Mount Hor

The death of Aaron is described with unusual procedural care. Moses, Aaron and Aaron's son Eleazar go up Mount Hor in the sight of the whole community; Moses removes Aaron's priestly garments and puts them on Eleazar; Aaron dies on the summit, and the two survivors come down. The people mourn for thirty days. What the passage records is not a burial but a handover, staged in public and completed before the death rather than after it.

The high priesthood in Israelite religion was an office held by one man at a time, and the garments were the office, so transferring them on the mountain established the succession beyond dispute at the moment it was most vulnerable. The setting matters for the same reason the procedure does. Aaron dies outside the land, on a border, during the wandering, and so does Moses, which the biblical narrative treats as a judgement on both of them rather than as an accident of geography. The site is therefore a memorial to a punishment as much as to a priesthood, and the text is explicit about that. The mountain has drawn visitors of three religions since antiquity, and the traditions attached to it are shared between them rather than exclusive to any one of them. Aaron is a revered figure in Islamic tradition as Harun, and the shrine on the traditional summit is maintained as a Muslim holy place while remaining open to Jewish and Christian visitors.

The biblical text gives Mount Hor a position in an itinerary rather than a location on a map. It sits on the border of Edom, on a route between named camps, and that is all the text supplies. Identifying it therefore depends on identifying the route, which depends in turn on identifying the other camps, most of which are equally unfixed. The long standing identification is Jebel Harun, the peak above Petra in southern Jordan, which carries a small white domed shrine over what is held to be the tomb and has been visited by Muslim, Jewish and Christian travellers for centuries.

Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's archaeological guide to the region notes that this identification is traditional and comparatively late, and that an alternative places Mount Hor considerably further north, near the edge of the Negev, which fits some readings of the itinerary better. Neither position can be tested, because there is nothing on either candidate that would identify it independently of the tradition itself. The atlas records the identification as traditional rather than established. That is not a weakening of the site's religious standing. Jebel Harun has been treated as Aaron's burial place by three religions for a very long time, and that treatment is itself the fact worth recording, whatever the underlying geography turns out to have been.