Few places carry as much religious meaning as Jerusalem. For three thousand years it has been a focus of prayer, pilgrimage and conflict.
The city of David and the Temple
According to the Hebrew Bible, King David made Jerusalem his capital around 1000 BCE, and his son Solomon built the First Temple there. The Babylonians destroyed the Temple in 586 BCE. The Second Temple, completed in 516 BCE and later rebuilt on a grand scale by Herod the Great, stood until the Roman destruction of 70 CE. The Western Wall, part of Herod’s retaining wall around the Temple Mount, is today the holiest place where Jews pray. Jewish prayer faces Jerusalem, and the hope of return to Zion runs through Jewish liturgy.
The city of the cross and the empty tomb
Christians remember Jerusalem as the place where Jesus taught, was crucified and, they believe, rose from the dead. In the fourth century the emperor Constantine built a church over the traditional site of the tomb, the origin of today’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Pilgrims have walked the city’s streets ever since, and Christian communities of many traditions share responsibility for its holy places.
The city of the Night Journey
Muslims call the city al-Quds (القدس, the Holy). The Qur’an speaks of God carrying the Prophet by night to “the farthest mosque”, which Muslim tradition identifies with Jerusalem; from there, tradition holds, the Prophet ascended to the heavens. Jerusalem was also the first qiblah (قبلة, direction of prayer) before Mecca. The Dome of the Rock, completed in 691 or 692 under the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik, and the nearby al-Aqṣā Mosque make the Haram al-Sharif the third holiest site in Islam.
A shared and contested city
Jerusalem passed through Byzantine, early Islamic, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman rule before the modern era. Its sacred sites lie close together, and questions of access and sovereignty remain among the most sensitive in the world. Understanding what the city means to each tradition is a first step toward understanding why.