Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen by Hazleton Lesley

Author:Hazleton, Lesley [Hazleton, Lesley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2007-10-15T22:00:00+00:00

6.

Sinai

in which Elijah rides a whirlwind

Mount Sinai is an imposing mass of jagged red granite in the southern Sinai desert, set off from the surrounding mountains not only by its height but by deep ravines. At the very top, a bolt of black volcanic rock thrusts up through the granite to form the peak of the mountain, known as Jebel Musa, Arabic for Moses’ Peak. Stand here at sunrise, and it’s as though you are at the highest point of a massive altar. With majestic slowness, the universe seems to reveal itself at your feet, range after range of mountains, until you have the entrancing illusion of being truly on top of the world.

Strange things happen in these high desert mountains. Strange tricks of the light, as when you walk along a narrow shaded defile and suddenly emerge into a deep red light that seems to infuse you with unearthly beauty. Strange tricks of the wind too. At times you swear you can hear the mountain breathing, even moaning. In the dry desert heat and the thin air of altitude, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s in your mind. The slightest things—a sudden flight of three birds, a single ray of light shining through a gap in the rock—seem like omens. The mountain’s reputation suffuses every moment you spend on it. It becomes, as Nikos Kazantzakis called it, “the God-trodden mountain.”

From the third century A.D. on, Christian hermits seeking mystic revelation made their way here, each finding his own cave near the high mountain hollow just below the peak. The local Bedouin call it Farsh Elias, Elijah’s Hollow, and it is the mountain’s secret. You have no idea it’s there until you suddenly emerge into it from a narrow track between towering rock faces. If Jebel Musa acts as the eyes of Mount Sinai, this cave-ridden hollow is its hidden heart.

Eventually there would be so many hermits here that the solitary life became impossible, and the hermits had no choice but to form a community at the foot of the mountain, known today as the monastery of Santa Katerina. But it’s safe to assume that twelve centuries earlier, when Elijah fled here from Jezebel’s fury, there was nobody else on the mountain.

The details of his flight are the stuff of legend. It took him forty days and forty nights to get here from Jezreel, echoing the forty days and nights Moses was said to have spent on the mountain. He was fed by angels as he had formerly been fed by ravens. He found shelter in one of the caves surrounding Farsh Elias, then climbed up to the summit, where Yahweh appeared in one of the most beautiful and mysterious passages in the whole of the Hebrew bible. In the unmatched musicality of the King James translation, it reads:

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