From Newsgroup: uk.religion.christian

Midian is believed to lie at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba and extend
down the west coast of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. Mt Horeb, on the
other hand, is usually identified with Mt Sinai, which is traditionally located towards the south of the Sinai peninsula.

The question arises, therefore, What was Moses doing with his sheep at
Mt Sinai? Sinai is a fierce, implacable desert where for mile after
mile, nothing at all grows. I simply do not believe Moses ended up there
by accident, following the grazing; there wasn't any! (Of course, the situation can change overnight following one of the very infrequent rain storms, when life can spring up suddenly and the desert is covered in
green. Such grazing, however, is strictly temporary and is gone in a
couple of days.)

However.

About half-way down the west side of Sinai and a couple of dozen miles
inland, is the site of Serabit el-Khadim. I have never been there, unfortunately. It is just too far off the beaten track and too difficult
to access, involving a waterless climb of about eight miles from the
nearest point you can reach by 4x4 car. There is no way that blue-rinsed people who made up the majority of our customers could even have
contemplated the journey, let alone completed it.

It is famous because during Egypt's Middle Kingdom turquoise was
discovered there. Every so often the Egyptians would mount an expedition
to the place, dig for a few months, and then retreat to the safety of
the Nile Valley. Each work crew left a record of its presence in the
form of a stele and/or an extension to the temple of Hathor.

Naturally, even slaves need feeding and when you are stuck out in a
waterless desert with only dried food for sustenance, there's nothing to
beat a bit of fresh mutton. So was Moses on his way to Serabit el-Khadim
to dispose of Jethro's sheep for a handsome profit?

By conventional chronology it is a non-question, as Moses lived a couple
of centuries after Serabit's heyday. However by the Revised Chronology
which I espouse, Moses lived at just this time. As someone who spoke
Egyptian, he would be the ideal negotiator to get a good price - and the chances of anyone recognising the svelte and shaven former young prince
in the grimy, bearded elderly bedu with his few sheep were vanishingly
small.

However there may have been another reason why Moses was willing to
visit Serabit. The people doing the actual work were slaves and a large
number of them were Semitic. (Jews? Who might be able to give him news
of his parents?) And thereby hangs an interesting speculation.

One of these semitic slaves must have got into conversation with one of
the Egyptian scribes who was busy carving a hieroglyphic inscription on
a stele and asked him what the strange signs meant. The scribe, willing
to suspend work for a break and not unwilling to show off, pointed to a rectangle with a gap in the bottom line and said, "That's meant to look
like a house and so we pronounce it 'per'. Of course, sometimes if we
are wanting to spell out a word we might just use the initial sound and
use it to spell 'p' in 'palestine', for example. And this wiggly line
here represents water and ..."

And the Jewish slave says, "Hmmm. House. That's 'beth' so I could use it
for the 'b' sound. I wonder if they have a symbol for 'th'? And of
course water is 'mayim', so there's 'm'."

And off he goes and starts a bit of scratching and by and by invents the
first alphabet. And just at that time Moses comes along, speaking both
Hebrew and Egyptian and able to read hieroglyphs, sees what our friend
is doing and grasps the idea at once! He's been mulling over a poem
about a chap who suffered a series of misfortunes and now here's a
simple and concise way of writing it all down.

Incidentally, the Serabit el-Khadim alphabet is the basis of the Hebrew alphabet and the various Canaanite and Phoenician alphabets, which were
the ancestors of Greek and Roman letters, which is why, if you shorten
the legs of the letter 'M' you have the same wiggly line that the
Egyptians used for water, except that is has the Hebrew 'm' sound for
'mayim'. Have a look at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14947429/First-words-Moses-inscribed-Egyptian-prove-Bible-true.html
and you'll see what I mean.
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