plateau and these could be considered as separate “mountains”,
between which the boat came to rest. I suggest that this topographical feature
is what the three sons of Noah were referring to in their account of the Ark’s
landing.
See my preferred version now of the:
Situated
at the Centre of the World
I
commented earlier that Anati was perhaps prophetic in musing that Har Karkom
might yet hold other secret messages. He (without putting his finger on the
exact situation) has perceptively discerned a nexus between the Exodus
migration and some earlier Palaeolithic migration of peoples that occurred
around Karkom:
It seems
that the story of exodus, in exodus times, relied already on archetypes. The
story of a great migration, which gave birth to the ‘nation’ is known from many
mythologies in five continents around the world. The common denominator brings
us back to the early migration of Homo sapiens leaving his place of
origin to explore and conquer the world. From what is presently known, the
whole of present-day humanity, entirely descending from Homo sapiens,
acquired its consciousness, including its ability and need to produce art, when
the early ancestors left their ‘Garden of Eden’. Har Karkom seems to provide
both; the evidence of this primordial migration and of the one which is
believed to have given birth to the Israelite nation. Is the coincidence
fortuitous? [24].
If this
study is correct, then two new beginnings for humankind occurred at this
important site of Har Karkom.
Whilst I would still basically accept the
correctness of this observation, I would now alter my view of the nature of the
earlier of these “new beginnings”.
Perhaps
Moses, by paralleling his own Exodus account with that of the Flood, was making
certain that the connection between the early migration associated with Noah
and that of the Exodus would not be missed by future generations. Har Karkom,
at the virtual ‘centre of the ancient world’, is perfectly situated for
subsequent migrations of the ‘sons of Noah’ (i.e. Palaeolithic man) northwards
to Palestine and Syria, west to Egypt and east to the land of Shinar, where
occurred the Babel incident (Genesis 11:2ff.). The mountain’s significance of
location has not escaped Anati [25]:
Har
Karkom, with more than 200 Palaeolithic sites, has by far the major
concentration of Palaeolithic finds recorded so far in the Sinai peninsula and
the Negev. Har Karkom has always been an important source of high quality
flint, a precious raw material for early man. It also appears to be on a major
migration trail of Palaeolithic man between Africa and Asia. Both in the Middle
and in the Upper Palaeolithic, flint implements of African types are found
there, but they are made with local flint.
In this
article, based largely on biblical parallelism, I have tried to take the
further step of showing why Har Karkom was so revered in Palaeolithic times. If
it is both the true Sinai and the mountain of the Ark … then the following
criticism of his Sinai research that Anati claims to have received from
colleagues would be quite ironic:
... we
found other kinds of hostile reaction. Some scholars simply did not like to
admit that they may have been wrong. We became used to sarcastic comments such
as ‘Did you find the broken Tablets of the Law?’, or, ‘Next you should look for
Noah’s Ark’.
I think that here might be a good starting place
for the latter.
Notes and
References
18.
Anati, E., Har Karkom in the Light of New Discoveries, Edizioni Del
Centro, 1993, p. 89, emphasis added.
19. Ibid.,
p. 46.
20. Ibid.,
p. 11.
21.
According to The Encyclopaedia Judaica, article “Sinai”.
22.
Stories about the Ark’s presence on Mount Ararat became especially common
during the Middle Ages.
23. Jubilees 5:28. According to the Jewish Book of Jubilees (c. 2nd BC), the
Ark landed on a mountain called Lu-Bar. Nicolas of Damascus (as preserved by
Josephus) gave it as Baris. Mount Demavend has also been mentioned as a
candidate.
24. Har
Karkom, p. 89.
25. Ibid.,
p. 87, emphasis added.
