Which Mountain, and Why the Question Stays Open

The biblical text gives Mount Hor a position in an itinerary rather than a location on a map. It sits on the border of Edom, on a route between named camps, and that is all the text supplies. Identifying it therefore depends on identifying the route, which depends in turn on identifying the other camps, most of which are equally unfixed. The long standing identification is Jebel Harun, the peak above Petra in southern Jordan, which carries a small white domed shrine over what is held to be the tomb and has been visited by Muslim, Jewish and Christian travellers for centuries.

Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's archaeological guide to the region notes that this identification is traditional and comparatively late, and that an alternative places Mount Hor considerably further north, near the edge of the Negev, which fits some readings of the itinerary better. Neither position can be tested, because there is nothing on either candidate that would identify it independently of the tradition itself. The atlas records the identification as traditional rather than established. That is not a weakening of the site's religious standing. Jebel Harun has been treated as Aaron's burial place by three religions for a very long time, and that treatment is itself the fact worth recording, whatever the underlying geography turns out to have been.