Historicity, and What Shavuot Preserves

Sinai's historicity carries the same debate as the Exodus it follows in the narrative, since both events belong to a single continuous story and stand or fall together in the arguments made on each side. Mount Sinai's location is itself not settled: the traditional identification, marked since Byzantine times by Saint Catherine's Monastery in the southern Sinai Peninsula, is one candidate among several that scholars have proposed, including sites elsewhere in the peninsula and in northwestern Arabia, and no proposal commands consensus. Separately from the historical question, rabbinic tradition makes a theological claim about Sinai that does not depend on archaeology at all: that the souls of every future Jew, including those who would later convert, were understood to be present at the giving of the Torah, binding later generations to the covenant as participants rather than as mere heirs.

Shavuot, observed fifty days after Passover in the same count that structures the festival calendar, commemorates the giving of the Torah, and in some communities is kept with an all-night study vigil, the Tikkun Leil Shavuot, read as a way of reenacting readiness to receive it. The custom is traced by tradition to a corrective reading of the Exodus narrative itself, in which the people are described as oversleeping on the morning the revelation was to be given, so that staying awake through the night is understood as making up for that lapse rather than as an arbitrary practice.