Place · Egypt
Sinai
The peninsula and wilderness between Egypt and Canaan, biblical setting of the covenant and one proposed area for Yahweh's cultic origin.
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Statements linked to this place
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According to the Bible, Jacob's son Joseph was taken to Egypt as a slave and, thanks to his skill at interpreting dreams, rose to the second-highest post in the kingdom; during a famine in Canaan his father and eleven brothers moved there. His descendants, the 12 tribes, thrived until a new king enslaved them. Moses, raised in the household of the king's daughter, freed them with ten plagues, and they left, crossing the Red Sea, which God parted and closed over the Egyptians. Other biblical clues suggest Yahweh came from outside Canaan, from the Sinai wilderness: a few texts describe him coming from the south, and inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud speak of 'Yahweh of the South'. That territory was inhabited by the Midianites, and some scholars have proposed that Yahweh began as a Midianite god (the Midianite hypothesis). At Sinai Moses meets Yahweh in the burning bush and Israel makes its covenant, stories that may reflect a vague memory of him as a deity first met there.