19:1 wilderness of Sinai. The Sinai peninsula, with its Mount Sinai (also called Mount Horeb) was to be the home of the vast body of Israelites for the next forty years. The exact location of Mount Sinai itself is still a matter of argument, although tradition has long associated it with the volcanic mountain called Jebel Musa, near the southern tip of the peninsula, where the Greek Orthodox Church’s St. Catherine’s Monastery was built in the sixth century A.D.