by Dave Franklin

Created on: January 20, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

" Take heed that you do not go up into the mountain or touch the border of it: whoever touches the mountain shall be surely put to death"

So says the Book of Exodus (19:12)

"The Thing about the ends of the earth is that someone somewhere - usually in Langley, Virginia - will imagine that they have strategic value"

So said Christopher Dickey in more modern times. And the two statements really sum up the problems with hunting for the sacred ancient biblical sites in the modern age, which is the subject of this book. Most of the Old Testament sites lie in a region that has always been, and still is, bitterly contested between three major faiths and a host of religious and secular sub groups. The area once known as the Holy Land comprises Israel, Egypt, Jordan, parts of Saudi Arabia and the much disputed Sinai Peninsular. The sites found here, either directly or indirectly are the focus of major power struggles, which make their exploration at best dangerous, and at worst life threatening. Both on the purely strategic grounds of the location as well as on the higher spiritual level of what these sites represent, control of them is hotly contested.

So which sites are we specifically talking about here. For hundreds of years people have sought to explore, examine and uncover the true nature and key locations from the religious writings of mans past. Finding the location of Noah's Ark, the Garden of Eden, The Ark of the Covenant has long held a fascination with explorers, all well documented in the Old Testament but always impossible to pin down with any degree of certainty. But there is one major site that has always been hotly debated that has received less attention, mainly because it location has always thought to have been beyond doubt. Genesis and Exodus tell how Moses went up on Mount Sinai to receive the wisdom of his God. But is the place on the map that we call Mount Sinai today really the actual place? Larry Williams and Bob Cornuke thought not. In the same way that Heinrich Schleimann used the writings of Homer to find the location of Troy, Williams and Cornuke used the information to be found in the Old Testament to re-evaluate the possible location of Moses mountain. Not only did they come to a different conclusion as to where the sacred place is, they decided that to be perfectly sure that it fitted the evidence, they would have to travel their to test their theory.

In the late 1980s they set off to find the mountain that they had chosen as their goal, the

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