User Reviews

The classic biblical account of Moses, who was a simple man chosen by God to lead his people out of slavery, parting the Red Sea and receiving the Ten Commandments, which were God's word written on stone tablets at Mt. Sinai, is profiled here, and the results are most interesting and even-handed. Moses lived a long life as he struggled to find a permanent home for his people, the Israelites, who ran into trouble with God when they built the Golden Calf, a false idol, so soon after the given miracles. That an imprint of what looks like a calf is shown in the historical spot is quite provocative. Of course, one can't forget the famous film with Charlton Heston either!

The narrator, Leonard Nimoy (Dr. Spock, a Star of TV's Sci./Fi. Star-Trek TV series) introduces a young Israeli scholar, Dr. Zvi Iland (PhD) who had recently published a scholarly paper arguing that Mt. Sinai might be Jebal Serabit el Khadim. Ilan offered as proofs the following: (1) The worship of the Golden Calf might be recalling the worship of the Egyptian goddess, Hat-Hor, a patroness of the Egyptian miners, who could assume the form of a woman with cow ears, or a bovine form of a Golden Cow. Ilan also noted that (2) Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions (an ancestor of the later Hebraic alphabet that the Bible is written in) found in association with nearby mines made mention of the Hebrew God called EL. In the Bible its is EL who speaks to Moses at Mt. Sinai. My own research (2010-2021) supports Ilan's proposals. Ilan was not the first, however, to identify Jebal Serabit el Khadim with Mt. Sinai. In 1921 a young Jewess, Lina Eckenstein pulished a book titled A History of Sinai in which she suggested the location to be Mt. Sinai. She has worked the site with its English excavator, Sir Flinders Petrie, earlier (circa 1904).

In Search Of... "The Ten Commandments" (1979)

Was Mt. Sinai the location of where Moses received the Ten Commandments? As host Leonard Nimoy states, a legend, no matter how old, doesn't make it a fact. The fourth season has certainly been the best but this episode is probably the weakest so far. That's not to say this is a bad episode because it certainly isn't. Several Biblical topics have been explored in the series and this here is a pretty good one as they try to determine the exact location of where Moses got the Commandments. There's some nice footage from Mt. Sinai as well as the typical good history lesson.

Episode: B+