Catholic Commentary
Israel Arrives at Sinai
1In the third month after the children of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that same day they came into the wilderness of Sinai.2When they had departed from Rephidim, and had come to the wilderness of Sinai, they encamped in the wilderness; and there Israel encamped before the mountain.
Exodus 19:1–2 describes Israel's arrival at Mount Sinai in the third month after leaving Egypt, camping before the mountain as a unified people. The passage marks a pivotal moment where the wilderness becomes the sacred space for God's covenant with Israel, following their journey from slavery through liberation and testing.
Israel arrives at Sinai not as a polished people, but as a people already broken and redeemed — and in that brokenness, they are finally ready to receive God's law.
Exodus 19:2 — "They encamped in the wilderness; and there Israel encamped before the mountain"
The doubling of wayyaḥănû ("they encamped") has struck commentators across the centuries. The Talmud (b. Shabbat 86b) draws a moral from the singular verb form — that Israel camped as one person, with one heart (ke-ish eḥad be-lev eḥad), a unity of purpose required for the reception of revelation. The phrase "before the mountain" (neged hāhār) positions Israel in the posture of an audience before a speaker, a bride before the canopy. The mountain is not yet named here as the site of God's theophany — that will unfold in the verses that follow — but it looms. All of Israel's forty years in the wilderness, the plagues, the Passover, the crossing of the sea, the manna and quail, the water from the rock: every element of the journey has pointed to this moment of encamping before the mountain. Arrival is itself a theological act.
Catholic tradition reads these two verses as a richly typological antechamber to the most important theophany of the Old Testament. The Church Fathers consistently interpreted Sinai typologically in relation to the New Covenant. Origen, in his Homilies on Exodus (Hom. 3), sees the three-month journey as the soul's progressive purification before it can encounter God — the stages of the Exodus correspond to stages of the spiritual life, from the purgative (Egypt), through the illuminative (the wilderness), toward the unitive (the mountain). This tripartite structure anticipates the classical Catholic mystical theology articulated by Pseudo-Dionysius and developed by St. John of the Cross.
More dramatically, the typological link between Sinai and Pentecost is foundational to Catholic sacramental theology. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1151) affirms that the signs and events of the Old Covenant prefigure the New, and the Church has always read the giving of the Law at Sinai — precisely fifty days after Passover — as the anticipatory "type" of the descent of the Holy Spirit fifty days after the Paschal Lamb's sacrifice (Acts 2). At Sinai, the law was written on stone tablets; at Pentecost, it was written on human hearts (Jer 31:33; 2 Cor 3:3). Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (§18), notes that the divine Word, once spoken in fragmentary ways, reaches its fullness in Christ — but Sinai is the great preparatory moment of that Word's self-disclosure to humanity. The mountain itself, rising above the wilderness, is for Catholic tradition an image of the Church: a community called out of the slavery of sin, purified in the wilderness of this world's trials, and gathered before the presence of God to receive His Word and become His own.
These two spare verses invite the contemporary Catholic to reflect on the spiritual discipline of arrival — of deliberately stopping, encamping, and placing oneself "before the mountain." In an age of relentless motion and digital distraction, the image of Israel setting down its burdens in the wilderness before the site of divine revelation speaks directly to the practice of silent prayer, retreat, and lectio divina. The journey from Rephidim matters: we come to God not despite our failures and quarrels, but through them and beyond them. Catholics preparing for the Sacrament of Confirmation, for a parish mission, or for a day of recollection might use this passage as an entry point: Where is my Rephidim — the recent struggle or defeat I carry? What would it mean to encamp before God today, not when I am "ready," but now, in this wilderness, in this month? The feast of Pentecost, which the Church celebrates in direct continuity with the Sinai event, is the annual invitation to renew precisely this posture of gathered, attentive readiness before the God who speaks.
Commentary
Exodus 19:1 — "In the third month… on that same day"
The opening time-stamp is dense with theological intention. "The third month" after the Exodus places Israel's arrival at Sinai approximately fifty days after Passover — a detail the Jewish liturgical tradition would crystallize into the feast of Shavuot (Weeks/Pentecost), the annual celebration of the giving of the Torah. The Greek phrase tē hēmera tautē ("on that same day") echoes the formulaic language used elsewhere in the Pentateuch to signal a moment of decisive, once-for-all significance (cf. Gen 7:13; 17:23). The narrator is not being casual with chronology — he is insisting that this arrival is the day, a day unlike other days. Some patristic and medieval commentators (notably Origen in his Homilies on Exodus and later Hugh of Saint Victor) read the "third month" as itself symbolic: just as the third day is the day of resurrection and renewal in Scripture, the third month signals that what happens at Sinai will be a kind of new creation, a new birth of a people. The phrase "had gone out of the land of Egypt" (yāṣāʾ miṣrāyim) is the Exodus formula par excellence, always carrying the weight of the whole liberating event — it reminds the reader that the journey to Sinai is inseparable from the liberation that made it possible. One cannot receive the law without first being set free.
Exodus 19:1 — "They came into the wilderness of Sinai"
The repetition of "wilderness" (midbār) twice in these two verses is not accidental. In biblical theology, the wilderness is a liminal space — neither Egypt nor the Promised Land, neither slavery nor rest. It is the place of testing, purification, and intimate encounter with God (cf. Hos 2:14, where God says He will "allure" Israel into the desert to speak tenderly to her). The specific location, the wilderness of Sinai, focuses the vague expanses of desert into a particular, holy geography. Sinai/Horeb becomes in Scripture the mountain of God (har haʾĕlōhîm), the axis mundi around which the covenant revolves.
Exodus 19:2 — "When they had departed from Rephidim"
The notice of departure from Rephidim is not redundant. Rephidim (Ex 17) was the site of Israel's failure — they quarreled with Moses, tempted God, and Moses struck the rock. It was also the site of their first military battle (against Amalek) and their first lesson in intercessory prayer (Moses' arms held aloft by Aaron and Hur). By naming Rephidim explicitly, the text quietly acknowledges the full weight of Israel's past: they arrive at Sinai not as a pristine people, but as a people already marked by both failure and grace. This is the realistic anthropology of the covenant.