About DTRF
The purpose of this website is to provide a comprehensive resource about the proposed locations of Mount Sinai in Arabia and the Exodus route. It will be updated as more research is gathered.
One of the greatest difficulties in this area of research is that there is not a single, comprehensive source where researchers can find all of the cumulative theories and the proposed evidences for them. Over a dozen candidates for Mount Sinai have been proposed over time, with the candidates in Egypt gaining the most attention and having the most access for excavation.
This website intends to provide a wide-ranging review of some of the theories so that researchers can work from a common set of facts and arguments, as well as to present the evidence for Jabal Maqla in Saudi Arabia.
In addition, the lack of consensus and apparent lack of compelling evidence for the historicity of the Exodus account has caused a mainstream dismissal of the story's credibility. A part of the difficulty lies in the fact that researchers may have been looking in the wrong places.
The most commonly cited location of Mount Sinai or “Jebel Musa,” meaning the “Mountain of Moses,” is at St. Catherine’s in the southern part of the Sinai Peninsula in modern-day Egypt. While there are respected supporters of that mountain being the Biblical Mount Sinai, many others have found the evidence to be lacking. The result has been mainstream dismissal of the Exodus account as a myth and proposals for alternative locations that may offer more compelling evidence.
The debate over the location of Mount Sinai, including whether it should be in modern-day Egypt or elsewhere in the Middle East, is oftentimes unnecessarily heated. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, which is considered an authoritative source on Jewish theology and history, religious Jews should not interpret the debate as a suggestion that their beliefs and traditions are inaccurate.
“There is no Jewish tradition of the geographical location of Mt. Sinai; it seems that its location was obscure already in the time of the monarchy,” it reads.[1]
For example, one Rabbi recently published a book titled "Searching for Sinai." Rabbi Alexander Hool believes that Mount Sinai is in Saudi Arabia, and not in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula as is usually believed.
The Doubting Thomas Research Foundation formed to gather as much information as possible about the theories of Mount Sinai's location, and to present truthful information regarding our contention for Mount Sinai in Saudi Arabia. We remain dedicated to pursuing the truth wherever it leads, and will abide by our Mission Statement in all of our activities.
This website is a project of the Doubting Thomas Research Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to investigating the historicity of the Exodus, including documenting the theories about the location of Mount Sinai, and researching possible reconciliations of the Biblical account with modern understandings of history and science. We are not a proselytizing organization.
[1] The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 14, p. 1599.