Sin, Tsin

סִין

Sometimes pronounced Su'en, he was the Assyrian/Babylonian moon god (yes, male). His principal shrines appear to have been at Ur, Charan and Yericho (Jericho), which is not uninteresting in the light of Av-Raham's early journeys. The crescent moon which is now the principal symbol of al-Lah was originally Sin's (the colour green that is so important to Islam goes back to his wife Ningal, the goddess of the reeds, whose husband was named Nanna, rather than Sin, in the Sumerian version).

He is held to have been the father of the sun-god Shamash, the Mesopotamian equivalent of Shimshon (Samson), who was also known as Tammuz, and in some versions as the father of Ishtar, the mother-goddess as well.

But this is late Mesopotamian, and in the early epoch of Sumer and Akkad, Sin was named Nanna, and Nanna was almost certainly a masculinisation of Inanna, which was also an early name for Ishtar; and in parallel Tammuz was Utu in Sumer and Dumuzi in Akkad.

Exodus 16:3 finds the Beney Yisra-El, on the full moon of the second month since their departure from Mitsrayim, mumbling and muttering their discontent with Mosheh at Midbar Sin (מִדְבַּר-סִין), yearning for "the fleshpots of Egypt"; as a consequence of which a form of dew is provided for them as a daily portion of food; the word "manna" - or actually "man" (מָן) in Yehudit means "portion" (cf verses 31-35).

There is much debate among the scholars as to whether Midbar Sin (מִדְבַּר סִין), the Wilderness of Sin, which is the root of the name of the Sinai desert, is connected with the Mesopotamian moon-god, or should in fact be called Midbar Tsin (צִן) as it is in Numbers 27:14, 33:36 and Joshua 14:3. Exodus 16:3 is very clear that it is Sin, and that it lies "between Elim and Sinai", and Numbers 33:10/11 concurs with this.

Resolving the issue is difficult, because no one can agree where Midbar Sin, or Tsin, was located; Numbers 33:36, at the end of a long list of way-stations of the Mosaic journey, states very clearly that Tsin is Kadesh, but Kadesh simply means "holy place", there are several places named Kadesh, and the text does not help us determine which one, because we don't know where most of the other named places are located either. 

And then, just to make it more difficult, Numbers 13:3 finds the Beney Yisra-El in the Wilderness of Pa'ran (פָּארָן), an entirely different point of the journey we assume, and so irrelevant, until verse 21 of the same chapter has the spies go out "from the wilderness of Tsin as far as Rechov (רְחֹב), at the entrance to Chamat", and then verse 36 informs us that Pa'ran is Kadesh - which means that Pa'ran and Tsin are the same place, even though the text has just told us of two quite different places.

All of which confusion among the heavenly scribes is exacerbated by the on-going dispute over whether the Beney Yisra-El crossed the Red Sea or the Sea of Reeds, the former of which would place Kadesh in the Aravah, probably in the region to the north of Eilat, the latter of which would place it somewhere just south of the Gaza Strip. 

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