Where did Moses see the burning bush?

Question

Accepted Answer

At Horeb, “the mountain of God”, while he was keeping Jethro's flock: Exodus says that Moses “led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb”. Christian tradition has shown the spot since the fourth century at the foot of Jebel Musa in the south of the Sinai Peninsula, where the map places Horeb, about 380 km south-west of Jerusalem in a straight line. Because the site of the mountain itself is disputed, so is the site of the bush; the question of the mountain has its own page. Then “the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.” God called to him from the bush and told him, “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground”. Moses' blessing of Joseph remembers God as “him that dwelt in the bush”; in the New Testament Jesus cites the words spoken “in the bush” about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Stephen places the vision “in the wilderness of mount Sina”. The pilgrim Egeria, about 383, was shown the bush, still alive and sprouting, in a garden in front of a church at the foot of the mountain. The emperor Justinian later enclosed the place in the fortified monastery now called St Catherine's; behind its apse is the Chapel of the Burning Bush, where visitors still take off their shoes, and a bramble growing by its wall is shown as the bush. Those who look for Horeb elsewhere move the bush with it: some to Midian in north-western Arabia, where Jethro was priest, about 100 km east of the map point, others to Har Karkom in the Negev, about 210 km to the north-north-east.