Mountains in the Book of Exodus, Part 1

In today’s exploration of what religious texts say about mountains and hills, I am looking at the second book in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible: Exodus.

Because Exodus says so much about mountains, I’ve broken my notes into two parts. Part 1 deals with the Book of Exodus through chapter 15, covering the early life of Moses, the burning bush, and the Israelites’ flight out of Egypt into the wilderness. Part 2 runs from Exodus 16 to 40 and covers the Israelites’ camp at Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the Tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, and the start of the Israelites’ onward journey to the promised land.

As we saw in my notes on mountains in Genesis, there are earlier symbolic associations with mountains in the Judeo-Christian tradition than the ones we will examine in Exodus. Yet few Biblical stories are as vivid in the public imagination as the ones in Exodus. These stories are mountain stories. Among these important mountain stories are the stories of the burning bush, the flight out of Egypt, the Ten Commandments, and the building of the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant.

Exodus reinforces mountain-related concepts first articulated in Genesis. But, as we will see by the end of Part 2, Exodus also establishes new ones, including the idea that temples and houses of worship are the manufactured, surrogate mountain homes of god.

An Overview of Exodus

Exodus is the second book in the Jewish Torah and Christian Bible. It recounts the story of Moses and the Israelites’ escape from Egypt to the promised land. It also reaffirms the pact, or the covenant, between god and the Israelites.

Exodus has three main narrative sections. The first, chapters 1 through 15, details the Israelites’ experience in, and their flight out of, Egypt. The second includes chapters 15 to 24 and charts the Israelites’ experience in the wilderness, including their acceptance of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. The last section, between chapters 25 to 40, includes building the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant.

The Story of Moses & The Burning Bush

The Book of Exodus begins with the personal story of Moses and the Pharaoh’s oppression of the Israelites in Egypt. Its early chapters establish that Moses belongs to the “house of Levi.” Levi was the son of Jacob, the grandson of Isaac, and the great-grandson of Abraham. Moses has a direct line of descent from those to whom god revealed himself and to whom god promised land. Upon hearing the “groaning” of the subjugated Israelites in Egypt, “God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.”¹

Moses, being adopted by the Pharaoh’s daughter, was raised as an Egyptian. But, when he became an adult, Moses came to the defense of an Israelite and killed his Egyptian attacker. He then fled to a place called Midian. Moses shepherded a flock of animals out of Midian to a mountain, where the angel of god appeared to him in “a flame of fire out of a bush.”² Upon turning over the burning bush, Moses was instructed by god himself to remove his sandals while on “holy ground.”³ Moses was on Mount Horeb, which Exodus refers to as “the mountain of God.”⁴

As we have seen in the Book of Genesis, the first Judeo-Christian altars were built on high places. But it is here in Exodus that a mountain becomes explicitly “holy” and possessed by a divine presence, both physical and spiritual.

The directive for Moses to remove his shoes on the mountain is an interesting one, for many world religions require the removal of shoes before entering houses of worship, temples, and shrines. God’s directive thus establishes a symbolic connection between mountains and temple-like sites of worship.

A Land of Milk and Honey

Still on Mount Horeb, god reaffirms his promise to Moses and the Israelites by saying, “I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites.”⁵

When god uses the phrase “I have come down,” he suggests his abode is somewhere high, above us, in the heavens. Do his words suggest he is a sky god? There are other references in Exodus that suggest this interpretation, like god’s ability to “rain bread from heaven,” his propensity to invoke thunder and lightning, and his predilection to assume the form of clouds.⁶ Entertaining the idea that the Judeo-Christian god is a sky god helps us understand why the elevated position of mountains is the ideal place to worship and communicate with him. But, as we will see, the god in Exodus might be better described as a mountain god. There is also an association with mountains and water/rain in the global history of ideas.

When god says he will deliver the Israelites “up out” of Egypt, he suggests the place they’re going to has an elevated position. The reference to the promised land as a high place is a literary allusion to its holiness, for god himself lives “on high.” But it is also a literal statement, as the promised land — “the country of the Canaanites” — has a hilly, mountainous terrain and a higher elevation than Cairo or the Nile River Delta.

God’s statement includes the first Biblical reference to the promised land as a “land of milk and honey.” As we saw in Genesis, mountainous landscapes are described as fertile, lush, and abundant places. They are places where, if we remember the Testing of Abraham, god “provides.” The promised land is therefore a mountainous land, a place of both physical and spiritual plenty.

Mountains as Sites for Worship & Sacrifice

Before bringing the Israelites to the promised land, Moses must return to Egypt, free the Israelites from oppression, and deliver them to Mount Horeb. Reaffirming that mountains are ideal locations for worship, god says to Moses, “When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”⁷

Later, when coaching Moses on what he should say to the Pharaoh, god clarifies what mountain worship looks like: “You and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt, and say to him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; let us now go at three days’ journey into the wilderness, so that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God.’”⁸

But it is a particular type of sacrifice that interests god: animal sacrifice.

The Pharaoh permits the Israelites to leave after the plague of locusts, but without any livestock or animals. Moses refuses to leave without them, saying: “You must also let us have sacrifices to the LORD our God. Our livestock also must go with us; not a hoof shall be left behind, for we must choose some of them for the worship of the LORD our God, and we will not know what to use to worship the LORD until we arrive there.”⁹

Horeb and Sinai

Throughout Exodus, Mount Horeb is more commonly called Mount Sinai. Why the two names? It is not clear. What is clear is that both names refer to the same place.

As we just saw, god instructs Moses to deliver the Israelites from Egypt to Mount Horeb. By the time the Israelites arrive, the mountain is called Sinai. Throughout Exodus, Sinai appears as the preferred name for the “mountain of god,” used more frequently than Horeb. A footnote in The New Oxford Annotated Bible says there is possible poetic alliteration between Sinai and the Hebrew word for bush (סנה - seneh).¹⁰

A Mountain God? A Fertility God?

In Exodus, god refers to himself as “God Almighty.” This English translation doesn’t capture the etymological depth or nuance of the Hebrew term used: El Shaddai (אֵל שַׁדַּי). The word El means god. The Hebrew term Shaddai (שַׁדַּי) is derived from the Akkadian word for mountain, mountain area, or steppe: šadû.¹¹ God Almighty is thus a poor (poetic?) translation of El Shaddai, which means God of the Mountain.

Some scholars have noted that Shaddai might also be a reference to “breast,” citing the modern Hebrew word for breast: shad (שָׁד).¹² This breast-mountain connection is compelling because of the symbolic link between mountains and fertility, as I discussed above and in my notes on Genesis. It is all the more compelling because god promises to deliver the Israelites to “a land flowing with milk and honey.” And, let’s not forget that breasts are conical in shape, much like an idealized mountain.

It should be noted here that El Shaddai appears a few times in Genesis, notably when god instructs Jacob to build an altar in Bethel (lit. House of God), to anoint it with oil, and to pour an offering on it. In keeping with the theme of mountain abundance, god promises prosperity onto Jacob, saying, “I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall spring from you. The land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you.”¹³

The Song of Moses & The Abode of God

After he closes the Red Sea on the Egyptian army and drowns them, Moses praises god in song. Towards the end of his paean, Moses sings:

In your steadfast love you led the people whom you redeemed; you guided them by your strength to your holy abode… You brought them in and planted them on the mountain of your own possession, the place, O LORD, that you made your abode, the sanctuary, O LORD, that your hands have established.¹⁴

Some scholars note that the lyrics in Moses’s paean are literary allusions to the promised land in Canaan. But let’s not forget that Moses’s use of the terms “holy abode,” “mountain,” and “sanctuary” are literal references to Mount Horeb/Sinai. Psalm 78:54, which recounts Moses’s escape from Egypt and the events that unfolded at Sinai, reaffirms the literal interpretation: “He led them in safety, so that they were not afraid; but the sea overwhelmed their enemies. And he brought them to his holy hill, to the mountain that his right hand had won.”¹⁵

In Part 2 of Mountains in Exodus, I’ll cover the Israelites’ camp at Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the Tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, and the start of the Israelites’ onward journey to the promised land.