The Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai

In the third month after leaving Egypt, at the new moon, Israel came to the wilderness of Sinai and camped before the mountain. The Torah uses a singular verb—and Israel camped—read as one person with one heart. Moses climbed and brought back the offer: if you listen to My voice and keep My covenant you will be for Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The people answered, all that the Lord has spoken we will do. Three days of preparation followed. On the third day, the sixth of Sivan, there was thunder and lightning, a heavy cloud and a shofar blast growing ever louder; the mountain smoked and the people trembled. Then came the Ten Utterances. Unable to bear the direct voice, the people asked that Moses speak instead. He then went up for forty days and received the rest, ending with two tablets of stone. Tradition treats this not as the founding of a religion but as the signing of a covenant with two sides.

Here the chronologies differ not by years but by a century. Seder Olam Rabbah places the Exodus in 1313 BCE. The prevailing academic date is the thirteenth century, the time of Ramesses II: its firm anchor is the stele of Pharaoh Merneptah of 1208 BCE, the first mention of Israel outside the Tanakh, where Israel is already in Canaan. A minority of scholars holds to the fifteenth century, reckoning by the plain count of I Kings 6:1 — four hundred and eighty years from the Exodus to Solomon's Temple. The timeline shows the prevailing dating.