Mountains and Sacred Peaks in the Torah

Most people can name Sinai. If they think about it, maybe they can name Ararat too. But almost nobody thinks about how consistently mountains show up in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Some of the most dramatic moments in these books happen on high ground: a burning bush, an ark landing, a father raising a knife over his son, the Ten Commandments, the covenants that define the whole religion. It’s a pattern that continues throughout the Old Testament and appears, albeit to a lesser degree, in the New Testament.

Today I will discuss a few mountains, roughly one from each book of the Pentateuch, including my case for why the tabernacle, arguably Judaism’s first temple, should count as a mountain too.

You can also watch this post on YouTube:

A Note on El Shaddai

Before getting into the mountains themselves, a quick note on why mountains matter in the first place.

One of the epithets for God used in the Old Testament — El Shaddai — is usually translated as “God Almighty.” But that’s a poetic translation. El just means “god.” But Shaddai is generally thought to derive from the Akkadian word for mountain, šadû.¹ So a more literal rendering of El Shaddai is closer to “God of the Mountain.” The god of the Old Testament is, in this sense, a sky god who likes to conduct his business on mountains.

The association between gods and high places was common across the ancient Near East, and it becomes a load-bearing element of the Old Testament, and, to a lesser degree but not wholly absent in, the New Testament too.

Mount Ararat

The first mountain, or mountain range, named in the Bible shows up at the end of the flood story in Genesis.

God floods the earth. Noah, his family, and the animals ride it out in the ark. When the waters finally recede, the ark “came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.”²

The idea of mountain-as-refuge doesn’t stop with Noah. Lot flees to the mountains to escape the destruction of Sodom, and centuries later Jesus tells his disciples to flee to the mountains when Jerusalem falls. It’s a trope that runs the length of the whole Bible. The expression “head for the hills,” meaning “run to safety,” has biblical roots. High ground is repeatedly associated with safety.

Once the ark comes to rest and the waters recede, Noah and his family leave it behind and build an altar on the mountain. This is the Bible’s first reference to altars, worship, and sacrifice on high ground. When God smells the “pleasing aroma” of the sacrifice, he blesses Noah and his family: “be fruitful and multiply.”³

All of humanity, and every animal on earth, descends from a mountaintop to repopulate the world. The metaphor here is a sky god irrigating the world, so to speak, from a summit… not with water, but with life. It’s another recurring mountain trope, mountains as places of life and abundance.

I cover the Genesis mountains in more detail in another post.

Mount Moriah

The second mountain involves one of the most disturbing stories in the whole Bible, and it also comes from Genesis.

God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.⁴ Abraham obeys. He climbs the mountain, builds an altar, and binds Isaac for the sacrifice. At the very last second, just as the blade is about to come down, an angel stops him and provides a ram to sacrifice instead.

Abraham’s line afterward, usually translated something like “on the mount of the Lord it shall be provided,”⁵ has become almost a proverb. The idea is that God provides for, or meets the needs of, his people when they need it most. “The mount of the Lord” has become a kind of shorthand for followers of God: those who climb the mountain, metaphorically speaking, to worship god will be provided for. Here I remind you of a related mountain metaphor, Jesus as a “good shepherd” guiding his flock of “sheep.”

Mount Sinai

The third mountain comes from Exodus and is the one everyone knows: Mount Sinai.

The Old Testament sometimes uses another name for Mount Sinai — Mount Horeb. There’s some scholarly debate here, but the two names are generally understood to refer to the same place, so I’ll just use Sinai.⁶

Moses first encounters Sinai as a shepherd, when he sees the burning bush. In that scene, God tells him to remove his sandals because he’s standing on holy ground⁷… as if Moses had wandered into a temple and forgotten to take off his shoes. The mountain is holy, after all.

It’s on this mountain that God later tells Moses he’ll bring the Israelites to the “promised land,” described as “a land flowing with milk and honey”⁸. This is another metaphor of abundance, worth noting alongside the fact that the promised land is elsewhere described as “the hill country.”

Sinai is the mountain Moses disappears into and, forty days and nights later, reappears from with the Ten Commandments in hand. It’s also at the base of this mountain that the Israelites, tired of waiting, melt their gold into a calf and worship it. In the heat of the golden calf crisis, Moses smashes the tablets. So, Moses climbs back up Sinai for forty more days and nights to get a second set.⁹

I’ve written about Sinai and the burning bush at more length in my two-part series on Exodus.

Mount Hor

The fourth mountain, Mount Hor, is much smaller in drama, but it matters because it’s where a mountain becomes the site of a transfer of religious authority.

In Numbers, God tells Moses to bring his brother Aaron, along with Aaron’s son Eleazar, up Mount Hor. At the top, Moses strips Aaron of his priestly vestments and puts them on Eleazar. Aaron dies on the mountain, and Eleazar becomes the second high priest of Israel.¹⁰

It’s a quiet story compared to Sinai and Moriah, but what happens on the mountain amounts to an ordination ceremony for the priestly class. More than revelation happens on mountains. Political succession does too. Power, whether divine or human, plays out on high ground.

Mount Hor shows up again later in Numbers, marking part of the boundary of the promised land.¹¹ Scholars generally think this is a second, different mountain that happens to share the name and not the same peak where Aaron died.

Mount Nebo

The final scene of the Pentateuch happens on Mount Nebo.

In Deuteronomy, God tells Moses to climb Nebo and look out over the promised land — the land he’s led an entire generation toward for forty years. Then God does something severe: he tells Moses he’ll die there, on the mountain, without ever setting foot in the land itself.¹² The Torah ends with Moses’s death on the mountain and his burial somewhere in the valley below.

The Mountains of Moab

Bamoth-baal, Mount Pisgah, and Mount Peor appear in the Book of Numbers, when the Moabite king Balak, watching the Israelites approach, hires a sorcerer named Balaam to curse them.

The king first takes Balaam to a high place called Bamoth-baal — literally, “the high place of Baal” — builds an altar, and prepares a sacrifice.¹³ The idea is that Balaam will invoke the Moabite gods from the mountain to curse the Israelites. Instead, the god of the Israelites overrides the other gods, and a blessing comes out of Balaam’s mouth instead of a curse. The king tries again on Mount Pisgah, with the same result.¹⁴ He tries a third time on Mount Peor — same result again, except this time Balaam directly invokes the name El Shaddai, God of the Mountain, in his blessing.¹⁵

What I find interesting here is the idea that worshipping gods on mountains wasn’t exclusive to the Israelites. It appears to have been a regional practice. It wasn’t unusual in this part of the ancient world for gods to be worshipped on high places, which makes sense given how much energy the Old Testament spends condemning the “high places” of other gods. You don’t need that many laws against a practice unless the practice is common.

The Tabernacle as Mountain

The last “mountain” isn’t technically a mountain at all, but I think it should count anyway.

Back in Exodus, while Moses is up on Sinai for forty days, God gives him remarkably specific instructions for building something called the tabernacle. The Hebrew word is miškān, which simply means “dwelling place.” God tells Moses he wants this structure “so that I may dwell among” the Israelites.¹⁶

But the Tabernacle isn’t just a temple or a tent. It’s a portable copy of Sinai itself. It has the same structure of holiness: an outer court, a holy place, and an innermost holy of holies, mirroring the three sacred zones of Mount Sinai. It’s covered by the same kind of cloud that covered Sinai’s peak when God’s presence was there. God speaks to Moses from inside the Tabernacle much as he spoke to him from the summit of Sinai. It’s even sometimes called the “tent of meeting.”

It’s designed to travel through the wilderness, set up and taken down at every camp. It’s God’s mobile home. It is a manufactured, portable mountain. And this is arguably the beginning of the end of mountain worship in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The faithful can now commune with God, and offer sacrifices to him, in their cities and towns, in temples. They don’t need to go mountain climbing anymore.

One of the narrative threads of the Old Testament, in fact, might be the story of God’s gradual descent from the sky and into the temple.

This isn’t unique to Judaism, either. The Hindu temple has a long design tradition of being built explicitly as a mountain,¹⁷ as do the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and other temple structures around the world. I’ve briefly touched on this pattern of manufactured mountains elsewhere.

If you want the fuller synthesis of how this arc plays out across the whole Torah — from Ararat to the Tabernacle — I pulled all six of my Torah posts together into one long essay.