But one of the only other references to it in the New Testament—indeed, in the same letter, Paul’s letter to the Galatians—gives us a far more specific location: Mt. Sinai, in the peninsula to the south of the Holy Land and to the east of Egypt. Mt. Sinai was where God had come down in fire and had given Moses the Torah; it was the place of revelation, the place of law, the place where the covenant between God and Israel, established earlier with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was solemnly ratified. Sinai, the great mountain in Arabia, was, in that sense, the place of beginnings.
