=Identification of Mount Sinai.= Desert sites are so readily forgotten, and the records of this period in Israel's history were committed to writing so many years after the events transpired, that it is now impossible to follow the Israelites with certainty in their desert wanderings. Their first aim after leaving Egypt was to find a safe asylum. In this quest the experiences of their leader, Moses, would influence them to find at least a temporary refuge with his kinsmen, the Midianites. Their second aim was to worship at the sacred mountain the God who had so signally revealed himself to them. According to the Northern Israelitish traditions (Ex. 3:1) the mountain of God was near the wilderness, where Moses was pasturing the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law. In all the biblical narratives it is implied that Sinai was not far from the land of Midian and that the home of the Midianites was to the south or east of Mount Seir. All the earliest references in the Old Testament, as for example, Judges 5:4, 5 and Deut. 33:2, indicate definitely that Mount Sinai was at least near the Mount Seir range, if not identical with one of its peaks.^{(66)} Furthermore, recent excavations have shown that the road which led along the western arm of the Red Sea to the Mount Sinai of later tradition passed important Egyptian garrisons, stationed there to guard the extensive quarries and mines which for centuries had been worked under the direction of the Pharaohs. This route would also have taken the Israelites far away from their kinsmen and their ultimate goal, into a barren country, incapable of supporting a large body of men and filled with hostile Arab tribes. =Lateness of the Traditional Identification.= The tradition which identifies the mountain of God with Jebel Mûsa, in the southern part of the Sinaitic peninsula,^{(67)} cannot be traced earlier than the fourth or fifth centuries of the Christian era. The detailed itinerary of Numbers 33 is generally recognized to be one of the latest sections in the Old Testament and embodies the late Jewish conception of the wilderness period. All attempts to identify the sites here mentioned have proved uniformly unsatisfactory.