Mount Sinai is the archetypal mountain of revelation, where the Hebrew Bible places the giving of the Law to Moses, and it is sacred to all three Abrahamic faiths, though its exact location is not certain.
The revelation
In the Book of Exodus, Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt to a mountain, called Sinai or Horeb, wrapped in cloud, fire and thunder, where God gives him the Ten Commandments and establishes the covenant. This makes the mountain the setting of the founding legal and moral revelation of Judaism, carried into Christianity and echoed in Islam, which reveres Moses, or Musa, as a prophet and knows the mountain as al-Tur. It is the model for every later "mountain of God".
Which mountain
The traditional identification, fixed by Christian monks in the Byzantine period, is with the peak now called Jabal Musa, "the mountain of Moses", in the south of the Sinai peninsula. This is a tradition rather than a demonstrated fact: other peaks in Sinai, in the northern peninsula and in Arabia have been proposed, and the biblical text does not permit certainty. The southern identification is nonetheless the one that carries the living pilgrimage.
Monastery and pilgrimage
At the foot of Jabal Musa stands the Monastery of St Catherine, a Greek Orthodox foundation of the sixth century built around the traditional site of the burning bush, one of the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monasteries and the holder of an extraordinary library and icon collection. Pilgrims and travellers climb the mountain by night to reach the summit for sunrise, by the long stone Steps of Penitence or the easier camel path. The monastery has historically protected itself through documents of respect attributed to Muhammad; the mountain remains a shared and active place of devotion.