The story of Moses’ encounter with God on Mount Sinai is well known, but it is perhaps less understood that he ascended the mountain a total of six times. After the dramatic events of the first Passover the Israelites made their way from the familiar landscape of the Nile Basin into drier and less hospitable terrain of the Sinai Peninsula. Exodus 19 reports that ‘on the first day of the third month after the Israelites left Egypt – on that very day – they came to the Desert of Sinai’ (Exodus 19:1 NIV). However, the location of the mountain under which they camped is debated. It seems likely that the Israelites trekked south through the plain of El-Markha, which runs along the eastern shoreline of the Gulf of Suez, and inland, the peaks of the great mountains would have towered over them, one of which would have been Mount Sinai; perhaps the best candidate was جَبَل مُوسَى (Jabal Mosu), which in Arabic translates as the ‘Mountain of Moses’.

The dramatic scenes that unfold in the following days are perhaps unparalleled in the Hebrew Bible. The initial meeting between God and Moses on the mountain is understated; God simply tells Moses to relay a message to the Israelites concerning their future as his treasured possession סְגֻלָּה (segullah). After carrying out his initial task Moses returns to the mountain once again and this time God instructs Moses to prepare the people for his arrival. In fact, little could have prepared the Israelites for what happened next: ‘On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled’ (Exodus 19:16 NIV). The following verse describes God’s arrival to the top of the mountain: ‘The LORD descended to the top of Mount Sinai and called Moses to the top of the mountain’. Nowhere had such a mass of people witnessed the arrival of the divine presence in such a way. Although God himself was not seen by the people in the camp, they heard his voice; something they could only endure for a short time: ‘They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die”’ (Exodus 20:18b-19 NIV).

In fact, Moses was not always alone with God on the mountain, although he is generally thought of as being so. Exodus 19:24 suggests that after God speaks out the Ten Commandments to the whole community, Aaron goes with him up the mountain – after Moses’ second Sinai encounter he is instructed to bring his brother with him the next time: ‘The LORD replied, “Go down and bring Aaron up with you’ (Exodus 19:24 NIV). However, although Aaron had accompanied Moses on his third climb, there is no suggestion that Aaron entered the ‘dark cloud’ הָעֲרָפֶל (haarap̄e lit. heavy cloud): ‘The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was’ (Exodus 20:21 NIV). It is during this time that Moses receives an expansion of the commandments already given; primarily laws governing community life, including farming regulations and instructions concerning festivals. Chapter 23 finishes with the famous discourse introducing the mysterious angel of the LORD who would go before the Israelites, but more importantly it represents a restating of God’s promises to the descendants of Abraham, including the promise of blessing and the promise of a future home: ‘“I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River”’ (Exodus 23:31 NIV). It is at this point that Moses is instructed to return to the camp and tell the Israelites what he had heard: ‘When Moses went and told the people all the Lord’s words and laws, they responded with one voice, “Everything the Lord has said we will do.” Moses then wrote down everything the Lord had said’ (Exodus 24:3-4 NIV). It is a pivotal moment in the history of the people of Israel as Moses speaks out and writes down the Book of the Covenant הַבְּרִית סֵפֶר (sep̄er habberiṯ). The following day Moses reads the words once more ‘Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey”’ (Exodus 24:7 NIV).

Verses nine to eleven then represents the fourth documented time that Moses ascends the mountain since arriving at Sinai, and once again he is not alone:

‘Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as bright blue as the sky. But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank.’ (Exodus 24:9-11 NIV)

The word used in the Hebrew for ‘went up’, would become an important one in the centuries that followed and one central to the future experience of the Israelites; it would take on special significance as the word describing the return of those who went back to Jerusalem after the exile. The term, in that sense, prefigures the practice of going up to the future capital to encounter God. Indeed, the seventy four receive a privileged vision of the God of Israel and the suggestion of the text is that they have sight of the very throne room of God.

That Moses however, experienced a greater degree of intimacy with God than his counterparts seems implied throughout the chapters detailing the events of that time. His fifth time of meeting God seems to be a case in point, although he was in fact accompanied by Joshua up the mountain (and back down again), only Moses it seems was allowed to enter the cloud; after the glory of Yahweh rests upon the mountain for six days, Moses is called into the cloud: ‘Then Moses entered the cloud as he went on up the mountain. And he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights’ (Exodus 24:18 NIV); it is this encounter that most people perhaps recall when they think of Moses on Mount Sinai. During the forty day period Moses receives specific instructions concerning the construction and setting up of the tabernacle. He would also be instructed as to the ministry of the high priest and the institution of the priesthood. Moreover, after receiving these detailed instructions at the end of chapter 31 Moses is told by God, that the sign אוֹת (owt) of the covenant would be the keeping of the Sabbath:

‘Then the Lord said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘You must observe my Sabbaths. This will be a sign between me and you for the generations to come, so you may know that I am the LORD, who makes you holy.”’ (Exodus 31:13 NIV)

Just as Abraham had received the sign of circumcision as sign of the covenant between himself, his descendants and God, so now, the weekly rest would be a sign that marked out God’s people as different from those of the nations around them. The sign of the covenant was not the only thing that Moses received on his last visit to the mountain however, and verse eighteen records: ‘When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant law, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God’. Of course, these are the tablets destined to be smashed by Moses, who is enraged at the idolatrous behaviour of the Israelites in his absence. It is a vivid symbol that the covenant had been broken no sooner than it had been confirmed by blood: ‘When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain’ (Exodus 32:19 NIV). The Israelites’ promise that they would do everything the LORD had asked of them was short-lived.

Moses is destined to take one last documented trip, his sixth time, up to the summit of Sinai and God tells him to bring two new tablets with him: ‘“Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke”’ (Exodus 34:1 NIV). This time no one accompanies Moses, and God famously appears to the Levite in spectacular fashion, proclaiming his name, Yahweh. Moreover, once again the LORD restates the terms of his covenant, after which Moses is asked to write down what he had heard:

‘Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.’ (Exodus 34:27-28 NIV)

It is after this point that the work on the tabernacle begins, and in Exodus 40, after its fabrication God tells Moses to ‘“Set up the tabernacle, the tent of meeting, on the first day of the first month”’ (Exodus 40:1-2 NIV). The day was a significant one, the beginning of a new Jewish year as instituted by God in Exodus 12. After all the work of had been completed and inspected by Moses, God’s kabod moves from the mountain to the tabernacle:

‘Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses could not enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.’ (Exodus 40:34-35 NIV)

God would now speak with Moses from the tabernacle and indeed, the whole of the book of Leviticus represents God’s continued discourse with Moses concerning the laws governing life and worship in the community: ‘The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting’ (Leviticus 1:1 NIV). Indeed, as if to confirm that the tribes of Israel had not yet moved from Sinai the book of Leviticus ends with the words: ‘These are the commands the Lord gave Moses at Mount Sinai for the Israelites’ (Leviticus 27:34 NIV). The book of Numbers similarly begins with a clear historical and geographical marker: ‘The Lord spoke to Moses in the tent of meeting in the Desert of Sinai on the first day of the second month of the second year after the Israelites came out of Egypt’ (Numbers 1:1 NIV). Things are about to change however, and one year exactly since the Israelites left Egypt the Israelites are called to remember their escape once more:

‘So Moses told the Israelites to celebrate the Passover, and they did so in the Desert of Sinai at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month. The Israelites did everything just as the LORD commanded Moses’ (Number 9:4-5 NIV)

In the end it would be one month from the end of the second celebration of the feast of unleavened bread that the Israelites would move from their temporary home in the Desert of Sinai:

‘On the twentieth day of the second month of the second year, the cloud lifted from above the tabernacle of the covenant law. Then the Israelites set out from the Desert of Sinai and travelled from place to place until the cloud came to rest in the Desert of Paran. They set out, this first time, at the LORD’s command through Moses.’ (Numbers 10:11-13 NIV)

The significance of the Israelites stay at Sinai could not be greater, in just over a year, they had been transformed through the leadership of Moses, from a disenfranchised rabble into a cohesive, organised confederation of tribes, with a firm purpose, and an established covenant with the God who had revealed himself as Yahweh, the God of their fathers. More importantly, the God who had descended on the mountain had now, through Moses, engineered a way that he could be with his treasured possession. Indeed, in the coming days it would be this very presence of God that marked out the Israelites as separate and re-enfranchised them as God’s people.