The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan records one of the most dramatic images in all of rabbinic tradition: "Moses brought forth the people from the camp to meet the glorious Presence of the Lord; and suddenly the Lord of the world uprooted the mountain, and lifted it in the air, and it became luminous as a beacon, and they stood beneath the mountain" (Exodus 19:17).
The Aramaic pushes the plain Hebrew into myth. The Hebrew merely says Israel stood at the foot of the mountain. The Aramaic says beneath it — and then clarifies why. God uprooted the entire mountain and suspended it in the air, where it glowed like a torch, and the people stood under it as under a covering.
The Talmud in Shabbat 88a preserves the same tradition and reads it as coercion: God held Sinai over Israel's heads like a barrel, saying, "If you accept the Torah, good; if not, this shall be your grave." Some rabbis worry about this reading, since coercion undermines the na'aseh v'nishma — the free acceptance of the covenant. Others read it more tenderly: the mountain was held over them as a chuppah, a wedding canopy, under which the covenant between God and Israel was sealed.
The Targum's image of the mountain as luminous as a beacon leans toward the wedding reading. A torch in the sky, a nation beneath it, a covenant being spoken.
The takeaway: the revelation at Sinai was at once overwhelming and tender, threatening and marital. The same mountain that could crush them was the canopy under which they were wedded to the Holy.