The Sinai Peninsula was the scene of numerous events of Bible history. The roughly triangle-shaped peninsula has the Gulf of Suez and the Suez Canal along its western side, the Mediterranean Sea on its north, and along the east is the Gaza Strip and the Negev Desert of Israel, and then the Gulf of Aqaba, with Saudi Arabia on the opposite shore. It measures approximately 150 miles (250 kilometers) east to west at its widest in the north, and 250 miles (400 kilometers) from north to south. It's a big place.

In modern times, the Sinai territory has been held for a time by Israel after wars with Egypt in 1956 and 1967, but in accordance with peace treaties is today again part of Egypt.

The Sinai is hot, dry and rugged, a wilderness that the Israelites after the Exodus became well familiar with. It was the place of their wilderness journey in the years before entering the promised land. The north part of the Sinai is mostly desert, while the southern area has numerous steep, craggy mountains - one of which we know as Mount Sinai, where Moses received the ten commandments from God.

The peninsula gets its outline, and its mountains, from the earth's dynamic "plate tectonics" - the surface sections of the planet's crust are very slowly separating in some places, colliding in others. See Earthquake!