Just a preliminary look at the new convention release "See The Good Land". It is small collection of maps of the Holy Land and Middle East around Biblical times. We in Christendom have had these things for some time, under the name "Bible Atlases". Perhaps the name of a pagan god was too much for our friends in Brooklyn, or perhaps they don't want to be seen to be simply copying Christendom.
On a quick survey of the book when it first arrived (many thanks to my old co-conspirator Dmouse! - the brochure is not due for release here in Oz until during the international convention in December), I was immediately struck by the map of the Exodus route:
What's wrong with this picture? Well, it seems our friends in Bethel have simply placed Mt Sinai at the currently most widely accepted tourist spot down towards the tip of the Sinai peninsula. Why is this a problem? Well, by Christian times the location of Mt Horeb (Sinai) had been long lost. It was the Watchtower's favourite pagan emperor masquerading as a Christian, Constantine, who declared that the currently accepted site was the right one, on the basis of a dream. From another site:
What we must understand is that Mt. Sinai in the Sinai peninsula was selected exclusively through the agency of DREAMS AND VISIONS that Constantine experienced throughout his troubled life. Constantine had a LONG HISTORY of visionary experiences. From the year 312 A.D. they became a REGULAR part of the emperor's life; and throughout his career he was affected by FREQUENT SUPERNATURAL OCCURRENCES. And, according to Constantine himself, he never had a reversal in his affairs if he HEEDED these visions.
"The ancient world," continues Grant, "and especially the world of Constantine's epoch, was as credulous of significant nocturnal DREAMS as it was of other kinds of VISIONS. 'It is to dreams,' wrote Tertullian, 'that the majority of humankind owe their knowledge of God.' Artemidorus of Ephesus devoted a study to the subject, the Oneirocriticon. Divine powers were believed to visit people very often in their dreams and give them messages, and this was thought to apply particularly to great and powerful men. Thus an angel was said to have appeared in a dream to Licinius, and Constantine himself was said to have seen and talked with God in dreams, as part of his LIFELONG RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SUPERNATURAL" (Ibid., p. 140).
And there was NO EXCEPTION TO THIS when Constantine selected Jebel Musa in the Sinai peninsula as the "true" site of the Mountain of God. As we shall see, there was no biblical or historical teaching that prompted Constantine to pick the area in the wilderness of the Sinai. The Jews themselves had NO FIRM TRADITION regarding the location of Mt. Sinai.
Notice what the Jewish Encyclopedia says:
There is NO Jewish tradition of the GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION of Mt. Sinai; it seems that its exact location was OBSCURE already in the time of the monarchy....The Christian hermits and monks, mostly from Egypt, who settled in Southern Sinai from the second century C.E. on, MADE REPEATED EFFORTS to identify the locality of the Exodus with actual places to which the believers could make their way as pilgrims. The identification of Mt. Sinai either with Jebel Sirbal near the oasis of Firan (Paran; Nilus, Cosmos Indicopleustes), or with Jebel Musa, CAN BE TRACED BACK AS FAR AS THE FOURTH CENTURY C.E. [TO CONSTANTINE'S TIME]. (Vol. 14, p. 1599).
The selection of the Sinai peninsula for the site of Mt. Sinai probably occurred at the same time Constantine decided to build a church at the supposed place of Christ's resurrection in Jerusalem. The identification of "holy sites" in the Middle East was the result of an ATONING ACTION by Constantine for the deaths of his wife Fausta and his son Crispus -- executed at his own command. In a fit of depression Constantine sent his MOTHER HELENA to the Middle East to discover the spots he had "foreseen" in his visions.
The strange thing is that almost all of the spots that Helena "identified" as holy sites were previously occupied by some sort of PAGAN structure! "The very place where Jesus himself was believed [according to Constantine's "dreams"] to have met his death and to have received the burial that preceded his Resurrection: the Church of the Anastasis or the Holy Sepulchre on Mount Golgotha, [was built] upon the site of a Jewish burial chamber and beneath A TEMPLE OF APHRODITE" (Constantine the Great: The Man and His Times, by Michael Grant. P. 202).
There are several sites in the Sinai that are believed to be better candidates for Mt Horeb, but the Watchtower has sided with their despised Roman Emperor Constantine.
The Oxford Bible Atlas (Third Edition) displays a similar map on pages 58-59:
As you can see, at least one alternative Exodus route is shown here, as well as a possible alternative for Mt Sinai. So why no acknowledgement of the problems in identifying Mt Sinai? Is it because the 'Tower must always seem to be sure on issues of Biblical scholarship? I don't see why that would be an issue here. After all, they have included question marks after some place names in the exodus map. And why use Constantine's site, arrived at by "divination", when there are other better, more interesting sites across the Sinai peninsula that could qualify as Mt Sinai/Horeb?
Stephanus,
of the "Always puzzled by Watchtower 'scholarship'" class.