tourism

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Forget about Hollywood for a moment: Where is the biblical Mount Sinai located?

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Forget about Hollywood for a moment: Where is the biblical Mount Sinai located?

QUESTION:

Where is biblical Mount Sinai located?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Why would anyone wonder about the sacred spot where God through Moses revealed the Ten Commandments and other biblical laws? Just look at the name. Doesn’t everybody know that Mount Sinai must of course be on the Sinai Peninsula and, specifically, at a long-venerated location there?

And yet a New York Times feature on June 25 reported that since Saudi Arabia opened up to tourists in 2019, some U.S. Christians have regularly traveled to the nation’s northwestern corner east of the Gulf of Aqaba and south of Jordan, to view what they insist is the true location – oddly enough, within Islam’s founding nation!

As the Times reported, the Arabia claim has been promoted by evangelical Christian tour guides, adventurers and treasure-hunters through popular books, Internet articles and videos. But there’s far more to it. Well-credentialed scholars of the Bible and ancient history in the Near East have proposed this location, which has been gaining ground in recent decades.

At least 13 locations for Mount Sinai (also called Mount Horeb in the Bible) have been proposed, according to the 1993 commentary on the Book of Exodus by Sweden’s Goran Larsson. Jewish tradition never preserved the identity of any location. In fact, Christians are far more interested in the question than Jews, who are more focused on historic sites in the Holy Land. Israeli skeptics and secularists even doubt the entire story about Moses and God’s giving of the Torah.

An article like this can only sketch a vigorous and highly complex debate, so interested readers are invited to explore the matter, starting with resources listed below.

To begin, it’s worth considering a proposed Mount Sinai location within present-day Israel in the southwestern sector of the arid southern wilderness known as the Negev.


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Washington Post sends travel pro to Waco, producing feature with big God-shaped hole

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I am sorry, but I cannot resist another trip to Waco with a blue zip code travel writer.

Once again, I confess that my interest is, in part, rooted in my amazement that Waco has become a major player in Texas tourism. That’s still stunning news for me, as someone who called Waco home for my history/journalism undergraduate and church-state master’s work at Baylor University.

GetReligion readers — especially those in Texas or anyone with shiplap inside their homes — may recall that religion played a major role in the edgy coverage that I dissected here: “BuzzFeed moves in to fix up all those happy tales about Magnolia folks and their 'new' Waco.”

Now, the powers that be at The Washington Post have dispatched travel writer Andrew Sachs to the Heart of Texas to see what all of the fuss is about. The headline: “Waco, Tex., needed fixing. Luckily, Chip and Joanna Gaines had the tools.”

So, what could be worse that somewhat snarky sociological analysis that assumed fans of Donald Trump were hiding behind every oak tree in Waco and, certainly, at Antioch Community Church, the evangelical base for many of the people active in the Magnolia success story?

Apparently, someone at the Post decided that religion had absolutely nothing to do with the events unfolding in Waco and nothing to do with why millions of people are flocking there as tourists. The Gaines family has all the “tools,” but faith is not part of this big picture.

Let’s walk through this first-person travel piece looking for faith-based content. First, there is this:

After five seasons of “Fixer Upper,” Waco and the Gaineses seem as inextricably linked as New York City and “Queer Eye” (the original quintet, not the Atlanta remake).


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Tourism to Israel is up, and it's obviously because of President Trump, right? Well, let's talk about that ...

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If you want an in-depth explanation of why “correlation does not imply causation,” you’ll need a more educated source than me.

But here’s what I will say about NPR’s weekend report linking evangelical support of President Trump with rising tourism numbers in Israel: Evidence to support that storyline seems a little squishy to me.

Or maybe a whole lot squishy. I’ll explain in a moment. But first, here’s how NPR sets the scene:

President Trump's evident desire to identify who's most "loyal" to Israel has a clear winner: U.S. evangelicals.

Not only do they outpace U.S. Jews in their support for policies that favor the Israeli government, but U.S. evangelicals have also become the fastest-growing sector of the Israeli tourism market. The developments may even be related.

"I'd say close to 100% of our travelers come back extremely pro-Israel in their political views," says Andy Cook, a pastor who leads evangelical tours of the Holy Land twice a year.

OK, that description of evangelicals as “the fastest-growing sector of the Israeli tourism market” certainly sounds authoritative. However, unless I missed it, NPR doesn’t provide any internet links or other hard data to back up that characterization.

Does actual data exist?

Or is that description attributable to a tourism official eager to tout evangelical travel to a reporter clearing wanting to make that connection?

Let’s read a little more:


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Once again in Royal David's City: Journalists still confused about Christmas who, what, when, where ...

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So journalists: When is Christmas in the ancient city of Bethlehem?

Obviously, for many people, Christmas is on Dec. 25th. That's when you'll see television coverage of people singing carols, in English for the most part, in Bethlehem Square. Often, reports will include a glimpse of the Midnight Mass in the modern Franciscan sanctuary known as the Church of St. Catherine.

Next door to this Catholic church is the ancient Church of the Nativity, an Eastern Orthodox sanctuary built with its altar directly above the grotto in which church traditions says Jesus of Nazareth was born.

So, journalists: When is Christmas celebrated at this very symbolic altar?

The answer, of course, is that Christmas is on Jan. 7, for most (but not all) Eastern Orthodox Christians -- those who follow the older Julian calendar. This includes millions of believers in places like Russia, Egypt, Eastern Europe and, yes, Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories. For more information on this, see my 2015 post: "Washington Post covers first of Bethlehem's two (yes, two) Christmas celebrations."

Year after year, journalists cover the events of Dec. 24-25, while ignoring those on Jan. 6-7. This is most strange if the goal is to (a) cover the current state of Christianity in Bethlehem and the  surrounding region and (b) to use Bethlehem tourism as a way to gauge the impact of economic trends and violence in the Holy Land. Like it or not, Russia (and Eastern Europeans) have strong ties to the ancient churches of the Middle East and many believers in the East like to make pilgrimages to these holy sites, while following the Julian liturgical calendar.

The Los Angeles Times recently published a Christmas in Bethlehem story that was, in many ways, business as usual. The good news: This feature showed evidence that Orthodox churches exist. The bad news: The editors of this story still seem to be in the dark when it comes to knowing the details of Bethlehem's two Christmas celebrations (including which church is which and the precise location of the grotto).

The story focuses on Father Hanna Mass’ad, a Catholic priest, and his short Mass in the grotto. Why is the Mass so short? Why the rush? Read this carefully:


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Concerning secular chapels, racy white wedding dresses and other non-religion news

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A long, long time ago I was fascinated by a New York Times story about a hot trend in the Big Apple -- all of those folks lining up at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. I started work on a post, but one delay led to another.

So deep into the GetReligion file of guilt it went, until a saw another wedding story with a sexy, literally, new news angle and the two got hitched.

On one level, the Marriage Bureau story had a simple business hook, and a valid one at that. You can see that in this fact paragraph near the top:

Weddings at the Manhattan bureau have increased by nearly 50 percent since 2008, according to the city clerk’s office. The increase has been coaxed by two changes in recent years: the legalization of same-sex marriage and an effort by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2009 to reimagine -- and relocate -- the bureau to rival Las Vegas as a wedding destination with pizazz.

Then later there were references to events inside and outside the "chapel." Such as:

Around 11:15 a.m., the pair entered the chapel of Angel L. Lopez, an officiant who had performed 86 weddings by the close of business. (A colleague handled another 15 during Mr. Lopez’s lunch break.)
Mr. Lopez stood behind a lectern on what appeared to be a doormat.

Interesting. Now, if one looks up the word "chapel" in a dictionary, one finds something like this:


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Washington Post probes hot debate on the banks of River Jordan

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I have crossed the Jordan River twice in my life and both times the experience was quite memorable. The river itself isn’t much to look at, but the social dynamics surrounding the location are fascinating. The first trip was a singer in a choral music tour, done with the cooperation of the U.S. government, to perform “The Messiah” for cultural and political leaders in both Israel and Jordan. No big deal, right? However, this effort took place in late December, 1972. Look that up in the history of the Middle East. The second trip was linked to the 2000 pilgrimage that St. John Paul II made to the region. Look that one up, too.

Do the math and I am automatically going to be interested in the Washington Post news feature that ran under the following headline: “Pope picks one of dueling baptism sites in visit to Holy Land.”

This is a solid story and, first things first, I want to praise the wide variety of images and information contained in it. However, at the same time, I want to challenge the Post assumption that most readers would be most interested in the financial and political angles of this story, as opposed to the religions questions that it raises. You can get to both of those subjects from the material at the top of the report:


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Pod people: What's religion got to do with Egyptian tourism?

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In the wake of the events of 9/11, I had the honor of taking part in a forum on religion and the news at the University of Nebraska that, no surprise here, featured a keynote speech by historian Martin Marty, an omnipresent scholar who has probably done as much as anyone to promote serious work on the Godbeat.


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