Sinim

סינים


Which everyone assumes, at first glance, must relate to Mount Sinai and the Mosaic wilderness. But no, not in the slightest.

Genesis 10:17 lists Ha Sini (הסיני) among the "sons" of Kena'an (Canaan), which is to say the ancient inhabitants of the land; the other "sons" named are:

Tsidon (צידן) = the Lebanese city of Sidon;

Chet (לת) = the Hittites who colonised the region from their homeland in the Caucasus;

Ha Yevusi (היבוסי) = the Jebusites of pre-Yeru-Shala'im;

Ha Emori (שאמרי) = the Amorites of Syria;

Ha Girgashi (הגרגשח) = the Girgashites of central Kena'an;

Ha Chivi (החוי) = the Hivites from southern Lebanon;

Ha Arki (הערקי) = the Arkites of Syrian Tripoli and the important town of Ugarit;

Ha Arvadi (הארודי) = the Arvadites from the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon;

Ha Tsemari (הצמרי) = the Tsemarites from the hill-country of Ephrayim;

Ha Chamati (החמתי) = the Hamathites from the Jordan Valley south of the Sea of Galilee.

All this immense region is treated as being Kena'an; not just the area we now think of as Biblical Yisra-El. This is immensely significant if we are to understand the religion of Kena'an, because it includes the whole of Phoenicia and a vast amount of Amorite land, and probably describes the Hittite empire in every aspect except its colonies east of Bavel (Babylonia).

Genesis 10:17, as noted above, gives Sinim as the nation inhabiting the region near Mount Lebanon, as does 1 Chronicles 1:15; Saint Jerome takes this for Sinna. 

The spelling here is identical to Midbar Sin (מִדְבַּר-סִין), the Wilderness of Sin, in Exodus 16:3, and to that of Mount Sinai itself, though it is clearly a different place. The reason for the repetition may be the Mesopotamian moon-god Sin, or it may be a description of the physical location, rooted (though little in this case was easily rooted) in Sin = clay or mud.

Exodus 16:1 and 17:1, as well as Numbers 33:12, have the desert or wilderness of Sin, on the shore of the Heropolitan Gulf, the former name for what is now the Gulf of Suez; taken as being the area around Mount Sinai, though no one has any definite idea where that mountain actually lies (most of the textual detail actually suggests it was on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, not the Red Sea, in Midyan); tradition places it somewhere between the two gulfs of the Red Sea (i.e. the Sinai peninsula, the Heropolitan and Aelanite regions); and probably Sinai was the range and not a specific mountains, with three principal summits, the lowest of which is called Chorev (Horeb - חרב = dry); the second may have been called Sinai, and the third is the one now known as Saint Catherine's Mount.

There is also an Erets Sinim (ארץ סינים) in Isaiah 49:12, which is understood to be a reference to China; and indeed Sin (סִין) is still the name for China in modern Ivrit. The name may well reflect the statement above, that the empire of the Beney Chet (Hittites) extended east of Bavel (Babylonia). Though it never extended as far as China, the likelihood is that the name was generic rather than precisely geographic.

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