St. Catherine's Monastery

Notice the door near the top of the 30 foot wall. This was the only way in and out of the monastery (they used a pulley system to maneuver their way up and down) until the 20th century.


The Well of Moses


The Burning Bush


After our all night hike up Sinai, we returned to the Morgenland Hotel in time to take very quick, freezing cold (no hot water) showers and pack our bags to leave.

Our first stop was right around the corner from the hotel. In fact, we had hiked past it last night and early this morning on our climb up Sinai. We returned to St. Catherine's Monastery which houses (according to tradition) the Burning Bush, as well as the well where Moses met Zipporah after protecting her and her sisters from the rowdy shepherds. The well is in fact fed by a spring that has never run dry and still today supplies the monastery with water.

This time, I opted to hire a taxi to drive me to the monastery and back to the parking lot. Besides the extreme heat of the desert, my muscles were beginning to tighten from the all night hike. In fact, I was so tired and sore that I didn't really pay very close attention to the tour at the Monastery. In fact, the pictures you see here are not mine, but ones I found on the Internet. I was really just along for the ride. Now, researching the monastery on google - I wish I had paid more attention!

St Catherine’s Monastery has existed for seventeen centuries, and is the oldest working monastery in the world - a place for Christian and Jewish pilgrims throughout the years. Records kept at the monastery also show its importance to Muslims after the Prophet Mohammed offered to protect the monastery in return for food and shelter.

Today, St Catherine’s is once again in the headlines thanks to the Codex Sinaiticus, the literal meaning of which is the Sinai Book. The Codex is what remains of a large hand written book that contained the scriptures from both the Old and New Testaments. It is one of the world’s oldest Bibles and dates to the last quarter of the fourth century.

The Codex, written in Greek, was originally removed in sections from St Catherine’s Monastery by the German scholar Constantine Von Tischendorf between 1844 and 1859 and taken to Russia for study, with the promise that it would later be returned to its rightful home, though this never happened. The largest portion of the Codex is located in the British Museum.

St. Catherine's is run by the Greek Orthodox church. Originally the monastery was built by order of Emperor Justinian I sometime between 527-565. The monastery enclosed the Chapel of the Burning Bush which was ordered to be built by Helena, the mother of Constantine I, at the site where Moses saw the burning bush. The bush living on the grounds today is purportedly the original. Our guide told us that botanists have determined that this bush is a species that they have never seen anywhere else on the earth. Hmmm.

St. Catherine's is a spectacular natural setting for priceless works of art, including Arab mosaics, Greek and Russian icons, Western oil paintings, paintings on wax, fine sacerdotal ornaments, marbles, enamels, chalices, and reliquaries. But of perhaps even greater significance is that it is one of the largest and most important collection of illuminated manuscripts in the world (The Vatican has the largest). The collection consists of some 4,500 volumes in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Slavic, Syriac, Georgian and other languages. We weren't able to see the library or the art collection, but just knowing it is housed in this ancient monastery makes my trip there more special.